Turning Tragedy Into Lore: The Annabelle Effect
Haunted mythology always wants more because ghost stories are hungry things
originally written for the Hayley is a Ghost blog
When news broke (July 15th, ‘25) that Dan Rivera, one of the caretakers touring the infamous “Annabelle” doll, had died unexpectedly, it didn’t take long for the usual whispers to start. Was it the curse? Did he anger the doll? Had he “disrespected the spirit”?
You could practically hear the content wheels turning.
There’s a particular kind of internet buzz that surrounds this kind of tragedy. Not just the usual shock and mourning, but something else. Something hungry. When someone associated with a haunted object or location dies, the mythology grows teeth... and fast.
And here’s the thing that’s hard to say out loud without sounding cold: Dan Rivera didn’t die because of a haunted doll, but the story will say he did. That says more about us than it does about Annabelle.
The Myth Always Wants More
The Annabelle doll is a Raggedy Ann doll said to be haunted and even cursed. It was locked in a glass case for everyone’s safety by Ed and Lorraine Warren, and forms part of the Warrens’ legacy, serving as a cornerstone of the American paranormal canon. For decades, she’s been trotted out as “evidence” that demons are real, that evil can inhabit objects, that fear is justified.
She’s also great for business.
Rivera, who worked closely with the Warren legacy and helped bring these haunted artefacts on tour, wasn’t just a background figure. In recent years, he’d become part of the mythology himself - not just showing off the doll, but living in proximity to it. Being “close to Annabelle” is part of the lore now. It gets you views, clicks, bookings.
So when someone like Rivera dies unexpectedly, it doesn’t stay a personal tragedy for long. It becomes part of the narrative. Even if he passed from something like a medical condition or natural causes, that won’t be the version people remember. They’ll remember the whispers, the TikToks, the spooky YouTube edits. The shadow at the edge of the frame.
And that’s the thing about haunted mythology: it always wants more.
If someone dies and it’s unexpected, the story shifts to accommodate it. This happens constantly in the paranormal world. A sound guy on a ghost show gets sick? Must be the entity. Every coincidence gets magnified, edited, and stitched into the lore. That’s not just magical thinking, that’s confirmation bias. It’s the brain’s way of trying to connect dots, even when those dots are grief, coincidence, and fear - and we’re really good at doing it quickly.
Within hours of the announcement, I saw people treating Rivera’s death as confirmation that the doll is still “dangerous.” I saw people warning others not to “speak her name”, people claiming they just knew something bad was going to happen.
All of it feels uncomfortably close to exploiting someone’s death to keep a scary story going. It’s quite selfish, in a way, and it’s typical of paranormal communities.
Dan Rivera was a person and now he’s going to become an internet plot point.
It’s chilling, honestly.
The Ethics of Haunted Object Tourism
Look, I get it. Haunted object tourism is fun. I’ve visited places with alleged cursed items. I’ve sat through the spooky monologues, admired the low lighting and the odd vibe. Sometimes it’s entertainment, sometimes it’s genuine belief - often it’s a blurry mix of both.
But when someone dies and the immediate response is “Ooh, the curse is real,” it stops being harmless fun and starts veering into something else. Something colder and tacky.
And it’s not just believers who are quick to jump in. I’ve seen plenty of skeptics already using Dan Rivera’s death to dunk on the Warrens, the doll, and the tour itself. And maybe some of that criticism is valid, but if not done carefully, skeptics risk doing the same thing the believers are doing - just facing the other direction.
Still making someone’s death about the doll, reducing a real person’s life to a headline in a larger argument, and using someone’s untimely death to score points. Whether you’re saying “Annabelle is real” or “Annabelle is fake,” you’re still centering the doll, and not the man who died.
That’s the real challenge in moments like this: resisting the pull of the narrative altogether. Sitting with the fact that sometimes people die, suddenly and unfairly, and the best thing we can do is not turn it into content.
Ghost Stories Eat People
This isn’t new. We’ve seen it before - actors from Poltergeist who died young, the “cursed” set of The Exorcist - the pattern’s always the same: a real human being dies, and within 48 hours they’ve been turned into a plot device in someone else’s supernatural narrative.
That’s what ghost stories do. They eat people.
That’s not me saying we should never tell stories about the strange or mysterious - I obviously love a good ghost story, but we need to know when to stop and when to let the story stay fiction, and let the real person rest in peace.
Turning a man’s death into evidence for (or against) a doll being haunted isn’t just bad logic. It’s bad ethics.
What haunts me about this story isn’t Annabelle. It’s how quickly people are willing to replace a person with a legend. Dan Rivera wasn’t cursed or claimed by a spirit. He was a man who passed unexpectedly, and now people are turning that fact into content.
That’s the real haunting: the way we rush to erase nuance, context, and humanity in favour of a good hook, a scary caption, a viral video, or an upvoted comment.
We want ghosts, so we make them, but maybe, just maybe, we should sit with discomfort sometimes. Maybe we should accept that death is hard and often makes no sense. It’s brutal. A gut punch. Maybe we shouldn’t fill every silence with a demon.
Maybe I’m just being grumpy, but I have been around so much death that watching this happen in real time just makes me sad. As I’ve written before, being involved in paranormal research for over two decades has taught me that I was never really investigating ghosts - I was investigating humans and their relationship with death, dying, and the dead.
If you take anything from this, please let it be this: we don’t honour the dead by making them into martyrs for myths or myth-busting. We honour them by remembering they were people.
Complicated. Imperfect. Human.
Let the stories stay stories, let the doll be just a doll, and let the dead rest in peace.