Pictures Worth a Thousand Nightmares?

Paintings are supposed to remain still.

Whatever the artist placed on the canvas stays there. The figures do not move when the room is empty. Children do not crawl from the frame. Painted faces do not change expression when no one is watching.

At least, that is how paintings are supposed to behave.

Stories of haunted and cursed artwork are considerably older than the internet. Portraits have been accused of watching people, changing expression, carrying misfortune from one owner to another, and surviving disasters that destroyed everything around them.

Two paintings in particular became modern legends.

One became famous through an eBay auction.

The other was blamed for a remarkable series of house fires.

The Hands Resist Him

In 1972, American artist Bill Stoneham created a painting titled The Hands Resist Him.

The image is unsettling even without knowing anything about its later reputation.

A young boy stands before a glass-paneled door beside a female figure resembling a doll. Behind the glass, numerous small hands press outward from the darkness.

Stoneham based the boy partly upon a childhood photograph of himself. The doorway represented the boundary between the waking world and the world of dreams, while the hands represented other lives or possibilities. The strange girl beside him was intended as a guide through that boundary.

For decades, the painting remained comparatively obscure.

Then it appeared on eBay.

The Haunted eBay Painting

In February 2000, a California couple offered The Hands Resist Him for sale on eBay.

This was no ordinary art listing.

The sellers claimed the painting was haunted.

According to their account, the artwork had been discovered abandoned behind an old brewery. After bringing it home, unusual things supposedly began happening.

Their four-year-old daughter claimed that the children in the painting fought during the night.

More disturbing was her claim that they sometimes left the painting entirely.

The parents eventually placed a motion-sensitive camera in the room.

They said the resulting photographs showed the figures moving.

In one image, the doll-like girl appeared to hold something resembling a gun or other object. Another supposedly suggested that the boy was being forced from the painting.

The sellers included the photographs with the auction.

They also included a warning.

Don’t Blame the Sellers

The eBay listing reportedly advised potential buyers that the sellers would not accept responsibility for whatever might happen after the painting changed hands.

That was irresistible.

People began sharing the auction.

Messages circulated.

Visitors reportedly contacted the sellers claiming that merely looking at photographs of the painting online caused strange physical reactions.

Some reported feeling ill.

Others experienced headaches or dizziness.

A few supposedly claimed that the image caused them to faint.

Whether those reactions had anything to do with the painting is impossible to establish.

But the legend had escaped the canvas.

Thousands of people who had never stood in the same room with The Hands Resist Him were now frightened by it.

The painting became known simply as:

The Haunted eBay Painting.

The Painting Finds a New Home

The auction attracted considerable attention and eventually sold for more than $1,000.

By then, the story had become inseparable from the artwork itself.

This creates an interesting problem when considering later experiences.

Anyone encountering The Hands Resist Him now knows what they are supposed to feel.

The image is disturbing.

The title is ominous.

The hands behind the glass suggest something trying to enter our world.

And before most people have spent thirty seconds looking at it, someone has probably already told them:

It’s haunted.

Suggestion can be remarkably powerful.

But suggestion doesn’t necessarily tell us how the original sellers came to believe something was wrong.

Perhaps their daughter simply had nightmares about a frightening painting.

Perhaps shadows, reflections, and the limitations of an early digital camera created the apparent movement.

Perhaps the eBay story was clever marketing.

Or perhaps something about that painting genuinely made the family uncomfortable long before the rest of the world knew what it was supposed to do.

Whatever happened, the auction transformed an obscure work of surrealist art into one of the most famous supposedly haunted paintings in the world.

The Crying Boy

Another painting acquired an even darker reputation.

The Crying Boy refers to a series of mass-produced prints based upon paintings associated with artist Giovanni Bragolin, a name used by Bruno Amadio.

The images generally depict tearful children staring directly toward the viewer.

The prints became enormously popular, particularly in Britain.

Thousands hung in homes.

Then, during the 1980s, people began noticing something peculiar.

Houses containing the pictures were burning.

And sometimes the Crying Boy survived.

The Curse Begins

The story exploded into public attention in 1985, when the British tabloid The Sun began reporting fires in homes containing Crying Boy prints.

One particularly influential account concerned a house in South Yorkshire destroyed by fire.

According to the story, much of the interior had been devastated.

But a Crying Boy print remained comparatively unharmed.

More reports followed.

Firefighters were said to have noticed the same strange pattern.

A home burned.

The picture survived.

Another fire occurred.

Another Crying Boy remained.

Soon the newspaper was receiving accounts from frightened owners across Britain.

The painting had acquired a new name.

The Curse of the Crying Boy.

Dozens of Fires

Reports eventually connected the pictures with dozens of house fires. Your original article recorded contemporary claims that approximately forty to fifty homes had been destroyed while copies of the painting remained intact.

The pattern seemed difficult to ignore.

But there was an obvious statistical problem.

The pictures were extremely popular.

If hundreds of thousands of copies were hanging in British homes, some of those homes would inevitably experience fires.

