June 11, 2025 • 17 mins
What makes an object haunted? These four paintings have strange and mysterious backgrounds, along with claims of supernatural phenomena. #1 The Hands Resist Him, #2 The Anguished Man, #3 Woman of the Rain, #4 The Crying Boy
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
Warning this episode contains detailsthat some listeners
may find disturbing.
Art has longbeen a topic for unsettling tales,
with certain paintings gaining notorietyfor allegedly being cursed or hunted.
Fear can be ignitedby various aspects the artist's style,
(00:23):
the depicted subjectwho may have passed away long ago,
or a dark connectionto the artist themselves.
This evening, we delve beyond the folklore
and explore the disturbing stories behind
four of the most haunted paintings.
This is a study of strange.
(01:01):
Welcome back to the show.
I'm your host, Michael May, your guideinto all sorts of strange things
and other things
you could tellI don't script this part of the show.
Tonight, I'm going to dive straight into the topic of for haunted paintings.
So let's start with a painting
that came from a dream,or perhaps something stranger.
(01:24):
The year was 1972.
An artist named William Bill Stoneham,born in Boston and raised in California,
was working under contractwith the Charles Fine Garten
Gallery in Beverly Hills.
He was no stranger to surrealism.
His works often explored boundariesbetween childhood
and adulthood, life and dreams.
Stone Ham's now infamous paintingThe Hands Resist Him,
(01:48):
was based on a photograph of himselfat age five,
and in the paintingyou see standing beside this young boy,
a young girl who is actually a doll,
and behind them a glass doorand pressing against the glass
are dozens of disembodied hands.
(02:08):
Stone painted this in 1972,and it sold quickly.
It was actually purchased by actorJohn Marley, who's best known
as the man who wakes up with a horse'shead in his bed in The Godfather movie.
The painting changedhands a few times in the years after that,
and to be honest, there doesn't appearto be any strange tales or stories
about this painting until it was put upfor sale on eBay in the year 2000.
(02:32):
The seller was a couple from California,and part of the description on eBay
was that this painting was haunted.
They claimed their four and a half yearold daughter
said the children in the paintingwould fight at night,
and that the boybut sometimes leave the canvas.
The father even wrotewe woke up to the boy in the painting
walking into the room.
(02:53):
Then they set up a motion sensor camera,and what they claimed to capture
is the doll pointing a gun at the boy.
Now, as you can imagine,this listing went viral.
Here's a quote from the newspaper,the Spokane Review.
We decided the painting had to go, wrotethe sellers, who added that
they would not be responsiblefor any events happening after the sale.
(03:13):
The painting became a web phenomenon.
At least 30,000 people viewed the webpage, and a handful reported
that they had experienced
strange events just lookingat the painting on their computers.
One reported hearing an Exorcisttype voice along with a blast of hot air.
Another reported that he became ill
while viewing the painting and had to burnWhite Sage to cleanse his house.
(03:35):
Afterward, another reportedblackout mind control experiences.
The painting sold for over $1,000
to an art gallery called PerceptionGallery in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
The sellers on eBayhad actually backtracked their initial
haunting claimsas the post was going viral.
Bill Stoneham,the artist was still alive and interviews.
(03:59):
He said he had no ideathe painting would be considered haunted,
and the title came from a poemthat his wife had written.
He says the hands symbolizeother lives, other possibilities.
The doll was a guide and the glass doorwas a barrier between waking and dream.
But here's a twist two menclosely associated with the painting died
within the first year of seeing it.
(04:21):
The gallery owner, CharlesFine, turned, and art
critic Henry sell this coincidence?
Yes, of course it is.
It's definitely a coincidence, butthe painting still hangs in perception.
Gallery and there have been no fires,no deaths, and no other haunted story.
But the gallery doeskeep it in storage for safekeeping.
(04:43):
My favorite part of this tale isthe artist was commissioned
to create follow up paintings
after the popularity of this,and I think there's only three of these.
The first one was in 2004called Resistance at the threshold,
and this shows the same boy, but older now
standing in front of the same glass door.
But this time the doll is gone.
The boy looks uncertain,as if he's perhaps
(05:05):
struggling with the choiceand the hands behind the glass.
There's fewer of them,but they're more defined,
and it's describedas representing the boy's confrontation
with the boundary between his inner selfand the outer world.
He then in 2012,made threshold of revelation.
And thisthe boy has crossed through the threshold,
(05:26):
and the scene is now surrealand dreamlike.
And there's new symbolsto populate the background.
And the artist called it about awakening.
