Copyright 2018 by Gary L. Pullman
In
an interesting article, “8
Eerie-Looking Paintings People Believe To Be Haunted,” Anantha
Sharma provides the scoop on the reasons for this strange belief.
Prints
of Giovanni Bragolin's The Crying Boy
were found among the debris of burned-down buildings. Correlation
became cause as believers claimed the fires resulted from the
presence of the prints in the destroyed homes. Without its alleged
association with fires, the painting, of itself, doesn't seem all
that eerie—at least, not to me. You be the judge:
A
painting rendered in oil and the anonymous artist's own blood
does look eerie and
would look so even if one wasn't aware of its bloody
background. Not long after painting his masterpiece, the artist
committed suicide. Its present owner, Sean Robinson, attributes the
paranormal phenomena he says occurs inside his home, where the
painting hangs, to the work of art. Of course, instead of a
cause-and-effect relationship between the painting and the alleged
paranormal phenomena, there could be only a correlation.
According
to Sharma, the present owners of Bill Stoneham's The Hands
Resist Him believe the painting
is “cursed,” so, to get rid of it, they're selling it on eBay.
Apparently, they're not as concerned about passing the curse on to
the painting's next owners, whoever they are, as they are of getting
rid of the damned thing.
The
presently cursed owners claim the children represented in the
painting move at night and sometimes, feeling a bit claustrophobic
perhaps, step out of the frame and into the chamber wherein it is
displayed. The reason they believe the children are alive seems to be
their own firsthand experience in having observed the rather animated
painting's subjects.
A
gift in one hand, a bouquet of rises in the other, a young redheaded
girl in a pink
dress, a blue
sash around her waist, smiles slightly, perhaps hesitantly, as she
looks forth from her frame. According to the staff of the Driskoll
Hotel in Austin, Texas, the portrait, Love Letters Replica,
has attracted the attention of a dead four-year-old girl, Samantha
Houston, a US senator's daughter, who tumbled down the hotel's grand
staircase as she pursued a ball.
Some
believe the girl in the painting seeks to “communicate with them”
and witness her “expressions change” when they observe her “too
long.” Might young Samantha be trying to communicate with the
hotel's staff or guests through the portrait of this young lady with
whom Samantha's ghost identifies for some mysterious reason?
Sharma's
article, which discusses these and four other mysterious paintings,
is well worth a read.
What
I'm most interested in, though, are the means by which people assign
supernatural or paranormal significance to ordinary objects—in this
case, paintings. Obviously, such works or art are paint on canvas, so
how and why do they become something more, something else, something
otherworldy?
One
reason, as mentioned, is that people confuse or replace the idea of
coincidence, or correlation, with the concept of cause and effect. As
Robert T. Carroll points out in his Skeptic's
Dictionary
article, “parapsychology,”
correlation is not
causation and the very notion of correlation is itself complex and
problematic:
.
. . correlations don't establish causality.
Finding a correlation that is not what would be predicted by chance
does not establish a causal event. Nor does it establish that if it
is a causal event, it is a paranormal event. Furthermore, even if
there is a causal event, the correlation itself isn't of much use in
determining what that event consists of. What you think is cause may
be the effect. Or, there may be some third, unknown, factor which is
causing the effect observed. Or, the correlation may be due to
chance, even if it is statistically unlikely in a certain sense. Or
the correlation may be illusory and due to an experimenter
expectation effect rather than to any real causal event.
The
ability, Carroll says, to “duplicate the results” of experiments
“with more and more rigorous tests” is necessary to determine
whether a possible causal relationship is “highly probable.”
Otherwise, he suggests, a cause-and-effect relationship between two
incidents (discoveries of prints of The Crying Boy
at multiple fire sites or the presence of a particular painting in a
home in which paranormal events are said to occur) should be taken
with a grain or two of salt.
What
about seeing something happen with one's very own eyes? Is seeing
believing? Not according to Carroll. Eyewitness, or anecdotal
evidence, is weak and perhaps even more problematic than
determining whether a relationship between the occurrences of two
incidents is correlative or causal in nature:
Anecdotes
are unreliable for various reasons. Stories are prone to
contamination by beliefs, later experiences, feedback, selective
attention to details, and so on. Most stories get distorted in the
telling and the retelling. Events get exaggerated. Time sequences get
confused. Details get muddled. Memories
are imperfect and selective; they are often filled in after the fact.
