Haunted Ebay Painting....'The Hands Resist Him'
This painting was auctioned on Ebay on February 2000. The owners claimed they had paranormal experiences from the painting, for example, their young daughter claiming to see the boy in the painting exit it into their livingroom, and other experiences, and yet still they claimed no belief in the paranormal. {?} They placed a disclaimer, warning that they could not be held liable for any happenings to the new owner(s).
Here is the original ad as shown on Ebay:
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WHEN WE RECEIVED THIS PAINTING, WE THOUGHT IT WAS REALLY GOOD ART. A " PICKER " HAD FOUND IT ABANDONED BEHIND AN OLD BREWERY. AT THE TIME WE WONDERED A LITTLE 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 CAMERA 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 FOLLOWING WARNING AND DISCLAIMER. ----WARNING: DO NOT BID ON THIS PAINTING IF YOU ARE SUSCEPTIBLE 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? 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.
This auction is nearing the end. I want to thank the more than 13000 people that took the time to look at this image on Ebay. I appreciate the more than 30 suggestions, that I received regarding blessing the house, exorcising and cleansing. 7 e-mails reported strange or irregular events taking place, when viewing this image. And I will relay two suggestions made by the senders. First not to use this image as the background on the screen, and second not to display this image around juveniles or children. Last not least, thanks for appreciating the art as well.
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Many viewers claimed to suffer from 'blackouts,' horrible feelings, feeling violently ill, paranormal happenings, all from just viewing the painting.
And also, you can now purchase prints of the painting, "The Hands Resist Him," for $350.00 each.
As an ending note to this page, many people CLAIM to be selling haunted objects, which are hoaxes. Please be sure of what you are buying before you do. In no way this painting was proved to be actually haunted, or just a hoax.
"Hands Resist Him", was painted by Bill Stoneham of Stoneham Studios. Below is what he has written on his site.
Where to begin? Well I've always had a connection to what Carl Jung called the collective unconscious. I think we all do. Artists, especially visual artists, are barometers for the currents which run through this collective. Dreams are a common experience people may have with this. Anyway, my own experience is a sensitivity to place physical, geographical place. There are memories, echoes of all the life within a place. Maybe it's what's called channeling. When I painted the Hands Resist Him in 1972, I used an old photo of myself at age five in a Chicago apartment. The hands are the 'other lives.' The glass door, that thin veil between waking and dreaming. The girl/doll is the imagined companion, or guide through this realm.
Both the owner of the Gallery where 'Hands' was displayed and the Los Angeles Times art critic who reviewed my show were dead within a year of the show.
I'm sure it was coincidence, but some of what I paint resonates in other people, opening the inner door, or basement. By the way I still have no idea what happened to the character actor (whose name escapes me) that bought the painting at the show, or how it ended up abandoned in a building, though I could speculate.
- Bill
UPDATE October 31, 2002
Painting goes bump in the night
Staff writer
Holly Pickett - The Spokesman-Review
Spokane graphic artist Bill Stoneham painted ``The Hands Resist Him'' in 1973. Since then, the work has taken on a life of its own, spawning tales of the supernatural on the Internet.
Gather 'round the campfire, kids, because we're going to tell you the story of "The Haunted Painting of eBay."
Like any good ghost story, this one has a surprise twist. A Spokane twist.
However, the first half of the story takes place either in the World Wide Web or the Twilight Zone, take your pick.
In February 2000, an anonymous couple from California posted a surreal painting on the online auction site eBay. The painting showed a little boy and little girl standing in front of a door. Disembodied hands floated in the blackness behind the door. In addition, something about the little girl was not quite right. Her joints were hinged like an old-fashioned doll, and she was holding an object with wires sticking out of the top. Was it a weapon?
Yet the painting was not overtly Gothic or frightening. The frightening part was below it, in the story written by the sellers.
They said they found it abandoned behind an old brewery. They took it home and hung it in their 4-year-old daughter's room.
One morning the daughter complained that the two children in the painting were "fighting" and "coming into the room at night."
Alarmed, the father set up a motion-triggered camera in the room for the next three nights. The camera shot several photos, one of which showed the little boy "seemingly exiting the painting under threat."
