Annabelle and the Plantation - Here Lies a Story

Have you heard the latest insane haunted conspiracy theory – that ANNABELLE THE HAUNTED DOLL burned down a PLANTATION IN LOUISIANA? Two of my favorite pieces of American ghost canon have come together in the mashup of the century, so here’s a couple thousand words to celebrate.

Annabelle

Annabelle the doll is a staple in American paranormal culture. She’s been in dozens of documentaries, ghost hunter shows, she’s the subject of tons of YouTube videos and she even has a big budget horror franchise. She was owned and promoted by the late, great Ed and Lorraine Warren, paranormal grifters extraordinaire. And right now, she’s ON TOUR.

According to the Warrens, Annabelle is a doll possessed by an evil spirit. It was given to a college student in the 1970s, and then haunted the shit out of her. The doll moved rooms, appeared in strange poses, and attacked the girls and their friends. The Warrens, who were gaining popularity as local paranormal investigators and demon slayers, swooped in to rescue the girls, and took possession of the doll. The doll was promptly locked up in their little basement museum with a sign that read WARNING DO NOT MOVE. When Hollywood adapted the Warrens’ story into the Conjuring Cinematic Universe, Annabelle became famous.

Now, you might reasonably ask why a doll that’s considered a spiritual nuke that harms anyone who comes near her is on the road coming to a city near you, and for that you need to dive into the history of the Warrens. I know we all love the paranormal on this channel, but we need to accept that they were CON PERSONS. CON PEOPLE? Con Elders. They were up to no good. They’ve been involved in some high profile hoaxes, like Amityville, the case behind a Haunting in Connecticut, and the Devil in Connecticut. Ed was accused of being a groomer and a pedophile, with Lorraine enabling his crimes.

A photo of the Nottoway plantation with an image of a Raggedy Ann doll overlaid

Not the real Annabelle, you’ve been spared

I can see why people are drawn to the Warrens – they were very compelling! They made good TV. Lorraine was a regular guest on one of the early ghost hunting shows, Paranormal State, which I loved. She comes across as a sweet older lady with a powerful psychic gift. She was very empathetic toward the spirits and stories she claimed to channel; she was believable and likeable. Maybe she did have some kind of psychic gifts, but everyone needs to make a living.

The Tour

The Warrens are both dead, and their son in law now manages their paranormal empire, called the New England Society for Paranormal Research. NESPR seems pretty popular, and they run themed events regularly. This year, they took Annabelle on tour and the response was positive. Their agent is working the local press pretty hard – everywhere they go, they get coverage. A LOT of it is being drummed up on social media, with Annabelle fans speculating about what will happen when she is unveiled in their town.

The tour – technically called Devils on the Run, hits a bunch of canonically haunted spots in the US. It kicked things off with an Annabelle Lock In at the West Virginia State Penitentiary, a MUST SEE in ghost hunting circles. The tour went to San Antonio to join a psychic festival at the haunted Black Swan Inn. In July Annabelle’s tour takes her to Gettysburg, alleged to be one of the most haunted places in America. At that stop, she’ll be hosted at the haunted orphanage there, another traditionally haunted site in American pop-paranormal culture.

Last week, Annabelle toured New Orleans, which is how the legend of her arson took hold. New Orleans is famously haunted, only there the ghosts of racial violence are a little more prominent, I think.

Painting of Nottoway by Cornelia Randolph, one of John Randolph’s 11 children

Nottoway Plantation

The plantation that burned to the ground was called Nottoway Resort. No my darlings, that is not a typo. They were marketing this place as a vacation destination. You could get married there! Take portraits! Stay for a weekend! How about THE OVERSEERS COTTAGE FOR YOUR ROMANTIC GETAWAY?

Nottoway was marketed as “the largest remaining antebellum plantation in the US.” Antebellum is doing a lot of work – that is a frilly ass word meaning “slave era.” Nottoway is a huge property that was built kind of late in terms of plantations – 1859. Nottoway enslaved at least 150 people. In fact, it was built by enslaved people who cut the timber from the property and constructed this wedding cake fantasy of a monument to capital excess and human suffering. I have some feelings about this, surprise!

Nottoway exists on a literal continuum of plantation houses that flank the Mississippi River in Louisiana, called Plantation Row, or Plantation Alley. These properties were built along the river so that they could import (people) and export (sugar) easily. Now they exist as tourist attractions, with actual Viking River Cruise boats making the same stops along the river. It’s fucking wild, and it’s so very American. I call the Row a continuum because different properties have different presentations of the history of planting and enslavement in the South. Nottoway didn’t talk about slavery at all – their entire site bears no mention. If you click on the history tab, you get a list of trees. EERIE.

