The Cutprice Guignol

The first line on the eBay listing was, to say the least, unsettling: “HAUNTED PAINTING —– WARNING AND DISCLAIMER.”

This piece could well have served as a sinister-enough disclaimer to the faint of heart in its own right – the large oil painting, which covered 24 x 36 inches of canvas, depicted a small boy, standing next to a girl doll, in front of a dark window. Against the blackness, hands can be seen reaching out of the dark and pressing against the pane, the figures they’re attached to unseen. It’s a striking image, the boy’s face impassive, the door behind him stretching out into some unknown plane that seems to stretch on forever.

But it wasn’t until 2nd February, 2000, that this particular painting would earn its urban legend stripes on the early internet, when it was listed for sale on eBay under that ominous headline announcing its supernatural status.

Posted for sale by a California-based user named Mrnoreserve, the painting itself attracted less attention than the detailed, slightly breathless, and all-caps description of the sinister events that had plagued the family who had been unfortunate enough to come into possession of the artwork.

The painting, they explained, had been found by a worker dumped out the back of a brewery – which surprised the family, as it was such a large and technically impressive piece. They decided to give it a new home, but their four-year-old daughter began to make claims that the children in the painting were fighting, as well as exiting the frame to enter the real world at night. “NOW,” assured mrnoreserve “I DON’T BELIEVE IN UFOS OR ELVIS BEING ALIVE, BUT MY HUSBAND WAS ALARMED”.

Their husband set up a motion-triggered camera, and, according to the ad, captured some sinister developments. As the little girl had described, the girl doll brandished a gun, and apparently threatened the boy out of the frame and into the real world. The pictures of this alleged event were shared as part of the eBay listing:

Not unreasonably, the owners had decided, after capturing these images of characters in a painting brandishing firearms and climbing into the real world, that the painting needed to go. “DO NOT” the ad warned “BID ON THIS PAINTING IF YOU ARE SUCCEPTIBLE TO STRESS RELATED DISEASE, FAINT OF HEART OR ARE UNFAMILIAR WITH SUPERNATURAL EVENTS”, followed by a lengthy disclaimer removing any personal responsibility from the seller for any misfortune that might befall the buyer after their purchase. They finished up their listing with a call for a help – “WE WANT OUR HOUSE TO BE BLESSED AFTER THE PAINTING IS GONE, DOES ANYBODY KNOW, WHO IS QUALIFIED TO DO THAT?”. Bidding started at $199.

eBay, the auction site where the painting was posted, had only gone public as a company about eighteen months prior to the painting’s listing, but the picture soon attracted a spike of visitors as the news of its apparently-haunted nature made its way around the internet. It’s not hard to see why; the artwork itself has a striking, eerie quality to it, and the description, though not exactly convincing, has enough surreal commitment to the bit to make for an easy link to slap in an email to your best friend in the slow early months of the year. Which is, in part, how the story of this painting spread – along with forum discussions debating the veracity of the story and paranormal websites covering the haunting, attention to the listing exploded, with more than 30,000 views in its short life on eBay.

And, it seemed, it wasn’t just the sellers who were being impacted by the painting’s strange powers. In an update before the auction’s end, Mrnoreserve revealed that they’d received a half-dozen emails attesting to unpleasant supernatural events apparently caused just by looking at the picture – from hot gusts of air blowing over the viewer, to demonic-sounding voices shouting in their presence. Though they added a disclaimer denying belief in the supernatural, they also implored users to not show the image to children or to use it as a screensaver.

Despite these sinister revelations, the painting received a flurry of more than thirty bids, and sold on 12th February, ten days after it was first listed, for around $1000. The winner of the auction was a user called Ionia7 – Kim Smith, the owner of the Perception Gallery in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

But the question is – where did this haunting picture come from? Did it really carry a dark supernatural power? Why was the doll in the picture apparently brandishing a gun at the little boy? What happened when the painting was delivered to its new home? And why the hell did the couple who owned it put this unsettling painting up in their four-year-old daughter’s bedroom?

Any horror film will tell you that the best way to get to the bottom of a haunted item’s power is to find out its history, and Kim Smith was soon on the case. Writing on the back of the canvas revealed the title of the painting to be “The Hands Resist Him” and, using this, was able to track the artist down. William Stoneham, a Boston-born visual artist who was working in the video game world when the painting sold, was the person behind The Hands Resist Him – but what exactly did it mean, and could Stoneham shed any light on the strange effect the painting seemed to have on people?

