My last post was about a supposedly cursed painting and so today I will do something different: a post about a supposedly haunted painting. 🙂
The painting in question turned up in an ebay auction in February 2000. It’s called The Hands Resist Me. It has a slightly unsettling look to it, don’t you think?
The painting was put up for auction by an anonymous Californian couple who said that they had found it behind an old brewery. Let me ask you, if it was you, and you had found this strange looking picture, what would you do? What these people did was to take it on home and hang it up on their daughter’s bedroom wall. She was only four and apparently the main problem that she had with the picture was that the children in it were keeping her awake at night (a problem she would not have had, I might add, if her parents had given her a My Little Pony Poster instead). Yes, these rowdy kids with the painted faces just could not get along together and kept on fighting and even coming into the little girl’s room.
Of course, daddy was most alarmed to hear this and, still preferring not to go with the My Little Pony idea, set up motion detecting cameras in his daughter’s bedroom instead. Some of the resulting pictures were included in the auction listing and, with a little imagination, perhaps aided by a day’s drinking behind an old brewery, the little boy might seem to look like he is trying to walk out of the frame. Worse still, the bad girl he’s been hanging with appears to have a weapon trained on him.
Seeing all of this, the couple decided that the picture had to go, and did what anyone in their right mind would do. They put the damned thing up for sale. They even added a disclaimer to the listing, pointing out that they would not be held responsible for anything that might happen after the sale went through.
And do you know what? This haunted(?) picture was an instant hit, and over 30 000 people viewed the listing. Stranger still, some of the people who viewed the webpage reported having strange experiences. With some it was strange noises, while others reported feeling ill or even that they felt like they were falling victim to mind control techniques.
Then the anonymous sellers did a quick backtrack and said:
“There are no ghosts in this world, no supernatural powers, this is just a painting, and most of these things have an explanation, in this case, probably a fluke light effect.”
Hmm… are these the same people that were so worried about the ‘fluke light effect’ that they had to post a disclaimer? Apparently so.
The couple managed to sell their much-hyped picture to an art gallery. They got $1200 for it and I bet they were very glad to see the back of the thing too.
The owner of the gallery managed to track down the man who’d painted the picture, a 55-year-old computer graphics artist called Bill Stoneham. Mr Stoneham was also the boy in the picture. He had used an old photograph of himself to work from. He was very surprised, as you can well imagine, on hearing about all the trouble he had been causing. Anway, if you want to read about the whole thing in more detail JUST CLICK HERE.
I know that, in writing this post, I have perhaps allowed a sarcastic undercurrent to flow along with the story, but, to me, it does seem like this anonymous My Little Pony-hating couple made quite a healthy profit out of bullshit. Sadly they are not the only ones to do so. I have seen some very bogus items fetch an awful lot of money in ebay auctions. There is a webpage somewhere that lists a lot of them and I remember that one such item was a haunted can of coke (wow, I’d heard it could keep you up at night). I will try and track the page down and, if I can, will post a link to it. It is amazing, and a little sad. A lot of people are fascinated by the unexplained, and there are just as many people that are willing to take advantage of that fact, so it really is a case of buyer beware.