And then in 2017,he created the hands in Vintage Him.
And this is painted as a kind ofa prequel, an origin story, I'll call it.
It shows a faceless, mannequin
like figure,possibly the prototype of the boy himself.
(05:48):
Stoneham said.
This was a painting about creation,that moment when the boy becomes real.
Each of these paintingshave been purchased,
and while they've drawn interest,none have achieved the same infamy
as the original, and notably,no paranormal claims.
Stoneham himself has said in interviews,people see what they want to see.
(06:09):
I just tell the story.
The fear that belongs to the viewer.
Hauntedpainting number two of all the haunted
paintings, the anguished manmight be the most unnerving.
Visually,the painting depicts a scream king figure,
a face void of details of wide mouth.
(06:31):
It's sort of a reddish colorwith blue smears.
It looks to me like pain
or the embodiment of dread.
But what huntsthis painting isn't the image itself.
It's the medium.
This story comes from a mannamed Sean Robinson from Cumbria, England,
(06:52):
and he claimsthat he inherited the painting
from his grandmother,who kept it locked in the attic.
She always claimedit was cursed, and the artist,
she said, hadmixed his own blood into the oils
and after finishing the painting,he then killed himself.
Sean brought this painting into his home
(07:13):
and this is when things allegedly startedhappening.
Doors slammed, cold draftsswept through the rooms.
His wife apparently would feel someonebrushing her hair at night.
And most frightening of all, Sean says,was the sound
a cry or a scream?
(07:35):
An inhuman scream.
And it would sound as if it was comingfrom inside the walls of the house.
In 2010,Sean posted this story to YouTube,
including videos of the paintingand footage from his bedroom
where you allegedly can hear these sounds.
Give it a listen.
(07:55):
Although I've just sent the picture,the Englishman back up in the bedroom.
I'm going to record
it for approximately eight hours,see if we can catch
some of the activity on video,and I'll leave the light on.
It's at this momentthat text comes up on screen
that mentions that he left this camerarecording for many hours
(08:16):
over three nights, and this sound iswhat happened at around 2 a.m.
one night.
And then at 4 a.m., the door swings shut.
(08:49):
Now, I'm
not sure what I hearwith the actual sound clip in that video.
In terms of the door closing,I have some skeptical theories about it,
but being that this podcastis an audio medium, I would suggest going
into my show notes and looking at the linkI have to this video
so you can get the full senseand come up with your own theories.
(09:11):
No artist has ever
been namedas the creator of this painting.
There's no background to the tale,no date,
just the alleged storiesthat have come out publicly.
Now, when you take that and you combine itwith the viral component of the video,
I dare say this is likely a hoax,but if it's a hoax,
(09:33):
it's a strangely effective onebecause the painting,
well, it's still disturbing.
It is a frightening painting.
Art historian Duncan McLaren,
who reviewed high resolutionimages of the work, confirms
that it was painted in oil on canvas,possibly in the mid to late 20th century.
No chemical traces or blood
(09:55):
have been found today.
The anguished manremains with Sean Robinson
and he allegedly keepsit locked away just in case.
Hauntedpainting number three the Rain Woman
in Lithuania A different painting,less infamous online than the others,
(10:16):
was painted by Ukrainian artistSvetlana Till.
It's in 1996.
Svetlana was in her early 30s.
She trained in Odessa and is known forpainting moody, introspective portraits.
But The Rain Woman was different.
She claimed she completed it injust five hours, nonstop,
as if someone was guiding her hand.
(10:38):
The painting depicts a pale, ghostly woman
with dark hairand a dark, wide brimmed hat.
She's standing alone in the rain,
which is represented by the background,which looks like dripping paint.
Her eyes stare out with sadness.
Her head and neck are unnaturally skinny,and she's all in black.
And if you look at it the right way,at least this is what happened to me.
(11:01):
It almost looks like her head is floatingjust above her body,
and after Svetlana painted it,strange things began to happen.
She says that she sold the paintingseveral times, but every buyer returned
it. One man reportedly called her daysafter purchasing it, claiming he couldn't
sleep, was having nightmares of the womanin the painting staring at him.
(11:21):
Another said he felt thatit watched him constantly
and that his marriage began to fall apart.
Soon after the painting entered the house,
even Svetlana reported
hearing footsteps and seeing shadowswhen the painting was in her studio.
And no. Is any of this true?
Well, there's no documented
evidence of the painting evercausing psychological distress.
(11:42):
Most of these claims are anecdotal.
