haunted picture.. cool huh

This is the true story of the Haunted Painting, the most bizarre and frightening tale I’ve heard in quite a while.

In February, 2000, the haunted painting was put up for sale on eBay and an auction begun. Today, many wonder if it was a true story, or a marketing ploy. Item 251789217 was it’s name on eBay, but it quickly became known on the Internet as “The Haunted eBay Painting.”

The item description in itself was bizarre:

WHEN WE RECEIVED THIS PAINTING, WE THOUGHT IT WAS REALLY GOOD ART. A ” PICKER ” HAD FOUND IT ABANDONNED BEHIND AN OLD BREWERY. AT HTE TIME WE WONDERED A LITLLE WHY A SEEMINGLY PERFECTLY FINE PAINTING WOULD BE DISCARDED LIKE THAT. ( TODAY WE DON’T !!! ) ONE MORNING OUR 4 AND 1/2 YEAR OLD DAUGHTER CLAIMED, THAT THE CHILDREN IN THE PICTURE WERE FIGHTING, AND COMING INTO THE ROOM DURING THE NIGHT. NOW, I DON’T BELIEVE IN UFOS OR ELVIS BEING ALIVE, BUT MY HUSBAND WAS ALARMED. TO MY AMUSEMENT HE SET UP A MOTION TRIGGERED CAMREA FOR THE NIGHTS. AFTER THREE NIGHTS THERE WERE PICTURES.THE LAST TWO PICTURES SHOWN ARE FROM THAT ‘STAKEOUT’. AFTER SEEING THE BOY SEEMINGLY EXITING THE PAINTING UNDER THREAT, WE DECIDED, THE PAINTING HAS TO GO.PLEASE JUDGE FOR YOURSELF. — BEFORE YOU DO, PLEASE READ THE FOLLOWIND WARNING AND DISCLAIMER. —-WARNING: DO NOT BID ON THIS PAINTING IF YOU ARE SUCCEPTIBLE TO STRESS RELATED DISEASE, FAINT OF HEART OR ARE UNFAMILIAR WITH SUPERNATURAL EVENTS. BY BIDDING ON THIS PAINTING, YOU AGREE TO RELEASE THE OWNERS OF ALL LIABILITY IN RELATION TO THE SALE OR ANY EVENTS HAPPENING AFTER THE SALE, THAT MIGHT BE CONTRIBUTED TO THIS PAINTING. THIS PAINTING MAY OR MAY NOT POSESS SUPERNATURAL POWERS, THAT COULD IMPACT OR CHANGE YOUR LIFE. HOWEVER, BY BIDDING YOU AGREE TO EXCLUSIVELY BID ON THE VALUE OF THE ARTWORK, WITH DISREGARD TO THE LAST TWO PHOTOS FEATURED IN THIS AUCTION, AND HOLD THE OWNERS HARMLESS IN REGARD TO THEM AND THEIR IMPACT, EXPRESSED OR IMPLIED.———— NOW THAT WE GOT THIS OUT OF THE WAY, ONE QUESTION TO YOU EBAYERS. WE WANT OUR HOUSE TO BE BLESSED AFTER THE PAINTING IS GONE, DOES ANYBODY KNOW, WHO IS QUALIFIED TO DO THAT?

Shortly thereafter, in response to questions about the piece, the sellers posted the following addition:

THE SIZE OF THE PAINTING IS 24 BY 36 INCHES, SO IT IS RATHER LARGE. AS I HAVE HAD SEVERAL QUESTIONS, HERE THE FOLLOWING ANSWERS. THERE WAS NO ODOR LEFT BEHIND IN THE ROOM. THERE WERE NO VOICES, OR THE SMELL OF GUNPOWDER, NO FOODPRINTS OR STRANGE FLUIDS ON THE WALL. TO DETER QUESTIONS IN THIS DIRECTION, THERE ARE NO GHOSTS IN THIS WORLD , NO SUPERNATURAL POWERS, THIS IS JUST A PAINTING, AND MOST THESE THINGS HAVE AN EXPLANATION, IN THIS CASE PROBABLY A FLUKE LIGHT EFFECT. I ENCOURAGE YOU TO BID ON THE ARTWORK, AND CONSIDER THE LAST TWO PHOTOGRAPHS AS PURE ENTERTAINMENT, AND PLEASE DO NOT TAKE THEM INTO CONSIDERATION, WHEN BIDDING. AS WE THINK IT IS A GOOD IDEA TO BLESS ANY HOUSE, WE STILL WELCOME INPUT INTO THAT PROCEDURE.

