In 2013, the horror movie The Conjuring introduced audiences to Annabelle, the cursed doll once owned by freelance Catholic demonologists Ed and Lorraine Warren. Though only briefly featured in the film's opening scene, Annabelle became an instant celebrity, and has since gone on to star in three spinoff films of her (its?) own.
In the movies, Annabelle is portrayed by a large, antique, Victorian era-style doll, custom designed for the film, that absolutely looks like it radiates supernatural malignancy. However, the real Annabelle, which can be visited at the Warrens' Occult Museum in Connecticut, is in fact a Raggedy Ann doll; one of thousands mass-produced in the 1960s as a popular children's toy. What's more, the alleged curse this doll supposedly carries seems to be entirely the product of the Warrens' imaginations.
While this might feel disappointing, Annabelle is an ideal case study of the strange world of "cursed objects," which is the subject of Edgar Award-winner J.W. Ocker's book Cursed Objects: Strange but True Stories of the World's Most Infamous Items (Quirk Books, 2020). It's well-written, beautifully presented, and is highly recommended to anyone interested in the folklore of cursed objects and the true stories behind them.
Ocker is the author of the excellent The United States of Cryptids, which explores the world of American cryptozoology from a folkloric rather than zoological perspective, and that same approach is deployed here, where cursed objects are defined as items that "operate as storytelling mechanisms for tragedy in culture." This is similar to the way that scholars like Judith Richardson and Tiya Miles have approached the topic of ghost stories, and Ocker duly notes that tales of cursed objects often overlap with those of hauntings and possessions.
Ocker's decision to examine cursed objects as narratives first and foremost serves the reader well, as it helps to explain how the lore surrounding such nefarious items as Annabelle can so readily supersede their reality. Because the story of a cursed object is more important than any empirical evidence of the curse itself, this means that the allegedly cursed object doesn't have to be particularly sinister, historically authentic, or even actually cursed.
An example of the latter, discussed by Ocker, includes one of the most well-known cursed objects of all time, the Tomb of Tutankhamen. Despite persistent claims to the contrary, there's never been any curse on the tomb of King Tut, and the idea that the archeologists who discovered it all met with sudden, inexplicable deaths can only be justified by the most unscrupulous of cherry picking. The curse of King Tut appears to be the concoction of tabloid journalists, not ancient Egyptian occultists.
In contrast to Tut, Ocker points to the grave of William Shakespeare, which does actually have a curse on it, The Bard evidently having died paranoid that overzealous fans might desecrate his corpse in pursuit of souvenirs. So why is it that there are dozens of novels and films about cursed mummies and not the vengeful ghost of the author of Hamlet? Because, Ocker suggests, the tale of the cursed tomb of an Egyptian boy pharaoh makes for a better story than that of a 16th century English playwright.
Along these same lines, Ocker devotes an entire section of Cursed Objects to items you'd think should be cursed but aren't, like the mummified head of the "Dusseldorf Vampire," serial killer Peter Kürten; and the eponymous Crystal Skulls. While these items are undoubtedly strange and spooky, they simply haven't accumulated the kind of stories necessary to gain a reputation as cursed.
Which is weird, because it's not like that reputation is hard to acquire. In the category of historically inauthentic cursed objects is the Dybbuk Box, which, like Annabelle, became the star of its own horror movie with 2012's The Possession. In Jewish folklore, a dybbuk is a parasitic ghost, but there's absolutely nothing in that folklore about imprisoning them in boxes. Nevertheless, in 2003, furniture reseller Kevin Mannis listed an antique wine chest on eBay, claiming it was a cursed dybbuk box.
The box sold for $140, and was subsequently re-listed on eBay with the claims of it being cursed enhanced. This time it sold for $280. The cycle continued until eventually, following the dybbuk box's big Hollywood break, it was sold to paranormal reality TV star Zak Bagans for a whopping $10,000, and it now resides as one of the centerpieces of his Las Vegas-based Haunted Museum. Unsurprisingly, Ocker observes, this has led to an influx of other allegedly "cursed" items popping up on eBay from prospective sellers hoping to strike it rich. Ocker even bought one himself, and describes its effects in Cursed Objects.
What all this demonstrates is that belief in the authenticity of a cursed object is paramount. Ocker writes that clinical psychologists refer to this as the "nocebo effect," and that anthropologists have documented how belief in the malign supernatural power of a cursed object is enough to make a person experience its effects in empirically verifiable ways.
One of the most dramatic examples of this concerns the so-called Hexham Heads, which were a pair of miniature stone heads discovered by two boys digging in their garden in the English town of Hexam. The heads were initially identified by archeologist Anne Ross as Bronze Age Celtic religious items. This was enough to put the idea that they were cursed into the minds of the boy's parents and their neighbors. Soon they were experiencing poltergeist activity in their homes, as well as nocturnal visits by a werewolf!
The family was desperate to get rid of the heads, so Ross took them home with her but soon began experiencing the same phenomena, werewolves and all. But what makes this story so strange is that subsequent analysis of the heads showed they weren't actually Bronze Age artifacts, but modern-day forgeries made of industrial concrete. Once again, the story of a cursed object trumped the humdrum reality of the object itself.