There are a lot of reasons to be scared of the art world, but this Halloween, Isabella Greenwood makes a case for being scared of the actual artworks themselves — or at least the haunted works on this list.
Certain images exceed their authors. Once released, they circulate like contagions, passed through tabloids, message boards, and whispered testimony. This is the terrain of cursed canvases, the strange and haunted strata of modern folklore: paintings that trail behind them the residue of catastrophe and superstition. Some have been accused of burning down houses, others of staring back at their viewers, of whispering in the dark, of refusing to be destroyed. Their stories travel faster than the works themselves, moving from newsprint to internet forums to ghost tours, mutating as they go. Each one sits at the intersection of image and belief, where art history blurs into rumour and ritual.
The convergence of rumour, media, and myth came to a head in 1985, when The Sun newspaper announced: “Blazing Curse of the Crying Boy”, a mass-produced print depicting a tearful child. The painting had hung, benign and kitsch, in thousands of British living rooms since the 1950s. Then came the fires. Dozens of homes burned, and amid the blackened ruins, the same unsettling detail appeared again and again with the painting, untouched. One witness, standing before the remains of her house, told reporters, “It burned everything but itself.”
Soon, neighbours gathered in cul-de-sacs to burn their own copies in bonfires, a collective exorcism of sorts. The object became a folk icon, stripped of author and intention, absorbed entirely into oral urban legend. Marina Warner once wrote of sentimental images as “icons without churches.” Here was such an icon, an orphaned devotional image, its sanctity reversed.
Haunting, of course, thrives where the image slips from its frame. The Hands Resist Him by Bill Stoneham, painted in 1972, began as a personal meditation on childhood. But by 2000, it had become what tabloids would later call “the most haunted painting in the world.” Its journey into legend didn’t happen in a gallery but on eBay. The seller’s description, posted to a then-quiet corner of the internet, warned potential buyers: “This painting may or may not possess supernatural powers that could impact or change your life.” The text read like a fragment from a fevered diary, was followed by reports of children waking up screaming, figures moving at night, the doll in the painting walking out of its frame.
The listing was shared, dissected, and amplified until the object itself dissolved into the myth. Stoneham himself, interviewed years later, admitted, “It’s surreal watching your painting grow teeth.”
In New Orleans, the anonymous eighteenth-century Portrait of Bernardo de Gálvez hangs in the Bourbon Orleans Hotel. Yet guests have long insisted his painted eyes follow them down the hallway, unblinking. A ritual grew from the superstition: photographs of the portrait would fail unless the viewer first asked aloud, “May I take your picture, General Gálvez?”
A tourist pamphlet from the 1990s recounts a witness who followed the ritual and captured the painting perfectly, while her friend, more cavalier, ended up with a completely black photograph. The hotel folded the story into its ghost tours, formalising the superstition into performance. Unlike the circulating cry of Bragolin’s boy or Stoneham’s viral doll, the haunting of Gálvez is enacted not by the object alone but by the choreography between object and witness (It is in the asking that the haunting takes place).
The Anguished Man, an anonymous and undated oil painting discovered in an attic in northern England, is perhaps the most infamous of this kind. Its smeared, screaming face has become a staple of internet lore. According to its owner, Sean Robinson, the painting was made with a mixture of oil paint and the artist’s own blood. “I thought it was just a story,” Robinson told a local paper in 2011. “Then I started hearing the voice.”Robinson described doors slamming, whispering at night, a shadow figure watching from the foot of his bed. The painting has never been authenticated, but its legend doesn’t need authenticity. It survives by affect, by repetition. Its hauntedness mimics a 19th-century gothic register, somewhere between M. R. James and spirit photography, but refracted through message boards and amateur ghost-hunting forums.
Haunting has not always been accidental. In the 1860s, Georgiana Houghton produced intricate, swirling watercolours under the guidance, she claimed, of “ministering spirits.” Her spirit drawings were not so much haunted as possessed, rendered through automatic gesture decades before Surrealism or Kandinsky’s mystical abstractions. When she exhibited them at the New British Gallery in 1871, critics were unsettled. One visitor wrote that the works “give the impression of invisible forces, and the longer you look, the less air there seems to breathe.” Another fainted.
Houghton’s drawings trouble the modernist narrative. These works were dismissed for their occultism, their femininity, their refusal to be contained by Enlightenment rationalism. Only now are they being reabsorbed into art history, not as curiosities, but as foundations. They remind us that haunting has long been part of the language of image-making.
In Ghostly Matters, Avery Gordon writes, “Haunting is not the same as being trapped by the past. It is the moment when the past comes to meet you.” Haunted paintings enact precisely this encounter: they do not merely reference history, they animate it, collapsing the distance between then and now. Their presence is not fixed in a single temporal frame but moves between epochs, drawing the past into the living present through affect, rumour, and the charged act of looking. They make history tactile, not as a stable archive, but as something that continues to lean toward us.
Museums, in their choreographed performance of neutrality, enact a kind of curatorial exorcism, at times, smoothing over the unruly. Yet these works resist containment. They follow the viewer like revenants, speaking fluently across temporal registers: the fevered sensibilities of fainting Victorians, the algorithmic hysteria of viral ebay auctions etc. In doing so, they reveal how frames are less vessels of order than porous thresholds, through which the spectral continually leaks.
