These Are the World’s Most Haunted Paintings
Stories of haunted paintings have circulated for centuries, and we love these tales because they suggest the creative process can conjure something far darker than Vantablack. Do some artworks truly have a dark aura—one that manifests in mysterious and nefarious ways to the detriment of anyone who comes into contact with them? There’s no way to know for sure, but plenty of paintings in museums and private collections are rumored to be cursed, inhabited by restless spirits or filled with malicious energy. Their effects range from merely unsettling to downright terrifying; people who spend time in the presence of haunted paintings report everything from subtle discomfort to full-blown paranormal experiences, misfortune and bodily harm.
The tales they tell are classics of the genre: strings of unexplained bad luck, feelings of dread, eerie whispers, ghostly presences and bizarre phenomena. Sometimes just viewing a print or even a photo of a haunted painting is said to trigger supernatural occurrences. True believers hold that the emotional force of an artist, or the intensity of a subject’s experiences, can leave an indelible—and malevolent—mark on a work. Often that mark comes from the artist’s own personal torment, but in other cases, dark rituals tied to a work’s creation are said to imbue it with forces beyond our understanding.
Much like ghost stories, the idea that a painting can be cursed or haunted taps into our collective fear of death and the unknown. The artworks below have become objects of both fascination and fear, captivating anyone drawn to the darker side of the art world. Whether they are truly haunted or simply haunting is up to you to decide.
The Dead Mother by Edvard Munch
Munch readily acknowledged that his work was darkly personal. “I paint not what I see, but what I saw,” he wrote of works like Death in the Sickroom. His painting of a child standing before her dead mother, unambiguously titled The Dead Mother, has a particularly haunting reputation. It has been in the collection of the Kunsthalle Bremen since 1918, but previous owners reported that the child’s eyes seemed to follow them and that they heard rustling sheets or whispers coming from the canvas. Some rumors even claim the girl occasionally disappears from the painting altogether.
The cursed paintings of Zdzisław Beksiński
Zdzisław Beksiński’s darkly dystopian surrealist paintings are ominous and unsettling in and of themselves, and the fact that the artist was murdered in his home in 2005 only adds to their aura. An untitled work from 1972 is reportedly haunted, with its owners said to have experienced extreme feelings of dread, bizarre accidents and violent disturbances in their home. But it’s tough to pin down exactly which painting is meant, because Beksiński seldom titled his work and he made more than a few nightmarish canvases that year. The artist himself, by contrast, was said to be not particularly creepy at all but modest and shy, as well as a convivial and witty conversationalist.
Man Proposes, God Disposes by Edwin Landseer
This 1864 painting, which depicts polar bears feasting gruesomely on the remains of a doomed Arctic expedition, hangs at Royal Holloway, University of London. It is the subject of an urban legend claiming that a student killed themselves in front of the painting by stabbing a pencil into their eye, but not before writing “The polar bears made me do it” on their exam paper. Students and staff have reported feeling uneasy around the work, and it’s said that anyone who sits in front of it during an exam will fail.
The Rain Woman by Svetlana Telets
This painting by Ukrainian artist Svetlana Telets has a creepy backstory: she painted The Rain Woman in 1996 after six months of feeling as though she was being watched. While making the initial sketch, she felt like “someone was controlling” her hand. A succession of buyers have purchased the work and then returned it, claiming that soon after acquiring it, a ghostly figure began watching or even following them. Musician Sergei Skachkov bought The Rain Woman in 2008 but put it in storage after his wife saw a ghostly figure in their home. Many have claimed that the woman in the painting has a life of her own, or that the painting itself has a soul.
Portrait of Maria Ivanovna Lopukhina by Vladimir Borovikovsky
Maria Lopukhina, sister of the famous adventurer Fyodor Tolstoy, died of consumption at 23 or 24, but not before Vladimir Borovikovsky painted the portrait that now hangs in the State Tretyakov Gallery. Known as the “Russian Mona Lisa” for Lopukhina’s elusive, sorrowful smile, the painting is said to be haunted by her spirit. Rumor has it that her grieving father, a Freemason, trapped her soul in the canvas, condemning young women who stare at it too long to unhappy marriages and early deaths, or perhaps to having their own souls imprisoned. Viewers report feelings of overwhelming sadness after gazing into Lopukhina’s eyes, and many have fainted. Gallery employees claim her expression regularly changes, and some say they have seen her spirit materialize beside the canvas.
The Hands Resist Him by Bill Stoneham
This surreal, unsettling work, painted by Stoneham in 1972 and sometimes called the “haunted eBay painting,” has a reputation as one of the most haunted artworks in existence. It depicts a young boy standing in front of a glass door beside a child-sized doll while strange, disembodied hands press against the panes behind them. The artist has explained that the painting depicts the barrier between the waking world and our dreams, but despite that benign intent, the work, which was sold on eBay in the early 2000s, has become infamous for its paranormal associations. The seller claimed it caused nightmares and that the figures in it moved during the night. Some viewers reported that the boy and the doll disappeared from the canvas or that the hands behind the glass shifted or reached out. Even viewing the painting online apparently gave people strange feelings, and stories of it bringing bad luck and causing technology to malfunction have circulated widely. According to rumor, The Hands Resist Him was responsible for the deaths of both a gallery owner and the first critic to review it.