The real mystery was not necessarily why a house containing a Crying Boy burned.

It was why the picture sometimes survived.

Why Didn’t the Pictures Burn?

A practical explanation eventually emerged.

The prints were produced on dense hardboard and coated with a protective varnish or similar finish. When exposed to heat, the hanging cord could fail first.

The picture then fell.

Frequently it landed face down.

The hardboard and protective surface could withstand conditions that destroyed lighter and more combustible materials nearby.

Under the right circumstances, therefore, the supposedly supernatural survival of the Crying Boy was physically possible.

That explains a great deal.

But it did little to stop the legend.

People had already begun removing the pictures from their homes.

Some owners were afraid to destroy them.

And according to the developing folklore, simply getting rid of a Crying Boy wasn’t always easy.

The Children Behind the Pictures

As the curse became famous, stories emerged attempting to explain it.

One claimed that the artist had painted an orphan whose parents died in a fire.

Another described a mysterious boy named Don Bonillo, sometimes called Diablo, whose presence supposedly caused fires wherever he went.

In some versions, the child eventually died in a fiery automobile accident.

The paintings were therefore said to contain either his spirit or his curse.

These stories are part of the later folklore surrounding the pictures rather than established biography.

But they gave the curse what every successful supernatural legend eventually seems to acquire.

An origin.

The paintings weren’t merely surviving fires anymore.

Now there was a dead child behind them.

Destroying the Crying Boy

As fear spread, The Sun offered frightened readers a solution.

Send in the paintings.

The newspaper organized a mass destruction of Crying Boy prints around Halloween in 1985.

Thousands reportedly arrived.

They were burned together.

The irony is difficult to miss.

People terrified that their paintings possessed a supernatural relationship with fire attempted to break the curse by…

setting the paintings on fire.

Apparently it worked well enough.

No army of weeping children emerged from the flames.

The Crying Girl

Folklore continued developing after the height of the panic.

A related image known as The Crying Girl became attached to the story.

According to one variation, bringing the Crying Boy and Crying Girl together could neutralize the curse.

It has the peculiar logic of much older sympathetic magic.

Something is incomplete.

Restore what is missing and the disturbance ends.

Whether this tradition developed during the original panic or afterward is difficult to establish, but it demonstrates how quickly a modern legend can acquire rituals of its own.

A dangerous object requires a method of protection.

The story supplies one.

The Haunted Painting of Delphine LaLaurie

Other artworks have acquired supernatural reputations of their own.

Your original article mentioned artist Ricardo Pustanio’s portrait of Delphine LaLaurie, which became associated with stories of paranormal activity.

Such claims belong to a much older tradition involving portraits of notorious or tragic figures.

The painting becomes more than a representation of its subject.

People begin wondering whether something of the person represented might remain attached to the image.

A portrait is particularly effective in this role because it already does something slightly uncanny.

It preserves a face after the person is gone.

The eyes continue looking outward.

The expression never changes.

And when the subject has a disturbing reputation, the painting can begin to feel less like a picture and more like a presence.

Why Paintings?

Haunted paintings occupy a peculiar corner of supernatural folklore.

A haunted house makes intuitive sense within the tradition. People lived there. People died there. Memories accumulated.

But why should a painting become haunted?

Some traditions suggest that intense emotion can attach itself to objects.

Others claim possessions can retain something of former owners.

A portrait might become associated with the person depicted rather than the person who owned it.

Still another possibility is much simpler.

Paintings are unusually good at unsettling the human mind.

We are designed to recognize faces.

A painted face can appear to watch us because perspective makes the eyes seem to follow movement around a room.

Shadows change as lighting changes.

Expressions appear subtly different depending upon viewing angle.

A disturbing image becomes considerably more disturbing at three in the morning.

Once someone says the painting moves when nobody is watching, watching it becomes very difficult indeed.

Pictures Worth a Thousand Nightmares

There are reasonable explanations for much of the folklore surrounding The Hands Resist Him and The Crying Boy.

The figures in Stoneham’s painting need not physically leave the canvas for a frightened child to dream that they do.

The Crying Boy prints did not need supernatural protection to survive fires if their construction made them unusually resistant.

And once newspapers and the early internet began repeating the stories, suggestion did the rest.

Perhaps.

But haunted artwork remains compelling because paintings already possess something other objects do not.

They show us something that isn’t really there.

A person.

A landscape.

A room.

A moment that ended decades or centuries ago.

We know it is only paint.

We know the figure cannot see us.

We know the hands behind the glass cannot reach through it.

And yet sometimes we cover an old portrait before going to sleep.

Sometimes we turn it toward the wall.

Sometimes we move it to another room because we don’t particularly like the way it watches the bed.

Perhaps that’s merely imagination.

Most haunted objects probably owe much of their reputations to precisely that.

But if a painting ever does seem slightly different from the way you remember it, there is one comforting thing to keep in mind.

Whatever you do, don’t tell the internet.

It has a history of making these things considerably worse.