‘Conjuring’ Family Member Never Heard of Matt Rife Before He Bought Occult Museum
Matt Rife made headlines this summer after purchasing the home of paranormal investigators Ed and Lorraine Warren. The house, which doubles as an occult museum, wasn’t the main attraction. The joint comes full of allegedly haunted objects, including the Annabelle doll featured in the movie The Conjuring. “I know a lot of you guys don’t know what any of this means whatsoever,” Rife condescended to his fans on TikTok, “but if you follow ghost stuff, this is about as big as it gets.”
For the Warrens’ grandson, Chris McKinnell, seeing the family legacy turned over to Rife didn’t mean much. “I’d never even heard of him until he bought it,” he said on the Reel Appreciation podcast, as reported by Entertainment Weekly. “I didn’t know who he was.”
Part of Rife’s deal in acquiring the Warren home is that he becomes “the legal guardian for at least the next five years, of the entire haunted collection, including THE ANNABELLE DOLL.” And that’s what has McKinnell worried.
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“One of the worst parts of my grandparents’ legacy is that my grandfather ever made the mistake of calling it a museum,” he said. “It was never open to the public. That’s a misconception.”
McKinnell says that under his grandparents’ watch, checking out haunted objects was possible only by special invitation to one or two people at a time. Getting that permission came with specific instructions: “Don’t touch anything, don’t treat anything with misrespect, do not try to communicate with anything.”
That changed when the Warrens’ daughter (and McKinnell’s mother), Judy Speara, took over the collection with her husband, Tony. The couple sent Annabelle and other spooky objects out on tour, a practice McKinnell calls “a betrayal of everything my grandparents spent their lives doing.”
“What are they doing now? They’re doing TikTok videos where they're talking to these things. They’re trying to communicate with these things,” he complained. “To me, that place is the Chernobyl of the paranormal, and it bothers me to no end what can happen.”
Laugh it off if you want, Matt Rife, but the last caretaker of Annabelle, paranormal investigator Dan Rivera, died mysteriously this summer while on tour with the doll. An autopsy determined Rivera died of a heart attack, but his unfortunate end is precisely the kind of fate McKinnell is worried about.
Maybe Rife is taking such warnings seriously. Rife reps told Entertainment Weekly that he has “no plans and there have never been plans to take any of the artifacts on tour.” But the comedian is posing for selfies with the doll and finding more ways to cash in on his investment.
Keep it up, Matt, and Annabelle will keep working her magic.
