Cursed Objects

Excellent idea for a thread, well done.

Egyptian curses in particular interest me, as there have been so many stories, along with their supposed ability to do magic, that it's a bit unsettling. Love it!

reply to post by AnteBellum


Great post the crying boy photo is so intense

reply to post by AnteBellum


Actually the Crying Boy picture has a very easy explanation, that was actually tested and proven plausible (by somebody, somewhere...yeah I forget who...too lazy to Google it at the moment) Apparently most all of these paintings were hung by a small string. The tests found that this was the first thing to burn, making the picture fall to the ground (generally face down). Seeing as how heat rises, the ground was often the last place to burn....meaning that usually the painting would remain more or less untouched.

Jack, Micky and Ryan like this thread. And I do too.

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Don´t forget Chuck Norri´s Hat

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I did not know what Robert the Doll was so I googled it and having seen the pictures I can't imagine why in earth a child or his parents would have kept, let alone accepted a gift so hideously creepy. And who would be so nasty as to create such a monstrosity and inflict it on an innocent child? Disgruntled servant? There is no excuse.

I had a soft cloth bodied doll with a vinyl face and rooted plastic hair I got from Japan when I was a kid. She was cute but at night her face looked less benign somehow and she would slowly straighten up and slide off her shelf and onto the floor. I slept with the low watt light on and I would watch her do that. It was an eerie thing to watch. I took it as a test of nerve to go pick her up and put her back on the shelf. I kept imagining one night she was going to thrash around and resist. It never mattered how hard I wedged her back onto the shelf, she would move slowly from a sitting position to straight and slide down again. It was pure stubbornness on my part that I didn't find another spot for her. I would wake up and find her on the floor. She never seemed to fall off during the day for some reason.

I wasn't afraid because I'd seen weirder things as a child that seemed more paranormal than that. I figured the weight of her fat vinyl head was causing it. I didn't learn until I threw her out a few years later when her plastic hair got melty and sticky that my father was scared to death of her. When he found out I was throwing the doll out he got two garbage bags and tied a tight knot into them and personally shoved her into the garbage can and smashed the lid down hard. He never has told me why.

Your post made consider the possibility that in addition to things being detrimental to our health, just by their presence, why couldn't there be things that are beneficial just by their presence? Would it not be the same concept, except the polar opposite?

My mom bought a beatiful glass elephant from my neighbors estate sale who had died. Their family member said it was cursed and not to buy it. But my mom did not believing it.

A week or so after my dad got into a car crash. Something else bad happened a few weeks after that, I can't remember exactly.

Then my mom gave it to my grandmother and she had a heart attack shortly after. My mom told my grandma to throw it away and she did.

She swore it was cursed, I always told her it was just a coincidence though. I'm more of a skeptic.

ive never gotten a "feeling" from a picture

im not some art snob

BUT

that crying boy photo

creeped me out, instant full body goosebumps and just instinctively thought it was the devil

im not very superstitious but if anyone EVER gave me one of those, id bug out hard


its incredibly creepy because the moment i 1st saw it i got the creeps and then everytime i look at it, instant creeps, stopping looking at it, creeps calm down, look at it again, creeped out to the max

creeeeeepy picture, destroy all you see


edited to add i wanna know more about the titanic mummy and the diamonds, its interesting such large powers each have their own

All very interesting. The trails of blood and death left by "valuable" artifacts such as jewels and ancient relics are to be expected given human nature. They hardly need a curse laid upon them; people will slaughter each other over them regardless. Not that I am saying there aren't curses at work with some of them.
But I find the tales of strangeness that follow otherwise mundane objects such as dolls or unknown artwork to be much more fascinating; the "greed" factor can be discounted as a likely source of the mayhem.