The pictures, which also were posted on the site, are dark and open to interpretation. But if you use your imagination, you might think that the little boy is walking out of the frame while the "Chuckie"-like doll-girl holds a weapon on him.
"We decided the painting had to go," wrote the sellers, who added that they would not be responsible for any "events happening after the sale."
The painting became a Web phenomenon. At least
30,000 people viewed the Web page, and a handful reported that they had experienced strange events just looking at the painting on their computers.
One reported hearing an exorcist-type voice, along with a blast of hot air. Another reported that he became ill while viewing the painting and had to burn white sage to cleanse his house afterward. Another reported "blackout/mind control experiences."
The sellers backtracked before the auction was over and wrote, "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."
This hardly deterred the true believers. Numerous Web sites and chat rooms devoted to the legendary "Haunted Painting of eBay" popped up.
Nobody was more flabbergasted by this legend than Bill Stoneham, a 55-year-old Spokane computer-graphics artist who works for Cyan Worlds, the company that created the best-selling computer games Myst and Riven.
Stoneham, you see, was the guy who painted this artwork, 30 years ago.
"The Haunted Painting of eBay" is actually "Hands Resist Him," a painting Stoneham sold to a California gallery in 1973 and didn't see again.
At least until August 2001, when the owner of the Perceptions Gallery in Grand Rapids, Mich., e-mailed Stoneham. The gallery had bought the painting from the California couple on eBay for $1,200, and the owner had tracked him down from a label on the back of the painting. He advised Stoneham to check out the various Web pages.
Stoneham was spooked, all right, but not for the same reasons.
"Suddenly, there's a blown-up image of my face from the painting," he said. "Now, that was a creepy feeling."
He was, in fact, the little boy in the painting, which he had painted from an old, faded family photo of himself with a little neighbor girl.
Then he started reading about the "haunted" lore. His first reaction was to think, "Why would they hang that in the kid's bedroom?"
His second reaction was to wonder how this painting had sparked such a ghost-storm. When he painted it, he said he had deliberately used Jungian and metaphysical symbolism. The door represented a gate to possibilities, and the hands represented "other lives."
He never intended it to be spooky, supernatural or even particularly disturbing. As for the "weapon," he said it was a dry-cell battery with wires coming out the top, like the ones he used as a kid for his model planes.
Since then, the "haunted" painting has changed his life in many ways. It inspired him to start his own Web page and to begin painting again for the first time in more than a decade. He said the strong reaction to his painting, even if not what he intended, was flattering.
He is enjoying a degree of fame, and not just on the Web. A radio talk show host in Dallas, Jessie Jessup on KDGE-FM, is running a "Haunted Painting" contest in which listeners are sending in essays about the painting. Entries will be judged on "creative creepiness" and chosen on the air today, Halloween.
Stoneham is one of the judges, and he has found reading the entries to be unsettling.
"People are getting very carried away, saying that the kid (in the painting) was abused by drunken parents, that sort of thing," said Stoneham. "It's like being in a coma in a roomful of people who are all speculating on your life."
Meanwhile, he has entered into an agreement with the Perceptions Gallery to sell limited edition prints of "Hands Resist Him" for $450 each, or a smaller version for $185.
One of those prints hangs on the wall in his south Spokane Victorian home.
Has this print ever spawned any, you know, freaky occurrences?
"Well," said Stoneham, thinking for a moment. "When we moved it here from my old apartment, the U-Haul broke down."
~*~
Ebay's Haunted Painting
When the painting appeared for sale on the internet, some who saw it wept in terror. Then it was linked to poltergeists and two mysterious deaths. Now its seller has disappeared ...
WHEN Bryan first saw the painting he began to cry. The college student found the artwork listed for sale on eBay.
As he studied the photographs on the auction website, he claims, his computer screen turned white and he felt a blast of heat coming from the monitor, "like when you open a hot oven door".
He called for his flatmate, who was watching TV in the next room. Now Bryan was speaking in tongues, tears were streaming down his face, his hair was standing on end, and his face was beetroot red.