People misinterpret their experiences. Experiences are conditioned by
biases, memories, and beliefs, so people's perceptions might not be
accurate. Most people aren't expecting to be deceived, so they may
not be aware of deceptions that others might engage in. Some people
make up stories. Some stories are delusions. Sometimes events are
inappropriately deemed psychic simply because they seem improbable
when they might not be that improbable after all. In short, anecdotes
are inherently problematic and are usually impossible to test for
accuracy.
Thus,
stories of personal experience with paranormal or supernatural events
have little scientific value.
Carroll's
critique of anecdotal evidence applies to both the animated children
in The Hands That Resist Him
and the altered expressions of the subject of Love Letters
Replica.
In
the case of Replica, a
few other connections between the painting and unrelated objective
events are also identified or suggested:
- A four-year-old girl, Samantha Houston, a US senator's daughter, tumbled down the hotel's grand staircase as she pursued a ball.
- Samantha's ghost is attracted to the painting.
- Samantha's ghost is trying to “communicate” with hotel staff and guests through the painting.
- Observers witness the portrait's “expressions change” over time.
There
is no evidence to connect any of these claims. Nevertheless, by
drawing relationships that sound possible or, in some instances,
perhaps even reasonable, where there are none, the incidents become
linked in a seeming series of chronological and, in some cases, even
(allegedly) causal sequences, unifying otherwise disparate and
distinct events so that the impression is created that the chain of
(supposedly) related incidents reinforces the likelihood that the
painting's overall significance (i. e., its interpretation) is apt to
be correct: Through the portrait of the girl in the hotel, Samantha's
ghost seeks to communicate with the living. In fact, there is no
evidence to support the linkages of these separate occurrences or to
account for their significance as a whole.
So
why do we tend to make such associations? Why must we seek to explain
the inexplicable or, indeed, to invent explanations of things that
need no explanation? Might a work of art, for example, have
significance simply because, having been created, it exists, as
proponents of the art-for-art's-sake movement suggest?
One
view of the impulse that drives our need to know why is known as
“cognitive
closure.” Formulated in 1972, by psychologist Jerome Kagan,
this theory holds that we are disturbed by uncertainty. When we don't
know what causes something, we seek an explanation to “eliminate
the distress of the unknown.” The downside to this need to know why
is that
.
. . cognitive closure can bias our choices, change our preferences,
and influence our mood. In our rush for definition, we tend to
produce fewer hypotheses and search less thoroughly for information.
We become more likely to form judgments based on early cues
(something known as impressional primacy), and as a result become
more prone to anchoring and correspondence biases (using first
impressions as anchors for our decisions and not accounting enough
for situational variables). And, perversely, we may not even realize
how much we are biasing our own judgments.
Each
of these errors can, in turn, occasion situations which themselves
present horrific possibilities ripe for the author of horror stories.
We can settle for a possible
explanation when, had we continued our quest for cognitive closure,
we could have discerned more likely explanations with larger and more
numerous capacities for application. Perhaps we could even learn how
to combat or eliminate the threat our story's characters face (for,
in horror fiction, characters always face some sort of threat of an
unknown nature or origin: think of Them!
or The Thing from Another World.)
Indeed,
writers of horror (and other genres of) fiction often play upon this
very array of possible explanations, suggesting several before the
true one is understood or supplied. In deft hands, this approach
heightens suspense, even as it complicates conflicts (think of The
Exorcist or The
Possession of Emily Rose);
while, in less adroit hands, this approach converts the sublime into
the ridiculous (think of almost any of Stephen King's or Bentley
Little's novels—in regard to the former, I'm thinking, at the
moment, of Under the Dome:
King's list of possible causes of the dome's existence, among which
are a foreign government's technology and the technology of a huge,
wealthy corporation, are far superior to the actual cause—an
adolescent female extraterrestrial's inversion of a gigantic
celestial bowl over the town she thereby cuts off from the rest of
humanity).
In
horror fiction, as in life, it seems we expect incidents, including
paranormal and supernatural ones, to be explained. Short story
writers, novelists, or screenwriters who fail to explain such
occurrences in emotionally and intellectually satisfying ways
disappoint readers or moviegoers at their own risk. There are a
wealth of stories to occupy our time; motivated by our need to know
the whys and wherefores of events, by our need for “cognitive
closure,” we're not likely to continue to read the work of writers
whose explanations of bizarre incidents is either nonexistent or too
ludicrous to satisfy us, especially after we've devoted hours to
their tales of terror.
To
be a satisfying horror writer, one need not be a scientist or a
philosopher (although at least a basic knowledge of both disciplines
can't hurt), but one must, at the very least, not disappoint one's
audience with a tacked-on, dues-ex-machina type of ending that
explains away, rather than explains, the strange phenomena that have
occurred throughout the story.
