Haunted Objects: Stories of Ghosts on Your Shelf (25 page)

In late August, Jeannette’s brother passed away and the other investigator returned home. Jeannette spent the rest of the summer alone in the house. Within a month, the electricity on the side of the house where the masks hung went out completely. Not long after, the plumbing on that side of the house stopped working as well. In the dining room itself, the light on the ceiling fan flickered day and night.

“It got to the point where I didn’t enter that side of the house,” Jeannette said. “Yet I didn’t want to take the masks down, either. It was almost as if I was drawn to them, as much as they disturbed me.”

Two days before Halloween, a family member came to visit and asked why there was a big hole by the front door, inside the gate. Jeannette never used the front door, as she came and went through the garage. She was blown away to find a 6-foot-by-8-foot hole right next to the front door. It was five feet deep, and Jeannette could see the pipes leading into her house. She called the gas company to check for leaks. When the gas man jumped into the hole to check, the ground underneath him gave way. The hole was now about 15 feet deep, with water rushing in two directions. The two quick-fixed the hole by placing plywood over it and securing the perimeter with police tape as a warning. That same week, Jeannette noticed another sink hole in her front yard, this one 20 feet in diameter. It was as if the house itself was being dragged into the depths of hell.

Inside the house, Jeannette began hearing “tinking” noises from the eight-foot arched windows in the dining room, as if they were bending and stressed. She also started to hear deep pops coming from the dining room floor.

“I was very afraid because I know the deeper the sound, the bigger the hole,” she said. “I began having nightmares about giant sinkholes under my home and water running through Swiss cheese-like tunnels.”

Jeannette asked a friend who was a contractor to examine the sink holes and tell her the extent of the damage. He said it was bad. He told her to get everything out of the house before calling the city, or else the city would “red tag” the house and she wouldn’t be allowed back in, it was that unsafe.

While all this was going on, Jeannette became depressed. She asked Bob to come home and help move them out of the house, so he drove from Idaho in a new $40,000 company truck. The day after he arrived, the truck was stolen from the driveway of the house, only to be found abandoned a mile down the road.

Bob decided to quit his out-of-state job and stay home with his wife. Soon he, too, fell into a deep depression, remaining in a dark room in the house for an entire week, something out of character for him. He, too, avoided the side of the house with the masks, and he refused to acknowledge the sounds that were coming from the dining room.

Eventually, Bob shook himself out of his funk and got a new job in Arizona. He found a new place for the family to live and rented a big truck to move their belongings from California. Jeannette took an extra day to say goodbye to her family, and with the masks in a box in her car, headed to the new house. But before leaving, she contacted Zaffis—there was no way she was going to bring those masks into her new home. She didn’t even want to risk driving across the desert with them in her car. She figured the best place for them was in Zaffis’ museum.

With the last of their belongings, Jeannette drove to a family member’s house three miles away to leave the masks. When she got to the second stop sign of her trip, the box with the masks flew forward with such force it pushed the driver’s seat forward, pinning Jeannette against the steering wheel. She was nearly broadsided by another car, and had to wiggle out the passenger side door to get out of the car, hurting her knee on the steering column in the process. She threw the box containing the masks into the trunk of the car. When she arrived at her relative’s house, she left the box outside because nobody wanted it inside. Then Jeannette drove to Arizona where she and her family have lived in peace without any further disturbances.

Meanwhile, the masks never did make it to John Zaffis in Connecticut. The next day, when Jeannette’s relative went to take the box to the post office, it was gone.

“I guess they are someone else’s problem now, and I hope they fare better with them than we did,” Jeannette said. “They ruined our dream home and nearly tore our family apart. They frightened seasoned investigators and baffled policemen. They put us in danger, and I am glad they’re gone. And now I am far more careful about what I allow to come into my home.”

The Haunted Painting

In February 2000, a painting appeared on the auction website eBay under the heading “Haunted Painting.” In truth, it was a painting titled
The Hands Resist Him
by artist Bill Stoneham. But the truth should never stand in the way of a good ghost story.

Stoneham painted the picture in 1972 and it depicts a young boy standing on a doorstep next to a creepy life-sized girl doll. Behind him, in the glass panes of the door, numerous sets of hands reach for him and press up against the glass. Stoneham has stated on his website that the boy is his younger self and the hands represent other lives. The doll serves as his guide between the waking world and the dreaming world, as represented by the door.

The painting was first purchased in the early 1970s by John Marley, a noted character actor who had roles in films including
The Godfather
. According to Stoneham, the owner of the gallery where the painting was shown and the
Los Angeles Times
art critic who reviewed the show were both dead within a year after gazing upon the painting.

Marley owned the painting until his own death in 1984, and at some point it ended up on the grounds of an old brewery, where a California couple found it and took it home. Their four-and-a-half-year-old daughter complained that at night she could hear the figures in the painting arguing, and that the doll would force the boy to exit the painting and enter the room in which it was hanging. In order to prove nothing was happening, the father set up some motion-activated cameras in front of the painting. The family was shocked when, on the third night, they captured what looked like the boy coming out of the painting. The object in the doll’s hands (which according to Stoneham was just a dry-cell battery and some wires) had morphed into a gun, which the doll had pointed at the boy as if to force him out of the painting.

