The Warrens' Occult Museum

Ed Warren, a self-taught demonologist, and Lorraine Warren, a clairvoyant and trance medium, founded the New England Society for Psychic Research in 1952. Over the following decades they kept objects from the cases they investigated at their home in Monroe, Connecticut, locked away, they said, to keep them safe from the public. Accounts disagree on where the room was: the basement, the back of the house, or a shed on the property. "You don't know how many priests have been there to bless that area from all over the world," Lorraine said in a 2014 interview. Their cases became the Conjuring films, starting in 2013 with the Perron family's farmhouse in Rhode Island.

Annabelle

The Warrens' account, published on their society's website, begins in 1970, when a mother bought an antique Raggedy Ann doll for her daughter Donna, a nursing student who shared an apartment with a friend, Angie. The two said they found the doll where they had not left it, sometimes cross-legged on the couch and sometimes standing. Then came penciled notes on parchment paper reading "Help Us" and "Help Lou." A medium told them the doll held the spirit of a girl. The Warrens concluded it was "not in fact possessed but manipulated by an inhuman presence," and took it home.

The same site tells two more stories. A priest who told the doll it could not hurt anyone reported that his brakes failed hours later. A young visitor who banged on the case crashed his motorcycle into a tree on the way home, and the site says he did not survive. "Ed warns you do not challenge evil," it reads.

The doll sits in a glass case marked "Warning: Positively Do Not Open." In 2024, Tony Spera, the Warrens' son-in-law, told the New York Post that a priest prayed over it "probably once a month." None of the people in the Annabelle story has been identified outside the Warrens' accounts. Sharon A. Hill wrote for Doubtful News in 2014, "We have nothing but Ed's word for this, and also for the history and origins of the objects in the museum."

The rest of the collection

The Warrens' tour page listed a Shadow Doll that "can come to you in your dreams, and stop your heart." Spera told the Post the curse travels by photograph: take a picture of the doll, write the curse on the back, and mail it. A horned figure about 6 feet tall was, by the Post's account, found by a hunter in the woods of Newtown, Connecticut, who said a figure in black followed him back to his car. The day after it reached the museum, Lorraine fell into a semi-conscious state for 3 days, and Ed blamed a cult leader. The tour page also listed a mirror "used for summoning spirit," an organ that plays by itself, and a vampire's coffin.

The Salem museum lists a spirit photograph of Abraham Lincoln. The best-known image of that kind is William Mumler's portrait of Mary Todd Lincoln from the early 1870s, with a pale figure standing behind her. Mumler had been tried for fraud in New York in 1869, with P. T. Barnum testifying against him, and the charges were dismissed.

Closed in Monroe

Ed Warren died in 2006 and Lorraine in 2019. Tours went on at the house on Saturday nights, drawing 50 to 60 cars by the local paper's count. In October 2017, Monroe's zoning enforcement officer ordered the museum closed, and the zoning board of appeals upheld the order with a $13,500 fine and $150 a day for non-compliance. "It is not a museum. It is a residential house," the police chief, John Salvatore, told The Monroe Sun.

In August 2025, the comedian Matt Rife and the YouTuber Elton Castee announced that they had bought the Warren house. Spera answered that he and Judy Spera, the Warrens' daughter, own every artifact, Annabelle included, and lease them: "We have no plans to ever 'sell' the artifacts." The house is now rented as an Airbnb.

Salem

Castee said the new owners could not find a site in Connecticut because of zoning and fire codes. On August 27, 2026, the Haunted Warren Museum opened in Salem, in a space it sublets from Blackcraft, with more than 1,000 objects in 13 rooms by the museum's count. Annabelle has a room of her own, and the gallery splits into two paths so visitors can avoid her. Castee told the Salem News that Salem's shorter permitted hours were "a huge reason why this is not our permanent location."

More than 1,600 people signed a petition against the opening, citing allegations against Ed Warren, and Blackcraft said its relationship with the museum is limited to landlord and subtenant. The allegation was reported by The Hollywood Reporter: in a sworn declaration from November 2014, Judith Penney said she was 15 when she moved into the Warrens' home in 1963 and began a relationship with Ed Warren, and that she lived there for 40 years.

The museum is in Salem until Christmas 2026 and is open 7 days a week. The entrance is at the back of the building, off Barton Square.

The visit is a self-guided tour of up to 1 hour, by the light of a flashlight the museum provides. General admission in October 2026 is $66.60 through October 28, $99.90 on October 29 and 30, and $130 on October 31. From October 2 to November 8, the last hour of each night is a VIP photo session with Annabelle, hosted by Rife and Castee, from $166.60. All sales are final.

Visitors must be 12 or older, and anyone 12 through 17 needs a ticketed parent or guardian. No phones, cameras, or recording devices are allowed inside.