Nottoway’s neighbor, Houmas House, exists in a similar state of obfuscation. In 2024, documentary filmmakers interviewed Houmas’ owner for their movie, Vacation Plantation. He calls his property “Disney for adults,” and a tribute to “Southern lifestyle.” He says he doesn’t talk about slavery on his tours because doesn’t know “who is on the right and who is on the left” and he doesn’t want complaints. He claims to be “just the facts,” but really there are a lot of facts missing. He compares himself to Jay Gatsby (oh, the irony!) and married his dogs on the front porch of the “Big House.” He also owns a nasty, racist museum dedicated to the Lost Cause Narrative, complete with dusty figures of Black people selling each other into slavery and weird Jim Crow artifacts.

Oak Alley Plantation, nearby, does a better job. Their site has a lot of history on slavery, a database of the human beings that lived and toiled on the land, and a lot of context on how the property fits into the overall story of slavery and the Civil War in the South. The Whitney Plantation, also on River Road, is an incredible museum dedicated to the experience of slavery in America. The entire focus is on the lives, deaths, and experiences of the people who built the South and brought great fortunes to the white planters of Louisiana.

It was Annabelle, bro

Last week, on or around the time Annabelle made her NOLA debut, Nottoway caught fire and burned to the ground. Fire officials do not know the cause, but they suspect it is electrical, not doll arson. The internet lit up as only the internet can, with TikToks and memes – music, selfies, AI images. People saw human-like shapes in the flames – the ancestors. They put music over it, jokes about BBQs, it was great. Celebratory – as it should be.

I don’t know exactly when the internet made the Annabelle connection, but there were enough videos and posts about it to make the news. The tour has obviously leaned into this coverage, this is fantastic for them. For me, it was a mash up of lore that is totally irresistible. Will you follow along with me on my journey to tell you how this is all about COMMERCE? Sorry, this is an economics newsletter now!

Annabelle the doll is a commercial creation. She was adopted as a mascot by the Warrens in their quest to dominate America’s paranormal industrial complex. I truly don’t know if the original owner was really haunted by her, or what happened, or if she’s actually become some sort of cursed tulpa because of the intense focus, but she makes people a lot of money. The movies generated over $200M in revenue – and that’s just the Annabelle franchise. The Conjuring series, featuring the Warrens, has made much more. The Warrens were a publicity machine while they were alive, but now that they’re gone, the heirs have to find a way to keep pumping cash out of their name.

The paranormal industrial complex is here to help! We’ve found a way, in America, to turn the worst parts of our history into entertainment. Look at the sites Annabelle visited, the map of commercially haunted places in America – battle sites, prisons, Confederate inns, slave ports. A 2D rendering of the worst impulses of the American experiment, the greatest suffering, the most unhealed trauma. These places are haunted for a reason! Even if you don’t believe in ghosts, there’s a reason people in this country are drawn to those places.

I don’t even mean to sound cynical, because I actually support it. I myself traffic in the paranormal, my whole site is dedicated to telling the story of America through folklore. I think that as we fail to talk openly and really process our own violent history, people turn to ghost stories and ghost experiences to process it. It’s in our subconscious; we want to understand it, and ghost stories are a way to approach the issues sideways, in a less threatening way. We are connecting Annabelle to the plantations subconsciously, because they represent similar things.

Now – Annabelle was not at the plantation. But do her tour and plantation vacations have something in common? COMMERCE! How else has a site of forced labor, sexual violence, and soul crushing oppression become a wedding venue with a hair salon on the premises? There are different attitudes from different plantation venues about making money – some say they need the money that weddings and events provide to keep the history alive, and that those events pay for more research and allow them to then tell the story of the real history. Others, like Houmas, simply don’t care. Obscuring the history makes them more palatable, and more profitable, and as we see in the documentary, the owner already has regressive attitudes about race in the US.

The sad reality of all of this is that the understanding and resolution people seek are not going to be found at the haunted orphanage of Gettysburg or the Myrtles Plantation of Louisiana. Those tour operators aren’t interested in educating visitors so much as entertaining them. There are incredible experiences to be had at sites of pain and trauma – the Gettysburg Museum at the National Park is incredible, as is the Whitney Plantation Museum. But those sites advertise as educational, they are confrontational about the past. A story about a slave ghost with a missing ear is titillating and hits familiar themes, it draws people in as an easier route to the past. In order to learn from ghost stories, however, you need context, history, and insightful interpretation. Most tours are not offering that.

Schadenfreude ASMR?
Credit to @staceylynne21

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