Annabelle is an allegedly haunted Raggedy Ann doll, housed in the now closed occult museum of the paranormal investigators Ed and Lorraine Warren. Annabelle was moved there after supposed hauntings in 1970. A character based on the doll is one of the antagonists that appear in the Conjuring Universe.

ccording to the Warrens, a student nurse was given the doll in 1971. They said that the doll behaved strangely, and that a psychic medium told the student that the doll was inhabited by the spirit of a deceased girl named "Annabelle". The student and her roommate tried to accept and nurture the spirit-possessed doll, but the doll reportedly exhibited malicious and frightening behavior. It was at this point that the Warrens say they were first contacted, moving the doll to their museum after pronouncing it demonically possessed. The doll remained in a glass box at The Warrens' Occult Museum in Monroe, Connecticut until the museum's closing.

Texas State University assistant professor of religious studies Joseph Laycock says most skeptics have dismissed the Warrens' museum as "full of off-the-shelf Halloween junk, dolls and toys, books you could buy at any bookstore". Laycock calls the Annabelle legend an "interesting case study in the relationship between pop culture and paranormal folklore" and speculates that the demonic doll trope popularized by films such as Child's Play, Dolly Dearest, and The Conjuring likely emerged from early legends surrounding Robert the Doll, as well as from a Twilight Zone episode released five years prior to the Warrens' story, entitled "Living Doll", in which the character of the mother is named Annabelle. Laycock suggests that "the idea of demonically possessed dolls allows modern demonologists to find supernatural evil in the most banal and domestic of places."