After this description, there were eight shots of the item. Two were overview shots. Slightly left of center on the canvas, we see a boy of perhaps five or six, with sloping shoulders and a heavy brow, scowling at us. He is dressed as we would expect any early- or mid-twentieth century middle- or lower-class young boy to be dressed: a blue tee-shirt, greenish shorts, short socks and shoes. His dirty-blonde (or dirty blonde) hair is cropped into a very short crew-cut on his blocky head. His expression – his small, deep-set eyes, and his slightly downturned frown – are the look of an alien: disdainful curiosity. “You are not supposed to be here.”

To his right, propped against a window moulding (or perhaps free-standing, it’s difficult to tell), is a life-sized wooden doll girl. She’s wearing a faded blue dress. She only has empty holes for eyes, but her mouth is articulatable (and closed). In her hands she’s clutching what at first looks like some sort of tall bottle or canister tied with a string, but on closer inspection appears to be a tall battery (complete with little lightning bolt) with mad, dangling clips.

The two are standing on a street curb, in front of a full-length window. The building behind them is completely dark inside, but reaching forth from the darkness we can distinguish at least a dozen tiny hands. Some of the hands are lower, some higher, but none are higher than the two central figures; if these are, indeed, children’s hands, some of the children are on the floor. It is not clear whether the hands are reaching for the window pane, the light, or the boy and the doll.

Four more shots were details of the boy, the boy’s face, the doll’s face, and the doll’s battery (or whatever it is). But the last two shots were the ones that were supposedly made by the motion-activated still camera. They are clearly different from the daytime shots. Because the flash was centered on the boy (being the central figure on the canvas), and because it’s a rather large painting, the doll (who was, as I said, towards the left edge of the painting) is obscured by shadow, but the photographs clearly show that now, her mouth is open.

After the auction began, viewers started to report strange happenings whenever they tried to view the page. All of them – spectral voices, hot flashes, black-outs and “mind-control experiences” – are typical of mass hysteria. One man, a Native American spiritualist in Mississippi, claimed that the painting had evil in it, and after having viewed it on his web browser he had to cleanse his house by burning white sage.

More than thirteen thousand people bid on the work. The buyer, who remains anonymous (his E-Bay login was ionia7) but bought the work for $1025 US, claims that although the story of the arguing spirits is compelling as a curiosity, he was more interested in the composition of the work and was “buying to sell.” He says that it seems to have been produced some time between 1965 and 1975, and is entitled “The Hands Resist Him.” It is signed, but the current owner has not released the artist’s name. He has never experienced any unusual effects, and calls the work “a good example of surrealism from that period.

I think it’s pretty clear that everything which happened to people who viewed the painting through the web was the result of the power of suggestion. On the other hand, I remain skeptical but agnostic as to whether the painting itself is animate. If it were a hoax, the trickster employed the most cunningly inconsistent assertions, destroying the reader’s ability to restore any suspended disbelief. Even if it isn’t legit, there would have to be something seriously wrong with someone to have painted the thing in the first place. I mean, they would have to be fucked in the head quite badly. If you saw the work, you’d understand. It’s just spooky. It is not at all surprising that it provokes such extreme reactions.

The new owner of the painting claims he found an inscription on the back saying the title of the picture was “The Hands Resist Him”. He also found a signiature, but refuses to say who the painter was. He says he received thousands of e-mails from people claiming they were “repulsed”, made “physically ill” and “suffered from blackout/mind control experiences” just by viewing the pictures of the painting online.

An exorcist type of voice, along with a blast of hot air, like standing in front of an oven door. Two friends crying after this experience and praying until a minute had passed and everything went back to normal.
A new Epson printer that ate and mutilated page after page when the user tried to download images of this oil.
The Native American who became so ill he had to cleanse his house by burning white sage. He warned me not to put this item around small children, and that there is great evil contained here.

As I recall, both the owner of the gallery where ‘The Hands Resist Him’ was displayed and the art critic who reviewed it were dead within a year of the show.

True story of emily rose

The true story behind “The Exorcism of Emily Rose,” involves a young German girl named Anneliese Michel.

The first person to recognize that Anneliese Michel was possessed by demons was an older woman accompanying the girl on a pilgrimage. She noticed that Anneliese would not walk past a certain image of Jesus, refused to drink water from a holy spring and smelled bad — hellishly bad. An exorcist in a nearby town examined Michel and returned a diagnosis of demonic possession. The bishop issued permission to perform the rite of exorcism according to the Roman ritual of 1614.

