Orphant Annie

Origin
Little Orphant Allie, a.k.a. the Elf Child, is an orphan child who helps keep house for the kind family who have taken her in. When work is done, she tells chilling horror stories to her younger housemates of misbehaving children who are abducted by goblins. She first appeared in the poem “The Elf Child” (1885), by James Whitcomb Riley. Reprints of the original poem from 1897 on render her name instead as Little Orphant Annie, by which she has become much better known. (Orphant is regional Indiana pronunciation of orphan or orphaned.) According to Wikipedia, the character is popular with Indiana children, particularly at Halloween.

The character is based on a real girl named Mary Alice Smith (1850–1924) who, similar to the character, lived in the author’s home and helped with housework. The public domain character Raggedy Ann was named after Little Orphant Annie in 1915, and the copyrighted character Little Orphan Annie was named after her in 1924.

The 1918 movie Little Orphant Annie indicates that she told her scary stories to her fellow orphans in the orphanage as well, depicts her unfortunate family situation before moving to her benefactors’ home and illustrates two of the scary stories she tells.

In 1921, author Johnny Gruelle further expanded Annie’s origin story in the prose work The Orphant Annie Story Book, which depicts the winter day of her arrival at her benefactor family’s home. Gruelle goes to great lengths to cast a magic fairylike glow about her, describing her, for example, as “a strange, mysterious, fancy‐filled little girl” who “seemed to come direct from the Land of Fairies” and who “seemed a creature … whose place was with Gnomes and Elves as they formed their Fairy Rings and danced in the shimmering moonlight.” In addition to horror stories, she also told much less frightening stories about fairies, gnomes, magicians and anthropomorphic animals.

Public domain literary works

 * “The Elf Child,” Indianapolis Journal, 15 Nov. 1885. Reprinted in 1897 and thereafter in multiple books as “Little Orphant Annie.”
 * Johnny Gruelle, The Orphant Annie Story Book, Indianapolis: Bobbs‐Merrill Co., 1921.

Public domain film
Little Orphant Annie, Selig Polyscope Company, 1918

Links

 * Wikipedia, including the full text of the poem
 * Wikipedia (about the 1918 movie)
 * The Orphant Annie Story Book on Google Books
 * IMDB