Eerie Paintings and Their Equally Eerie Interpretations

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.