The flatmate held him and recited prayers. "I'm telling you the absolute truth now," Bryan says, "I have never been so scared in all my life."
Hands Resist Him a 36" x 24" oil on canvas painting is one piece of art you probably wouldn't want to hang on your wall. Linked with hundreds of strange occurrences, ranging from poltergeist activity to unexplained deaths, it has been dubbed the 'Haunted Painting'.
Christine, a web designer, began to have difficulty breathing when she viewed the picture. "It felt like my throat was tightening," she says.
Jeff, a horror movie buff, felt nauseous and was overcome with anxiety. "I'm not easily spooked," he says, "but the painting just terrified me."
The Haunted Painting, so the story goes, was found abandoned behind an old brewery by an art picker. It was sold to a Californian woman named Lucy. At the time, she wondered why such an impressive piece of art had been discarded. Within weeks of her purchase, she wondered no more. She took the painting down, locked it in an LA vault, and listed it for sale on eBay, after experiencing a bizarre supernatural event.
One morning, Lucy's four-year-old daughter claimed that the boy and the doll had come alive during the night, and had begun fighting in the room. "I don't believe in UFOs or in Elvis being alive," Lucy explained, "but my husband was alarmed. To my amusement, he set up a motion-triggered camera. After three nights there were pictures."
The photographs, Lucy claimed, showed the boy leaving the painting, apparently under duress from the doll. "We decided the painting had to go," she said.
Word of the bizarre auction spread quickly across the world wide web, as internet chatrooms, message boards, and weblogs filled with links to the eBay listing. As the painting's notoriety grew, Lucy began to be inundated with emails. She received 40 messages offering advice on exorcism and the blessing of her house, and many more reporting "strange or irregular events" in connection with viewing the image, including computers crashing, printers going berserk, uncontrollable crying, temporary illness, strange behaviour from children and animals, an "Exorcist-type voice", and a "blackout/mind control experience".
Over the ten-day listing period, the painting's eBay page received more than 16,000 visitors, but attracted just 30 confirmed bids. Many were interested in the Haunted Painting, but few were interested in owning it.
IN Grand Rapids, Michigan, gallery owner Kim Smith was unaware of the hysteria surrounding the painting. A two-and-a-half hour drive from Chicago, Grand Rapids sits among the Great Lakes of the American Midwest. Gillian Anderson, Agent Scully from TV's The X-Files, went to high school in the city, but, up until now, that had been just about the most mysterious thing that had ever happened there.
Smith was scouring eBay for new exhibits for his Perception Fine Art Gallery, located in a renovated 19th Century brick building in the city's Downtown area, when he happened upon the Haunted Painting.
"I initially thought it was a Forties American work, and hence pretty valuable," he says. "I can't deny that the sales pitch increased my enthusiasm. So, I took a calculated risk, and bid $1500 (£900). Fortunately, it came in at considerably under that."
Smith's first impressions upon receipt of his $1025 (£600) purchase were mixed. "The surface crazing and composition hinted that it might be from the Sixties. I was disappointed that it wasn't older, but still liked the image and talent exhibited," he says. "My wife, Patti, looked at it the way she does most things I buy: 'What did you pay for that again?'"
That should have been the end of the story. But visitors continued to flock to the now-closed eBay auction, finding Smith listed as the auction winner. And then the emails began to arrive in his inbox, with questions, advice, and tales of strange experiences related to the painting.
Kate, a nurse from New York, claimed to be a sceptic, but the picture brought about such a state of anxiety that she nearly fainted. "I am aware of the power of suggestion," she said, "and I assure you that I read nothing about the picture before I saw it."
Little Eagle Heart, from Alabama, sent Smith an email saying, "I am a Native American, and we know evil when we see it. When I first viewed the painting, my heart speeded up, I got horribly sick to my stomach. I felt so ill I had to burn white sage to cleanse my house. Please do not put it anywhere there is a child. There is great evil there."
Other correspondents advised Smith to have the painting blessed by a Catholic priest, or even destroyed. He was also offered the services of Ed and Lorraine Warren, regarded as the world's top demonologists. The Warrens' most famous case was the Long Island exorcism that inspired the 1979 movie The Amityville Horror.