I have personal experience with an odd, unknown painting...it didn't engage in arson, but it was weird even so. A friend of mine assisted his blind grandmother in locating and purchasing a house. The place was around fifty years old, in excellent condition, and had a long list of previous owners. We never could find if there was a single reason for so much turnover of ownership, but people rarely seemed to live there long. If the place was "haunted" it was of a benign variety, I admit the house was overly noisy at night and there were frequent odd drafts or puffs of air that were noticeably different in temperature(both hot and cold) than the surrounding still air, but given the house's age those things were easy to discount in theory, if not in practice.
There was, however, this painting in the attic. My friend told me about it one night when we stayed over after dinner and were watching a movie on the TV in the room set aside for him by his grandmother. I commented on the various soft noises coming from the ceiling, saying we should set some traps or get some poison or otherwise dispose of what sounded like a rodent infestation in the attic; an old blind lady could not possibly be at ease in a house full of rats or mice that she can hear but not see. After a brief silence, my friend stated flatly that there was nothing "of concern" in the attic.
The way his face and voice went to MIB Neutral when saying this naturally peaked my interest. I bugged him about it for a few minutes, finally he told me that shortly after purchasing the place, he had checked the attic space to see if it would be suitable for long term storage of stuff his grandmother didn't necessarily use but didn't want to throw away. When he went up there, he found a large, cavernous space, dry and unremarkable, very much suited to long term storage. It was completely empty except for one thing: leaning against a vertical support and just out of arm's reach from the trapdoor entry, there was a mid-sized painting of the head and upper torso of a young girl.
The painting was in no way sinister or otherwise "creepy looking." My friend said he remembered thinking it was a little strange; mainly because it was just so unexpected. People abandon boxes of junk in attics, not paintings of pretty young girls. Only later did it occur to him that, seeing as how the attic was totally empty aside from the painting, either a)The painting had been the only thing stored up there, which is strange, or b)There had been other stuff stored up there and subsequently removed, and the painting had been purposefully left behind, because it could hardly be missed by accident, which is also strange.
When he told his grandmother of his find, she immediately recommended they get rid of it. He told me she said "Little girls ought not be left in the dark," but neither should they keep something so intimately personal as a hand-painted portrait that had been abandoned for unknown reasons. My friend, reluctant to actually personally destroy the painting, put it out on the curb next to the trash, leaning up and set face-out, hoping maybe some passerby would take it instead of the guys in the smelly truck. Either way, trash day came and went, and several weeks went by and he forgot all about the painting.
Until one day his grandmother told him there were several boxes in her room that she had made ready for storage in the attic. When he brought the first of them up the ladder and through the trapdoor, he saw the painting leaning in its spot against the upright, facing him.
I'm sure you all saw that coming. I did too when he was telling me the story. I was still fascinated, however, and I asked him what he did then, and where was the painting now?
"I tried a couple more times to get rid of it. The last time, I took it to the park, folded it into one of the little BBQ grills they have there, and set it on fire. I watched it burn to ash. The next time I went up there for grandma, it was there again." He paused, then said, "Now, when she asks me to get something from the attic, or put something there, the place I actually go is the little shed in the back yard."
A bit more Q&A revealed that nothing actually scary or menacing or potentially dangerous had occurred; despite being repeatedly thrown away and even burned, whatever was behind this phenomenon had not turned mean. My friend's fear or aversion was based purely on the weird-factor; paintings that don't stay thrown away are to be avoided. I pointed this out to him and thereby convinced him to let me go up there and have a look at it myself.
The painting was there, as described. It was a small to midsized portrait, say 18x24 inches (46x61cm), done by a fairly talented amature, on a hard, stiff media, somewhat like very dense cardboard and with a surface texture like rough canvas. It was of a girl in her preteens, say between nine and twelve years of age, smiling slightly and very pretty, with blond hair and a blue dress in styles somewhat old-fashioned, like you would expect in some of the earlier color photographs. There was no background, as though maybe the painting was incomplete...there was only a hint of shading around her in an oval shape, to give contrast to the mostly light colors used to paint her. Outside of that oval, the canvas board was its original off-white. That was really the only visually odd thing about the painting; the effect made it look as though she were sort of floating in a white void.

