Read Online The Demonologist: The Extraordinary Career of Ed and Lorraine Warren by Gerald Brittle - Free Book Online Page A

all. The Warrens then took a seat with the others at the table. After loading a cassette into the recorder, Ed switched on the machine and entered the time, date, address, and full names of the principals.
    “Okay,” Ed began, “I’d like to hear the whole story, right from the beginning. Who here can tell me?”
    “I can,” said Deirdre.
    “All right. Cal, Lara, please add any details she leaves out,” Ed directed.
    “There are two stories, really,” Deirdre said. “One that began earlier in the week with Cal. The other one’s about Annabelle. But I suppose they’re both about Annabelle. I’m not sure.”
    “Who’s Annabelle?” Ed promptly asked.
    “She belongs to Deirdre,” Lara replied.
    “Belongs?” questioned Lorraine. “Is Annabelle a live, breathing being?”
    “Is she alive?” Deirdre repeated quizzically. “She moves. She acts alive. But no, I don’t think she’s alive.”
    “Annabelle’s in the living room,” said Lara, pointing across the table. “She’s sitting on the sofa.”
    Lorraine looked to her left, into the living room. “Are you talking about the doll?”
    “That’s right,” Lara replied, “the big Raggedy Ann doll. “That’s Annabelle. She moves!”
    Ed got up and walked into the living room to inspect the doll. It was big and heavy, the size of a four-year-old child, sitting with its legs stretched out on the sofa. The black pupilless eyes stared back at him, while the painted-on smile gave the doll an expression of grim irony. Looking it over without touching the thing, Ed then returned to the kitchen.
    “Where did the doll come from?” Ed asked Deirdre.
    “It was a gift,” Deirdre replied. “My mother gave it to me on my last birthday.”
    “Is there some reason why she bought you a doll?” Ed wanted to know.
    “No. It was just something novel—a decoration,” the young nurse answered.
    “Okay,” Ed went on, “when did you first start noticing activity occur?”
    “About a year ago,” said Deirdre. “The doll started to move around the apartment by itself. I don’t mean it got up and walked around, or any such thing. I mean when we’d come home from work it would never be quite where we left it.”
    “Explain that part a little more,” Ed requested.
    “After I got the doll for my birthday,” Deirdre explained, “I put it on my bed each morning after the bed was made. The arms would be off to its sides and its legs would be straight out—just like it’s sitting there now. But when we’d come home at night, the arms and legs would be positioned in different gestures. For instance, its legs would be crossed at the ankles, or its arms would be folded in its lap. After a week or so, this made us suspicious. So, to test it, I purposely crossed its arms and legs in the morning to see if it really was moving. And sure enough, every night when we’d come back home, the arms and legs would be uncrossed and the thing would be sitting there in any of a dozen different postures.”
    “Yea, but it did more than that,” Lara put in. “The doll also changed rooms by itself. We came home one night and the Annabelle doll was sitting in a chair by the front door. It was kneeling! The funny thing about it was, when we tried to make the doll kneel, it’d just fall over. It couldn’t kneel. Other times we’d find it sitting on the sofa, although when we left the apartment in the morning, it’d be in Deirdre’s room with the door closed!”
    “Anything else?” Lorraine asked.
    “Yes,” said Deirdre. “It would leave us little notes and messages. The handwriting looked to be that of a small child.”
    “What’d the notes say?” questioned Ed.
    “It would say things that meant nothing to us,” Deirdre answered. Things would be written like HELP US or HELP CAL, but Cal wasn’t in any kind of jeopardy at the time. And who ‘us’ was—we didn’t know. Still, the thing that was weird was that the notes would be written in pencil, but when we