The Warren House and Occult Museum

OVERVIEW

A suburban house on Knollwood Street in Monroe, Connecticut, home of the demonologist Ed Warren (1926–2006) and the medium Lorraine Warren (1927–2019), who founded the New England Society for Psychic Research in 1952 and kept in the basement a museum of objects taken from their investigations: Annabelle the doll in a locked case marked WARNING: POSITIVELY DO NOT OPEN, a coffin said to be a vampire's, a child's gravestone used as an altar, masks, idols and some 750 other pieces. Tours ran for decades by appointment. The museum closed to the public in 2019 over zoning; the collection stayed in the house under the care of the Warrens' son-in-law Tony Spera and NESPR.

HISTORY

Monroe property records filed on 8 August 2025 show the house and museum sold to Haunted Homes LLC — the comedian Matt Rife and the paranormal YouTuber Elton Castee — for $1 million, with the buyers taking on legal guardianship of the collection for at least five years. They announced overnight stays in the house and a new, more public home for the museum in Monroe.

REPORTED ACTIVITY

The house's reputation rests on its contents rather than its own history: the Warrens and their successors have held that several of the objects are inhabited or cursed, that Annabelle in particular should never be handled, and that visitors who mocked the case were harmed afterward. These are the keepers' own accounts, told on the tours and in Gerald Brittle's The Demonologist (1980); the objects' provenance is recorded on their own pages in the ODPSI registry, with sources.

VISITING

Private property in a residential street. Not open as a museum; the new owners announced booked overnight stays in 2025. Do not visit unannounced.