The couple listed the artwork as “Haunted Painting” on eBay, and included the photos of the boy allegedly leaving the painting. The eBay listing had the following warning posted as well: “Do not bid on this painting if you are susceptible to stress-related disease, faint of heart or are unfamiliar with supernatural events … This painting may or may not possess supernatural powers that could impact or change your life …”

The auction description went on in rambling fashion, at first attempting to offer photographic proof that the figures could exit the painting before later claiming, “There are no ghosts in this world, no supernatural powers, this is just a painting” and that it is “pure entertainment.”

Once the item was on eBay, the alleged hauntings took on a whole new dimension. Over 13,000 people viewed the auction, and many reported having paranormal experiences of their own. Just the image on the website alone was enough to impact those who viewed it, from feelings of queasiness to intense heat radiating from the computer monitor. The couple selling the painting put an addendum on the auction listing suggesting that people “not use this image as the background on the screen” and “not display this image around juveniles or children.”

The 30-day auction, which began at $199, received 30 bids, and the painting finally sold for $1,025. Although the buyer remained anonymous, there have been numerous websites tracking the tale that suggest nothing paranormal happened to the new owners.

The Other Haunted Painting

In 1985, a series of mysterious fires broke out across England, with one common thread running through them—in each home, everything burned to the ground, except for a print of a painting known as
The Crying Boy
. The painting, by artist Bruno Amadio, depicts a close-up of a young boy with tears streaming down his cheeks. Around 50,000 prints of the painting were sold across England, and there are also some variations painted by Amadio that appear to be part of the curse as well.

The story first came to light when a fireman spoke to a British newspaper, which printed reports of dozens of other fires that had occurred, with a print of the painting remaining untouched. The paper called for other prints to be mailed to its newsroom to be set ablaze in a big bonfire to quell whatever curse was attached.

Yet the mysterious fires still continued, and the legend of
The Crying Boy
grew. According to the story, Amadio had taken in a young orphan—the subject of the painting—whose parents had died in a fire just as strange as the ones later associated with the painting, and that it was the boy who set their home ablaze. He was a proven firebug, and some even suggested he was actually a pyrokinetic—someone who can start fires with their mind. Amadio failed to heed the warnings, however, and not long after the boy arrived, the artist’s studio burned to the ground.

Ten years later, the boy died in a fiery car crash, and from that day forward, any paintings of him carried his curse and ignited into flames.

In later years, the newspaper tried to prove the reason the prints didn’t burn in the fires was due to the string that was used on the back of them: once the string ignited, the print would fall to the floor and remain unharmed. That may explain how the paintings survived the fires, but it cannot explain how the fires started.

Perhaps whatever caused that orphan boy so much pain and suffering still burns inside his restless spirit today.

One of the variations of “The Crying Boy.”

Poster Child

Posters are snapshots of the trends that mark our lives. They are time capsules we tear down as we find new interests and replace with new definitions of ourselves. They are literally pictures into our hearts and desires. The best ones are framed behind glass, but most are stuck to walls with push pins and globs of putty.

Posters can also be a focus for energy left behind, a way for specters to communicate with us. While few people admit a poster is powerful enough to call them back from the dead, stories do exist about ghosts offering their opinion on the way we decorate.

Dodie, from the story on P. 24, whose house featured more than one spirit and who had her hands full with some haunted dresses, also dealt with an offended art critic. Her teenage son had placed a revealing poster of some women on his wall. The spirits, perhaps those of the little girls who had died in the house, didn’t care for his choice of artwork.

“He woke up and [the poster] was thrown against the opposite wall,” Dodie said. “The tack that kept it up was still in the wall. It’s impossible that it just fell. He put up a nice one of some cars (instead).”

Paranormal investigator and author Thomas D’Agostino had his own poster experience when he and his wife, Arlene, moved into new living quarters. In a house where the walls are covered with swords, old instruments, gargoyles, and other eclectic artifacts, the poster should have fit right in.

“My sister bought us an original poster from the movie,
Night of the Living Dead
, from 1968,” D’Agostino said. “It was quite a macabre and grotesque piece of art, fashioned in black and white. The poster definitely put across the frightening aspect of the movie.

“We decided to hang it at the top of the stairs in the old house we were renting. The house was already haunted, but the spirits liked what we had done to the rooms and we had no problem until that night.”

It seemed the spirits did not like the D’Agostinos’ poster. “All during the night, we heard restless shuffling and banging around upstairs. I finally went to the stairs to see what the din was, and the upstairs had a yellow hue to it. The poster, at the top of the stairs, was within the distinct discolored air. Arlene and I would hear the noises all night, and upon examining the second story, found it heavy with energy and the strange hue in the air.”

While not scared, they decided the poster had to go. There was no reason to upset the balance they had struck with their unseen housemates. “In the morning, we took the poster down. At that point, the hue cleared up and a peaceful silence came over the upstairs once again. We can only deduce that the other inhabitants of the house did not like that poster at all and were very animated in letting us know.”

There is one story about a haunted poster that is so disturbing, I hesitate to even tell it. It feels like someone else’s secret, and in many ways it is. It involves one of the most infamous suicides in modern-day American history, a moment that defined the angst of Generation X and was blamed for the teenage violence that would follow it.

This story was shared with me years ago, and while I remember the details clearly, I can’t confirm any of them. Looking back on it now, the story has too many holes, yet at the same time, is entirely too neat. I will share the story as it was told to me by a friend, who heard it from someone who was friends with the teen who experienced it. It will sound like an urban legend, but there are already so many legends surrounding this incident that I feel one more can’t hurt.