Half a year and 67 rites of exorcism later, Anneliese Michel was dead at 23.

Anneliese Michel did not die in the Middle Ages, but in 1976, in the small town of Klingenberg, in the heart of one of the most civilized and advanced countries in Europe: Germany.

Two years after Michel’s death, a German court found her parents and the two priests involved guilty of negligent manslaughter and sentenced them to six months in prison, suspended with three years’ probation.

What shocked Germany most was the fact that it could happen in a country that prides itself on being highly rational — and highly secularized.

“The surprising thing was that the people connected to Michel were all completely convinced that she had really been possessed,” says Franz Barthel, amazement still in his voice three decades after he covered the story for the regional daily paper Main-Post.

“Many years later, I visited the woman who first diagnosed the Devil,” Barthel says. “She blessed my microphone with holy water because I was working for the radio then, and it was likely that the Devil was in control of the microphone.”

Michel was raised in a strict Catholic family in Bavaria, which rejected the reforms of Vatican II and flirted with religious fringe groups. While other kids her age were rebelling against authority and experimenting with sex, she tried to atone for the sins of wayward priests and drug addicts by sleeping on a bare floor in the middle of winter.

According to court findings, she experienced her first epileptic attack in 1969, and by 1973 was suffering from depression and considering suicide. Soon she was seeing the faces of demons on the people and things around her, and voices told her she was damned.

Under the influence of her demons, Michel ripped the clothes off her body, compulsively performed up to 400 squats a day, crawled under a table and barked like a dog for two days, ate spiders and coal, bit the head off a dead bird and licked her own urine from the floor.

By 1975 Michel was asking for an exorcism. The Revs. Ernst Alt and Arnold Renz performed the rite 67 times over the first half of 1976. Some of the sessions took up to four hours. Forty-two sessions were recorded on tape.

Michel’s recorded voice can still send shivers up your spine. It is the voice of a demon, growling, barking, inhuman — and surprisingly like the voice of Linda Blair in “The Exorcist,” which had been released in Germany two years earlier.

Sometimes the demons identified themselves — as Cain, Nero, Judas, Lucifer, Hitler and others — and even answered the exorcists’ questions, explaining what was wrong with the church or why they were in Hell. “People are stupid as pigs,” spat Hitler. “They think it’s all over after death. It goes on.” Judas said Hitler was nothing but a “big mouth” and had “no real say” in Hell.

Anyway, it wasn’t the exorcism that killed Anneliese Michel.

At some point she began talking increasingly about dying to atone for the wayward youth of the day and the apostate priests of the modern church, and refused to eat. Though she had received treatment for epilepsy, by this time, at her own request, doctors were no longer being consulted.

She, her parents and the exorcists decided to rely completely on exorcism. By the time Michel died of starvation, she weighed only 68 pounds.

After her death, the Anneliese Michel trial also set reason against faith.

“I personally believe that this case was handled in such a way as to play down the reality of the Devil,” says Norbert Baumert, Jesuit priest and chairman of the theological commission of the Catholic Charismatic Renewal in Germany, which cannot perform exorcism but practices “prayers for deliverance” from “demonic nuisance.”

The trial went to the heart of faith: If the Bible is true, then the miracles must have really happened, and Satan must be real.

But it’s not easy preaching the existence of the Devil to one of the most secularized countries in Europe. A study by research institute Infratest and published in the German newsweekly Der Spiegel last month showed that even among churchgoers, approximately a third of baptized Catholics and half of baptized Protestants do not believe in life after death.

“I understand the complaint that German theologians are too rational,” says Klemens Richter, professor for liturgical science in Muenster. “But exorcism is all about helping the sick. In Anneliese Michel’s case, the sickness was supported. When I go to a patient and support her in her delusion, she gets the impression that she really is possessed.”

Exorcism is far more widespread today than most people imagine. According to Richter, there are about 70 practicing exorcists in France and just as many employed in Italy. In July this year, a congress in Poland was reportedly attended by about 350 practicing exorcists.

Germany is the major European exception. Here, there are only two or three practicing exorcists, and though they have the approval of their bishops, they operate in secret.

Secularization has the church in its grip,” says Ulrich Niemann, a Jesuit priest, medical doctor and psychiatrist who often has been called into exorcism cases by clergymen. “We do a lot for the Third World, but little for faith in a transcendent God. . . . The German church is far too cerebral.”

