Confused
As shown in The Conjuring, this demon told the school nurses it was the spirit of a girl named Annabelle Higgins, a 7 year old girl who supposedly died in the apartment these school nurses were inhabiting. Ed Warren, however, told these nurses that Annabelle Higgins never existed. Yet, the prequel to this movie, Annabelle, shows that Annabelle Higgins was real. Maybe Ed Warren was wrong.
So it turns out that Annabelle Higgins was a young woman who ran away to join a satanic cult, whose right of passage was for her to murder her own parents. After killing her parents, she set her sights on her parents' neighbors who had the doll, but was gunned down by police before she could get to the neighbors. Before she died, however, she performed a ritual on the doll that allowed it to be used as a conduit by a Demon? For what reason would Annabelle Higgins have to do this? Did she think she was transferring her soul into the doll?
But now, this new prequel, Annabelle: Creation, is saying that the doll was created by a man named Samuel Mullins, who had a daughter that died about a decade or two prior (I sarcastically wonder what her name was), and at that point the doll was already possessed, and starts attacking a group of sheltered orphans living in Mullins' house. So, there was no point for the ritual Annabelle Higgins would do years later because the doll was already possessed. So, that would mean the plot of Annabelle is pointless, story-wise.
And I didn't think the bad continuity of the Puppet Master series couldn't be replicated.