This has become much longer than I originally anticipated, so to cut a long story short: I took the painting with me and stashed it in my closet at my house. Originally I had planned to keep it out somewhere but eventually had to put it away for the simple reason that I kept finding myself staring at it, and in order to do things like study or read or fold clothes, I had to keep it out of sight. And yes, eventually it turned back up in the attic, whereupon I checked my closet and it was gone from there. I wanted to do some more experimenting, a LOT more actually, but my friend said no because the noises from the attic had increased a lot when I had the picture and his grandmother had asked him if he would set some rat traps in the attic. He had never told her anything about the painting coming back, as far as she was concerned it had been taken care of the day she told him to get rid of it, and he did not want to disabuse her of this notion. Rat traps wouldn't work for the noises, which would lead to questions he didn't want to answer; that was the end of that. As far as I know, it's still up there.

My apologies for the overlong post.

reply to post by General.Lee


Excellent point!

Energy associated with these objects tends to stem from negative instances but I see it as you mentioned also.
It is like an equalizer in a stereo. one the top is positive energy on the bottom is negative. If it takes an extreme negative instance to create a so called curse on things the same would have to be true in reciprocal for the other spectrum - positive charms!

reply to post by Tsurugi


Maybe the girl in the photo is some sort of guardian for the house. Goodness only knows how to explain how a picture can relocate itself, though.

I had this subject on my mind and my post specifically was bugging me so I called my dad and asked him about his reaction to my doll. He says he did tell me years ago why he freaked out, but I must have forgotten. It's nothing supernatural. He says the doll did do its creepy fall down act in the daytime, after all. He says my mom would put it back and just not mention it. He says a couple of times he heard slithering noises coming from my room when I was out and he went in and saw the doll move off the shelf as I had described. My dad was a vet and says going into my room to root out that noise reminded him too much of a situation in Viet Nam where a guard fell asleep and didn't check in and my dad had to stealthily go in and make sure the enemy hadn't taken the guy out and was lurking to kill him next. He said the doll made a stealthy rustling noise reminiscent of what he heard coming from the guard area he was trying to check. He said the flashback to that situation coupled with watching the doll look just plain creepy doing its slide off the shelf was enough to make him want it out of the house, but he never pushed me into throwing it out because he felt silly letting it get to him.

I really can't remember him telling me this years ago. I think he meant to but didn't and thought he did. But my memory isn't perfect, so who knows. While the doll turned out to be nothing more than merely creepy, I do have a more inexplicable and weird story about a stuffed bear I'll share next time. It made me really wonder about the transference of human energies and connections to inanimate objects. But no, it's not a scary story. Just odd.

Thanks for the great posts everyone!



Given one or two comments here I started a new thread:
ATS: Charmed Objects

This is an awesome thread. If you've never heard of Annabelle the haunted Raggedy Ann doll google it. Super creepy. Haunted/cursed/possessed dolls have always fascinated and terrified me.

reply to post by SheeplFlavoredAgain


In defense of your dad, I can tell you that just reading what you wrote about what he said gave me the creeps and raised goosebumps on my arms. Dolls have always, always creeped me out. The more "lifelike" they are, the more they creep me out. Dunno why.

Also, interesting that you called your dad, because I went and called my friend about the painting. We've not seen each other in a couple years and he sounded a little less than thrilled to have me call out of the blue and ask about his least favorite subject. He said he didn't know if the painting was still up in the attic because he hasn't checked since it apparently left my closet to return to his grandmother's house. After a brief pause, he told me he knew she wasn't evil or anything, but the painting had some strange effect of locking your eyes to it(as I noted in my story), and he just couldn't stand the idea of standing there on the ladder to the attic, staring helplessly at the damn painting, while the little girl--if that's what it really is--approached him from behind.

That also raised goosebumps. Hello, nightlight.

caught this article on my homepage and it reminded me of this amazing and thought provoking thread x)

your comment about positively charmed objects is an interesting thought experiment. imagine if a loving group of friends came together and each made simple necklace or bracelet and held hands in a circle around the object, and make a smaller circle around the object of lit white candles and concentrated deep loving thoughts and protection into the accessories, what they could produce? x)