Mi Novia (or Portrait of a Lady) by Juan Luna
According to legend, Mi Novia depicts Paz Pardo de Tavera, the wife Juan Luna murdered, whose spirit now possesses the portrait. Other sources say the woman in the painting is model Angela Duche, who according to a Wikipedia note “was neither married to nor murdered by him.” Still, past owners of the work have suffered many sorrows, from miscarriage to bankruptcy to death in a car crash. Somewhat less dramatically, a lightbulb above the painting reportedly exploded during a 1987 exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Manila.
The portrait of Bernardo de Galvez in the Hotel Galvez
Hanging in the Hotel Galvez in Galveston, Texas, a portrait of Spanish military leader Bernardo de Galvez is steeped in eerie, if mostly benign, folklore. Visitors claim his eyes follow them as they walk past and that simply standing too close to the painting can inspire a sense of dread. Those who try to photograph the portrait without first politely asking de Galvez’s permission end up with blurry, warped images or worse. Some photos contain skull-like distortions, and one team of paranormal investigators that took a picture without asking ended up with an image not of de Galvez but of his skeleton.
The Crying Boy by Giovanni Bragolin
This now-infamous painting by Italian artist Giovanni Bragolin became notorious in the 1980s for an alleged curse and the media frenzy surrounding it. Prints of the work, part of a frankly bizarre series depicting tearful children, were mass-produced and sold widely in the U.K. After a string of house fires in which homes burned to the ground but prints of The Crying Boy were found untouched in the ashes, some began to believe the print brought bad luck or was even causing the fires. Firefighters reportedly advised people to remove it from their homes. An investigation by the Building Research Establishment later found that the reproductions had been treated with a varnish containing a highly effective fire retardant, but the legend persisted, and the prints are still associated with unexplained disasters.
The Anguished Man by an unknown artist
The Anguished Man is infamous for its disturbing history and unsettling presence, as well as for the copies it has inspired. The story goes that the artist mixed their own blood into the paint to create the image of a bald, noseless figure mid-scream, then took their own life shortly after finishing it. The painting is now owned by Sean Robinson, who, according to videos he has posted on YouTube, inherited it in 2010 from his grandmother, who had kept it locked away because she believed it was cursed. When Robinson displayed the painting at home, he and his family reportedly experienced a series of terrifying events: shadowy figures, disembodied moans and screams and the sensation of being watched. La Brea Pictures acquired the rights to the story in 2016 and hinted at a film to be directed by Til Ricks, but the project appears to have stalled.
Love Letters by Richard King in the Driskill Hotel
The Driskill Hotel in Austin, Texas, is reputed to be one of the most haunted hotels in the United States. It is also home to Richard King’s reproduction of a painting by Charles Trevor Garland showing a young girl holding a letter in one hand and a bouquet of flowers in the other. King’s faithful copy evokes the same sense of innocence as the original, but it has also gained a reputation for its mysterious connection to a tragedy. According to the story, a young girl, the daughter of Senator Temple Lea Houston, fell to her death on the hotel’s grand staircase in 1887. Some believe the girl in Love Letters bears an uncanny resemblance to her, and guests have reported everything from seeing the girl’s expression change to sudden chills, dizziness or a sense of being watched, adding to the hotel’s already haunted reputation.
The paintings of Arshile Gorky
For many survivors of the Armenian genocide, artist Arshile Gorky‘s work symbolizes the losses they endured while also providing a sense of identity. His work remains highly sought after: at the start of London’s Frieze Week in 2024, an $8.5 million Gorky painting sold by Hauser & Wirth led sales at Frieze Masters. But Gorky’s paintings are also rumored to be cursed, linked to unsettling incidents such as artworks falling from walls, galleries catching fire and the appearance of a mysterious black-haired ghost in a blue overcoat. The most chilling event tied to his work came in 1962, when American Airlines Flight 1 crashed two minutes after takeoff, killing all 87 passengers and destroying 15 of the artist’s paintings.
William Johnson’s portrait of Henrietta Nelson
In 2004, Bonham’s listed a portrait of a woman wearing a blue dress and wide-brimmed beribboned hat in an auction of the contents of a rectory in Banningham, Norfolk. The painting, which sold for £2,467.50, was of Henrietta Nelson, a former resident of Yaxley Hall in Eye, Suffolk, who died of injuries sustained in a fall at age 82. In the years prior to her passing, she’d stated unequivocally that she wanted to spend eternity at Yaxley Hall, and her remains were interred in a mausoleum on the grounds of the estate. But later owners demolished the mausoleum, moving her remains to a vault in a nearby church. Since then, those who’ve owned the portrait report that her spirit leaves the painting to wander, forever searching for a path back to her former home.
The painting of Aunt Pratt at Shirley Plantation
At Shirley Plantation in Charles City, Virginia, hangs a portrait of Martha Hill, known as Aunt Pratt, who was born on the plantation. It was painted in the 18th Century, before Hill left for England, never to return. According to lore, when the family remodeled in 1858 and moved the portrait to the attic, the house was filled each night with a disturbing shuffling and knocking that stopped only after the painting was rehung in Aunt Pratt’s former bedroom. When it was moved again after the Civil War, the ghostly nighttime noises returned until the portrait was restored to its original spot. And in 1974, the painting traveled to Rockefeller Center for an exhibition of haunted objects, where an NBC cameraman reportedly caught it shaking violently on its hook. Thereafter, it was locked inside a case, from which banging and crying sounds emanated, and workers later claimed to have found the portrait outside the locked case. Today, Aunt Pratt is back where she belongs, in her old bedroom, and apparently at peace.