Smith also received emails purporting to offer insight into the painting's history. One referred to a horrific Forties child murder at a home known as the Satillo House in Woodlands Hills, California. The ghosts of two children are said to haunt the building. "I have visited this house a few times," said a correspondent named Ailda. "We saw a boy. He was wearing a light T-shirt and shorts. His sister was in the shadows. He seemed to be protecting her. We named them Tom and Laura. When I saw the painting I saw their faces. It's Tom and Laura."
Another email sender, Amber, claimed to know the painting. "My grandmother had the very same painting when I was young," she said. "When she died back in 1978 the painting disappeared. No-one remembers who took it or who it was sold to. The painting haunted me as a child, but my grandmother would never get rid of it. It sends chills up my spine. I still can't think about it for more than a few minutes."
UNBEKNOWN to his correspondents, Smith was already researching the painting's history, a task made easier by the fact that it was titled and signed. Smith sent an email to an artist called WP Stoneham, saying, "Do you know Hands Resist Him?"
"I replied that it was the title of a painting I had completed in 1972," Bill Stoneham explains. "He sent me the eBay page link, and I must admit seeing the close-up of my own face scrolling up the monitor was creepy."
Hands Resist Him is a self-portrait, depicting the artist, aged five, at a Chicago apartment. "The painting was one in a series of family album images, derived from old photographs from my childhood," explains Stoneham, a former Penthouse magazine illustrator and now a computer graphic artist. "The title was inspired by a poem my wife wrote about me."
Stoneham read the eBay item description with wonderment, and began to explore the various message boards and chat rooms devoted to his work. "I quickly learned of the growing internet chatter about the painting and the weird reactions it caused in viewers," he says. "If I were to find any insight into this, it's the revelation that people seem to need an external image to define their inner selves, even when these may be disturbing."
The painting was first shown in 1974 at a Los Angeles gallery. On his website, stoneham studios.com, Stoneham claims that both the gallery owner and the LA Times art critic who first reviewed the show died in mysterious circumstances within the year. When asked about the deaths and other strange happenings claimed to have transpired at the time, Stoneham replies, "Most of the occurrences were coincidental and not necessarily associated with the painting."
The artist is unsure how the painting ended up abandoned behind a brewery. "I seem to recall the painting being purchased by a character actor of some fame," he says. He can't recall the actor's name. "As to where it was found, I don't know if the eBay story is true."
ALTHOUGH the original eBay auction has long been removed, copies of the listing remain on the web and continue to evoke strange reactions. "I have been simply overwhelmed by the enquiries I still continue to receive," says Smith. "The reactions seem to range from, 'That's weird!' to 'It made my stomach ache!' to 'Do you know a priest that can cast out the demons in this work?' Most agree the painting has a creepy quality."
So Smith's life has been changed by his purchase of Hands Resist Him, although not in a supernatural way. "I have not personally experienced anything unusual, but a couple of friends have appeared visibly affected," he says.
If Lucy's life has changed for the better since selling the painting to Smith, she isn't saying. In fact, she isn't saying anything. Despite maintaining contact for several months after the sale, Smith has been unable to contact Lucy for some time. "The seller has disappeared completely," he says, "and that has been the case for the last two years."
Today, Hands Resist Him remains in Michigan. "I still own the painting," says Smith, "though I have been tempted with a couple of very serious offers. I look at it often and still like it very much, and may never sell it. Which would mean one of my two sons would inherit it in the future, and neither seem too keen on it presently."
Smith's sons refuse to have the painting in the family home. Instead, it resides in the back room of Smith's gallery. "It is brought out for special occasions, and whenever someone is interested in the story," says Smith. "I have had prints made of it, in the same size as the original, but I am not even listing these on eBay, because I don't want to cheapen Bill's work. Neither he nor I are interested in this image ending up on a McDonald's cup."
To order a print of Hands Resist Him, email Kim Smith at hauntedpainting@aol.com
Sunday Herald - Australia - Paul Brown - Oct 26.03
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