Svetlana has since paintedseveral other similar figures
with a similar tone and energy,and she insists there's nothing
cursed about those paintings,but she does it omit quote.
It paints itself.
It wanted to be seen today.
The rain Woman sits unsoldin Svetlana collection.
(12:04):
It has never remained with one owner
for more than a month.
Haunted painting
number four is a crying boy.
Our final tale is the most infamous
of the haunted paintings,and perhaps the most misunderstood.
The Crying Boy isn't just one painting.
(12:25):
It is a mass produced printby Italian painter
Bruno Amadio, known as Giovanni Bragdon.
This was painted in the 1950s,and the image depicts
a wide eyed boy, tearspouring down his face.
It's a very realistic depiction.
Amadio has painted dozens of variations,all with crying children
(12:47):
and, to be very clear,the crying boy itself.
This one painting that has been massproduced in prints
is the one we're talking about here today.
So why did Amadio paint all these cryingchildren?
Well, that's debated some saythat these are all paintings of orphans.
Others say that they're paintings
that were commissioned by touristsin postwar Italy.
(13:09):
Amadeo rarely spoke publicly,but in one interview in the 1980s,
he said that he painted sadnessbecause people understand it, and his work
is very provocative because you definitely
are hit with a strong sense of emotion.
The legend of The Crying Boy took offin 1985 when the son, the famous British
(13:29):
tabloid, published a front pageheadline, Blazing Curse of the crying Boy.
It told the story of a housefire in Yorkshire and everything burnt.
The whole housecompletely, destroyed everything,
that is, except a print of The Crying boy.
Firefighters claimedthey'd seen this before, homes
being destroyed by firebut the painting untouched.
(13:52):
Soon reports came in from across the UK.
The fires,but always the same painting never burned.
The Royal Society for the Preventionof Accidents even investigated.
Eventually it was determined
that the prints were madeusing a varnish resistant to fire,
and oftenthese paintings are hung on a string,
so when there's a fire, the string wouldburn, the painting would fall down.
(14:15):
Face down specifically,and it would be shielded from the flames.
But even with this conclusion
from the investigation,the myth had already taken root.
British tabloids fanned the flame, punintended, of the myth,
and it kept growing and growingand growing until it evolved into a claim
(14:35):
that the child in the painting was a gypsyboy who happened to have died in a fire.
In 1985,BBC's That's Life addressed the legend,
concluding that the mass produced
nature of the varnishlikely explained the phenomenon
and that the paintingand its prince were not haunted.
But we're not done with the storybecause one more thing happened.
(14:56):
The sun hosted a public burningof the Crying Boy paintings,
inviting readers to bring in their printsand toss them into a bonfire.
And hundreds dead.
Today, skeptics like myselfthink of this as a social phenomenon
more than a ghost story.
The case, a case of mass moral panic.
(15:16):
And it's a perfect blend where you takeart and fear in the tabloid machine
and you see these claims quicklybecome new folk tales.
If haunted paintings are real,
what haunts a painting isthat have something to do with the artist,
the model, or is it something else?
(15:37):
A painting doesn't move, but our minds do.
We seek patterns. We seek meaning.
We fear the stillness because sometimesthe scariest part isn't what
the painting does or the story behind it,
but what it makes us imagine and feel.
In the end,all four of these artworks remain intact.
(15:58):
There's no confirmed curses.
There's no deaths associated with them,just stories.
But stories, as we know, have power.
And that'll do it for today's episode.
Thank you so much for listeningto a Study of Strange.
On a personal note,you might ask, why four paintings?
(16:20):
Why not five?
Why not ten?
There's plenty of supposedlyhaunted paintings out there.
Well,a, I liked these four paintings a lot.
They had an effect on meon a personal level, and B as a skeptic
of haunted objects, these fourhad a fair amount of fuel to them.
Interesting backgrounds
where I can look up and I can seewhy some might think they're haunted.
(16:43):
So many hauntedobjects are purely based on anecdotes,
and these had a little more background,a little more stuff that you can actually
specifically researchand so that's why I chose these four.
And I will providelinks in the show notes.
So you can look up these paintingsbefore we go.
I do have a little businessto take care of.
There will probably only be about twoepisodes per month throughout the summer.
(17:07):
Right nowit's June in 2025, but we will return
to a more weekly patternat the end of the summer.
However, like I did last year, I'mgoing to be releasing additional content
on our Substack,so there will be strange mysteries and all
sorts of other things that I write aboutand publish on our Substack,
and I'm going to make sure about 50%or more of that will be free.