Stoneham had created The Hands Resist Him as part of his first one-man show in 1974, commissioned by the Feingarten Galleries in Beverly Hills, California, when he was in his early twenties. The young boy in the image is Stoneham himself – based on a picture taken of him outside his grandmother’s apartment in Chicago when he was about five, standing with a neighbourhood girl who became the basis for the doll in the painting. The title of the painting was taken from a poem Stoneham’s then-wife wrote for him about his upbringing as an orphan – “It must confront its enemy/The hands – resist him – like the secret of his birth”. The unsettling and abstract nature of the painting is very much in line with Stoneham’s work at the time, which critic Henry Seldis described as bringing “the surrealist fantasies into the contemporary realm”.

Stoneham himself has described the painting as a depiction of the collective unconscious, with the boy being the explorer and the doll his guide – “the hands are the ‘other lives.'” he explained. “The glass door, that thin veil between waking and dreaming”. Perhaps the most perplexing part of the image as listed in the eBay advertisement, the gun being held by the doll figure, is actually a battery, similar to the ones Stoneham used in his model trains as a child. The images in the eBay listing show the painting lit in such a way as to make the battery and the windowframe look like a firearm, rather than the doll manifesting weaponry to terrorize her scene partner with.

But just because there was an explanation for the painting’s existence didn’t mean that there couldn’t be some unsettling history to explain the effect it seemed to have on people, right? William Stoneham claimed that the Los Angeles art critic who reviewed his show and the owner of the gallery he showed it at were dead within a year of its release – a sinister story, for sure, but I’m not sure there’s much to it. Seldis, quoted above, the art critic from the LA Times who covered the show, died in 1978, four years after the painting was first shown – Charles Feingarten, the owner of the gallery at the time, was active until at least 1980, according to the gallery’s website. The painting was originally sold after the show in 1974 to John Marley, an actor probably best known for playing the character unfortunate enough to wake up in bed with a horse’s head in The Godfather. He died in 1984, ten years after the purchase of The Hands Resist Him, though he had sold it by the time of his death; three deaths related to the painting in ten years, to me, do not constitute a compelling haunted item backstory, though I’m open to corrections.

For what it’s worth, I don’t think these are deliberate misrepresentations on Stoneham’s part, more like misremembrance due to the time that had passed combined with the internet’s habit of unquestioningly passing on unverified information until it becomes part of the story. To me, this is more of a case of working backwards from a painting that does have an eerie and unsettling feel to it to invent a backstory that would explain that strangeness, instead of crediting the artist for creating something as evocative as The Hands Resist Him.

So, despite the fact that the painting didn’t really have any particular spooky credibility – or anything other than the all-caps storytelling of a nameless California eBay seller – it still managed to earn a reputation as one of the most haunted paintings of all time. Kim Smith, for his part, didn’t report any strange occurrences taking place after he housed the painting in the Perception Gallery, aside from a few concerned emails from people offering advice on how to cleanse the space and ensure his spiritual safety in the face of such a powerful object. Though it now lives in the storage area for the museum, a handful of people have requested to see it over the years, most of them apparently there due to the internet infamy of the piece.

As for Stoneham, the picture’s sudden spike in popularity led him to return to painting after a decade of digital-only work, and he was commissioned to create a sequel to the piece, which he titled Resistance at the Threshold, in 2004. In the years that followed, as recently as 2021, he’s been adding to the series with new paintings that explore more of this dreamlike world and the characters contained in it, and, honestly, I would really reccommend checking them out – they’re beautiful, unique pieces that preserve the feel of the original while capturing Stoneham’s development as an artist, and I love them.

The people who created the “haunted painting” post on eBay haven’t been identified, though it seems quite obvious that the backstory they shared for the piece was little more than a marketing scheme that was relatively successful (given that the painting sold for five times what it was listed for). Though I sincerely doubt the veracity of any haunted aspect of this painting, I’ll end this article the same way Mrnoreserve ended their final update to the story: “Last not least, thanks for appreciating the art as well”.

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Sources and Further Reading/Listening:

Original eBay Posting

Daily Dot Article

Crawlspace Podcast Episode