Niemann doesn’t consider himself an exorcist and doesn’t perform the Roman ritual of 1614. “As a doctor, I say there is no such thing as possession,” he says. “In my view, these patients are mentally ill. I pray with them, but that alone doesn’t help. You have to deal with them as a psychiatrist. But at the same time, when the patient comes from Eastern Europe and believes that he’s been impaired by evil, it would be a mistake to ignore his belief system.”

After the Michel trial, German bishops and theologians formed a commission to review the exorcism rite, and in 1984 they petitioned Rome to change it.

The heart of the problem, they found, was the practice of speaking directly or “imperatively” to the Devil, that is, “I command thee, unclean spirit . . . ” That part of the rite seemed to do the most damage, since it confirmed to the patient that he or she truly was possessed.

The Germans didn’t get what they wanted.

“We were astonished when Rome issued a changed exorcism formula in 1999 which left open the possibility of speaking to the Devil directly,” says Richter. “But you can’t know for certain that a patient is truly possessed of the Devil.”

Today, 30 years after Michel’s death, with both exorcists and her father also dead (her mother couldn’t be reached for this article), Michel is still revered by small groups of Catholics who believe she atoned for wayward priests and sinful youth, and honor her as an unofficial saint.

“Buses, often from Holland, I think, still come to Anneliese’s grave,” Barthel says. “The grave is a gathering point for religious outsiders. They write notes with requests and thanks for her help, and leave them on the grave. They pray, sing and travel on.”

Room 310

This is the true story of a haunted hotel room in Oregon. The hotel owners have tried to hush up the story for fear that noone will visit their establishment, but the name of it is The Oregon Caves Chateau.

A woman was driving back to her home in California from Washington to California. It was late evening and snowhad begun to fall before she finally reached the little Oregon town where she planed tospend the night. Tired and ready for a hot meal and a goodnight’s sleep, she stopped at the first place she came upon. It was an old hotel on the main street. The lobby had a musty odor. The seedy clerk behind the desk signed herin. Her room was on the third floor -Room 310.

An elderly bellhop helped herwith her luggage. As soon as the door was opened, a blast of hot air struck the woman full in the face. With the hot air came something else, something she could not define but that filled her with dread. It was heavy and depressing, she explained, “with the strong scent of theevil.“ She felt as if she was about to faint. All she said was, “It’s awfully hot.”

This is a genuine photo of the haunted hotel room in question. Room 310.

The bellhop tinkered with the radiator knobs. Then he opened the window and left. The room began to cool off, but the feeling of despair and dread grew stronger. It centered on the open square of black window space. The terror seemed to speak in her mind. She thought she could sense a voice whispering to her. Compelling her to do something terrible. “Go to the window,” it said. “Throw yourself out!”

She couldn’t seem to resist the urge to jump out the window to what she knew would be certain death. She clawed at the bedsheets, trying to restrain herself from walking towards the open window. Terrified, the woman eventually summoned the strength and crawled out of the room. She rushed down to the lobby and shouted to the staff that she couldn’t stay another minute.

She explained, “I was sure that if I stayed the night, I’d be dead by morning.” She was prepared to sacrifice the money she’d already paid just to leave, but when she went, the clerk never asked what was wrong or if she wished to try another room. He returned the full cash amount to her.

She checked into another hotel and had planned to be on her way early the next morning. Instead she decided to stay over a day and look into the history of the old hotel to see if she could discover the reason for her terrifying experience there. She visited the local library to makea few inquiries. An elderly librarian satbehind the desk. “I’m just wondering,” the woman said tentatively. “Did anything shocking ever happen in the old hotel?” The librarian looked at her strangely. “How did you come upon that bit of history?”she asked. “It took the hotel a long time to squash the story.” The librarian went on to tell what had happened.

One evening back in 1948 a couple checked into the hotel as Mr. and Mrs. Oscar Smith. The next morning hotel employees found the youngwoman’s body lying on the sidewalk outside the hotel beneath Room 310. The man who had registered as her husband had disappeared. “At first it was ruled suicide,” the librarian concluded. “But thenthey pried open her fist and found itclutched a handful of dark curly hair, not her own. So they made a search for the murderer. But he was never found . . . “By the way,” the librarian suddenly added,”isn’t that a coincidence! It all happened on November 5th, forty years ago yesterday. “