(17:31):
So check that out.
You can find thatthrough our support tab on our website.
A study of strange.com.
Thank you again and good night.
Warning this episode contains detailsthat some listeners
may find disturbing.
Art has longbeen a topic for unsettling tales,
with certain paintings gaining notorietyfor allegedly being cursed or hunted.
Fear can be ignitedby various aspects the artist's style,
(00:23):
the depicted subjectwho may have passed away long ago,
or a dark connectionto the artist themselves.
This evening, we delve beyond the folklore
and explore the disturbing stories behind
four of the most haunted paintings.
This is a study of strange.
(01:01):
Welcome back to the show.
I'm your host, Michael May, your guideinto all sorts of strange things
and other things
you could tellI don't script this part of the show.
Tonight, I'm going to dive straight into the topic of for haunted paintings.
So let's start with a painting
that came from a dream,or perhaps something stranger.
(01:24):
The year was 1972.
An artist named William Bill Stoneham,born in Boston and raised in California,
was working under contractwith the Charles Fine Garten
Gallery in Beverly Hills.
He was no stranger to surrealism.
His works often explored boundariesbetween childhood
and adulthood, life and dreams.
Stone Ham's now infamous paintingThe Hands Resist Him,
(01:48):
was based on a photograph of himselfat age five,
and in the paintingyou see standing beside this young boy,
a young girl who is actually a doll,
and behind them a glass doorand pressing against the glass
are dozens of disembodied hands.
(02:08):
Stone painted this in 1972,and it sold quickly.
It was actually purchased by actorJohn Marley, who's best known
as the man who wakes up with a horse'shead in his bed in The Godfather movie.
The painting changedhands a few times in the years after that,
and to be honest, there doesn't appearto be any strange tales or stories
about this painting until it was put upfor sale on eBay in the year 2000.
(02:32):
The seller was a couple from California,and part of the description on eBay
was that this painting was haunted.
They claimed their four and a half yearold daughter
said the children in the paintingwould fight at night,
and that the boybut sometimes leave the canvas.
The father even wrotewe woke up to the boy in the painting
walking into the room.
(02:53):
Then they set up a motion sensor camera,and what they claimed to capture
is the doll pointing a gun at the boy.
Now, as you can imagine,this listing went viral.
Here's a quote from the newspaper,the Spokane Review.
We decided the painting had to go, wrotethe sellers, who added that
they would not be responsiblefor any events happening after the sale.
(03:13):
The painting became a web phenomenon.
At least 30,000 people viewed the webpage, and a handful reported
that they had experienced
strange events just lookingat the painting on their computers.
One reported hearing an Exorcisttype voice along with a blast of hot air.
Another reported that he became ill
while viewing the painting and had to burnWhite Sage to cleanse his house.
(03:35):
Afterward, another reportedblackout mind control experiences.
The painting sold for over $1,000
to an art gallery called PerceptionGallery in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
The sellers on eBayhad actually backtracked their initial
haunting claimsas the post was going viral.
Bill Stoneham,the artist was still alive and interviews.
(03:59):
He said he had no ideathe painting would be considered haunted,
and the title came from a poemthat his wife had written.
He says the hands symbolizeother lives, other possibilities.
The doll was a guide and the glass doorwas a barrier between waking and dream.
But here's a twist two menclosely associated with the painting died
within the first year of seeing it.
(04:21):
The gallery owner, CharlesFine, turned, and art
critic Henry sell this coincidence?
Yes, of course it is.
It's definitely a coincidence, butthe painting still hangs in perception.
Gallery and there have been no fires,no deaths, and no other haunted story.
But the gallery doeskeep it in storage for safekeeping.
(04:43):
My favorite part of this tale isthe artist was commissioned
to create follow up paintings
after the popularity of this,and I think there's only three of these.
The first one was in 2004called Resistance at the threshold,
and this shows the same boy, but older now
standing in front of the same glass door.
But this time the doll is gone.
The boy looks uncertain,as if he's perhaps
(05:05):
struggling with the choiceand the hands behind the glass.
There's fewer of them,but they're more defined,
and it's describedas representing the boy's confrontation
with the boundary between his inner selfand the outer world.
He then in 2012,made threshold of revelation.
And thisthe boy has crossed through the threshold,
(05:26):
and the scene is now surrealand dreamlike.
And there's new symbolsto populate the background.
And the artist called it about awakening.
And then in 2017,he created the hands in Vintage Him.
And this is painted as a kind ofa prequel, an origin story, I'll call it.
