Zak Bagans has confronted a lot of things from the beyond during his time investigating the supernatural, but even the Ghost Adventures star was left shaken upon encountering the real-life Annabelle doll. In a preview of Sunday’s E!’s True Hollywood Story, Bagans recalls his experience with the allegedly possessed doll that scared audiences first in the Conjuring movies and in its own spinoffs.
“When it comes to haunted objects, you think of Annabelle right away,” he says in the clip from Sunday’s show dedicated to her story, “An inhuman demon’s going to possess a doll to trick the living into thinking it’s a little kid.”
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Showing footage from his time with the Raggedy Ann doll, kept at the Occult Museum in Connecticut for years by famed demonologists Ed and Lorraine Warren, two figures of light appear on his sensor camera as Bagans asks her questions.
“A figure appeared out of her and then went into me,” Bagans recalls. “Next day I’m still recovering from my investigation from Annabelle and all of a sudden, like in the movies, the skies just turn black. They’re rumbling and then boom, lightning strikes a light pole where my car is and leaves a huge gash on the light.”
The ghost hunter wonders, “If I wasn’t around that doll, would that have happened?”
The first time Bagans’ spooky footage was seen was during his 2017 Halloween special for Ghost Adventures, which had some people up in arms that Bagans would touch the doll. In a Facebook post shortly after the special aired, he defended his actions to his followers.
“So many of you in outrage because I touched ‘Annabelle”‘ so here’s my response. While so many viewers think they know exactly what it’s like to be in these type situations, in all due respect, they do not. I am a 100 percent sensitive,” he wrote. “What’s that mean? I absorb and sense energies around me at a very high level. Whether it’s from living people, residual energy, objects or from spirits. I’ve been like this my entire life. I am not a psychic medium. I am a sensitive. And while some perceive this to be ‘overreacting’ or ‘too dramatic’ well those people will never be able to relate to what I feel when I’m around spirits. It’s a rush, its draining, it’s exhilarating, it’s terrifying all-in-one depending who or what I’m in contact with.”
“I touched Annabelle but felt like I had to,” he continued. “Not because it would be a great TV moment but because of things most of you wouldn’t understand…. something had a grip on me and I had a tremendous amount of sadness thru the whole thing except one quick moment of rage near the end when Tony took her and left.”
In the end, he revealed he regretted his contact with Annabelle: “Touching her I feel has lead to many strange events and I do believe was indeed a dangerous thing to do.”
E! True Hollywood Story airs Sundays at 10 p.m. ET on E!
Photo credit: YouTube/E!
