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If you’re like most people, you know Matt Rife either from his comedy—which got popular on TikTok a few years back, before breaking containment and scoring him a couple of Netflix specials—or from people being annoyed by his comedy. (See those same Netflix specials, which provoked a wave of backlash when they arrived.) Luckily for us, all of that part of Rife’s public profile has now pretty much been wiped from our minds, because if you only have the brainspace to fit one fact about Matt Rife in there, it’s going to be this one: Matt Rife is now the “legal guardian” of Annabelle, the doll that kills people.
You may be familiar with Annabelle’s work from movies like Annabelle, The Conjuring, or Annabelle Comes Home: She’s one of the spooky crown jewels of the collection of Ed and Lorraine Warren, the famous paranormal investigators who served as the basis for the Conjuring movies. (Note that, much as Ed and Lorraine didn’t look much like Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga, the actual Annabelle is a pretty normal-looking Raggedy Ann doll stuck in a glass case with a spooky “Do not open!” sign on it.) Rife (a long-time fan of both The Conjuring, and the paranormal in general) enters the picture because he and YouTuber Elton Castee apparently just bought the Warren’s house and Occult Museum, meaning that they’re now—per an Instagram post—”the legal guardian for at least the next 5 years, of the entire haunted collection including THE ANNABELLE DOLL.”
The Warrens’ museum was closed back in 2019 due to zoning issues, right around the time that Lorraine Warren herself died. There have been attempts to tour the museum’s contents to keep the show rolling on—including one supported by a viral hoax that claimed Annabelle had gone missing a few years back—but Rife and Castee apparently intend to bring the collection back to life. In his post, Rife writes that “We plan to open the house for overnight stays and museum tours so you yourself can experience and learn all the haunted history surrounding this amazing place.” So, yeah: You’ll apparently soon be able to spend the night with an entity that drains the joy and vitality out of others simply by its mere presence. Also, the Annabelle doll will be there.
[via NBC Connecticut]