It shows a faceless, mannequin
like figure,possibly the prototype of the boy himself.
(05:48):
Stoneham said.
This was a painting about creation,that moment when the boy becomes real.
Each of these paintingshave been purchased,
and while they've drawn interest,none have achieved the same infamy
as the original, and notably,no paranormal claims.
Stoneham himself has said in interviews,people see what they want to see.
(06:09):
I just tell the story.
The fear that belongs to the viewer.
Hauntedpainting number two of all the haunted
paintings, the anguished manmight be the most unnerving.
Visually,the painting depicts a scream king figure,
a face void of details of wide mouth.
(06:31):
It's sort of a reddish colorwith blue smears.
It looks to me like pain
or the embodiment of dread.
But what huntsthis painting isn't the image itself.
It's the medium.
This story comes from a mannamed Sean Robinson from Cumbria, England,
(06:52):
and he claimsthat he inherited the painting
from his grandmother,who kept it locked in the attic.
She always claimedit was cursed, and the artist,
she said, hadmixed his own blood into the oils
and after finishing the painting,he then killed himself.
Sean brought this painting into his home
(07:13):
and this is when things allegedly startedhappening.
Doors slammed, cold draftsswept through the rooms.
His wife apparently would feel someonebrushing her hair at night.
And most frightening of all, Sean says,was the sound
a cry or a scream?
(07:35):
An inhuman scream.
And it would sound as if it was comingfrom inside the walls of the house.
In 2010,Sean posted this story to YouTube,
including videos of the paintingand footage from his bedroom
where you allegedly can hear these sounds.
Give it a listen.
(07:55):
Although I've just sent the picture,the Englishman back up in the bedroom.
I'm going to record
it for approximately eight hours,see if we can catch
some of the activity on video,and I'll leave the light on.
It's at this momentthat text comes up on screen
that mentions that he left this camerarecording for many hours
(08:16):
over three nights, and this sound iswhat happened at around 2 a.m.
one night.
And then at 4 a.m., the door swings shut.
(08:49):
Now, I'm
not sure what I hearwith the actual sound clip in that video.
In terms of the door closing,I have some skeptical theories about it,
but being that this podcastis an audio medium, I would suggest going
into my show notes and looking at the linkI have to this video
so you can get the full senseand come up with your own theories.
(09:11):
No artist has ever
been namedas the creator of this painting.
There's no background to the tale,no date,
just the alleged storiesthat have come out publicly.
Now, when you take that and you combine itwith the viral component of the video,
I dare say this is likely a hoax,but if it's a hoax,
(09:33):
it's a strangely effective onebecause the painting,
well, it's still disturbing.
It is a frightening painting.
Art historian Duncan McLaren,
who reviewed high resolutionimages of the work, confirms
that it was painted in oil on canvas,possibly in the mid to late 20th century.
No chemical traces or blood
(09:55):
have been found today.
The anguished manremains with Sean Robinson
and he allegedly keepsit locked away just in case.
Hauntedpainting number three the Rain Woman
in Lithuania A different painting,less infamous online than the others,
(10:16):
was painted by Ukrainian artistSvetlana Till.
It's in 1996.
Svetlana was in her early 30s.
She trained in Odessa and is known forpainting moody, introspective portraits.
But The Rain Woman was different.
She claimed she completed it injust five hours, nonstop,
as if someone was guiding her hand.
(10:38):
The painting depicts a pale, ghostly woman
with dark hairand a dark, wide brimmed hat.
She's standing alone in the rain,
which is represented by the background,which looks like dripping paint.
Her eyes stare out with sadness.
Her head and neck are unnaturally skinny,and she's all in black.
And if you look at it the right way,at least this is what happened to me.
(11:01):
It almost looks like her head is floatingjust above her body,
and after Svetlana painted it,strange things began to happen.
She says that she sold the paintingseveral times, but every buyer returned
it. One man reportedly called her daysafter purchasing it, claiming he couldn't
sleep, was having nightmares of the womanin the painting staring at him.
(11:21):
Another said he felt thatit watched him constantly
and that his marriage began to fall apart.
Soon after the painting entered the house,
even Svetlana reported
hearing footsteps and seeing shadowswhen the painting was in her studio.
And no. Is any of this true?
Well, there's no documented
evidence of the painting evercausing psychological distress.
(11:42):
Most of these claims are anecdotal.
Svetlana has since paintedseveral other similar figures
with a similar tone and energy,and she insists there's nothing
cursed about those paintings,but she does it omit quote.
It paints itself.
It wanted to be seen today.
The rain Woman sits unsoldin Svetlana collection.
(12:04):
It has never remained with one owner
for more than a month.
Haunted painting
number four is a crying boy.
Our final tale is the most infamous
of the haunted paintings,and perhaps the most misunderstood.
The Crying Boy isn't just one painting.
(12:25):
It is a mass produced printby Italian painter
Bruno Amadio, known as Giovanni Bragdon.
This was painted in the 1950s,and the image depicts
a wide eyed boy, tearspouring down his face.
It's a very realistic depiction.
Amadio has painted dozens of variations,all with crying children
(12:47):
and, to be very clear,the crying boy itself.
This one painting that has been massproduced in prints
is the one we're talking about here today.
So why did Amadio paint all these cryingchildren?
Well, that's debated some saythat these are all paintings of orphans.
Others say that they're paintings
that were commissioned by touristsin postwar Italy.
(13:09):
Amadeo rarely spoke publicly,but in one interview in the 1980s,
he said that he painted sadnessbecause people understand it, and his work
is very provocative because you definitely
are hit with a strong sense of emotion.
The legend of The Crying Boy took offin 1985 when the son, the famous British
(13:29):
tabloid, published a front pageheadline, Blazing Curse of the crying Boy.
It told the story of a housefire in Yorkshire and everything burnt.
The whole housecompletely, destroyed everything,
that is, except a print of The Crying boy.
Firefighters claimedthey'd seen this before, homes
being destroyed by firebut the painting untouched.
(13:52):
Soon reports came in from across the UK.
The fires,but always the same painting never burned.
The Royal Society for the Preventionof Accidents even investigated.
Eventually it was determined
that the prints were madeusing a varnish resistant to fire,
and oftenthese paintings are hung on a string,
so when there's a fire, the string wouldburn, the painting would fall down.
(14:15):
Face down specifically,and it would be shielded from the flames.
But even with this conclusion
from the investigation,the myth had already taken root.
British tabloids fanned the flame, punintended, of the myth,
and it kept growing and growingand growing until it evolved into a claim
(14:35):
that the child in the painting was a gypsyboy who happened to have died in a fire.
In 1985,BBC's That's Life addressed the legend,
concluding that the mass produced
nature of the varnishlikely explained the phenomenon
and that the paintingand its prince were not haunted.
But we're not done with the storybecause one more thing happened.
(14:56):
The sun hosted a public burningof the Crying Boy paintings,
inviting readers to bring in their printsand toss them into a bonfire.
And hundreds dead.
Today, skeptics like myselfthink of this as a social phenomenon
more than a ghost story.
The case, a case of mass moral panic.
(15:16):
And it's a perfect blend where you takeart and fear in the tabloid machine
and you see these claims quicklybecome new folk tales.
If haunted paintings are real,
what haunts a painting isthat have something to do with the artist,
the model, or is it something else?
(15:37):
A painting doesn't move, but our minds do.
We seek patterns. We seek meaning.
We fear the stillness because sometimesthe scariest part isn't what
the painting does or the story behind it,
but what it makes us imagine and feel.
In the end,all four of these artworks remain intact.
(15:58):
There's no confirmed curses.
There's no deaths associated with them,just stories.
But stories, as we know, have power.
And that'll do it for today's episode.
Thank you so much for listeningto a Study of Strange.
On a personal note,you might ask, why four paintings?
(16:20):
Why not five?
Why not ten?
There's plenty of supposedlyhaunted paintings out there.
Well,a, I liked these four paintings a lot.
They had an effect on meon a personal level, and B as a skeptic
of haunted objects, these fourhad a fair amount of fuel to them.
Interesting backgrounds
where I can look up and I can seewhy some might think they're haunted.
(16:43):
So many hauntedobjects are purely based on anecdotes,
and these had a little more background,a little more stuff that you can actually
specifically researchand so that's why I chose these four.
And I will providelinks in the show notes.
So you can look up these paintingsbefore we go.
I do have a little businessto take care of.
There will probably only be about twoepisodes per month throughout the summer.
(17:07):
Right nowit's June in 2025, but we will return
to a more weekly patternat the end of the summer.
However, like I did last year, I'mgoing to be releasing additional content
on our Substack,so there will be strange mysteries and all
sorts of other things that I write aboutand publish on our Substack,
and I'm going to make sure about 50%or more of that will be free.
(17:31):
So check that out.
You can find thatthrough our support tab on our website.
A study of strange.com.
Thank you again and good night.
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