The Hands Resist Him…the temptation to strangle stupid people.

In this world we live, there are many strange things that occur. Things that go bump in the night, things that are unexplained…dogs and cats living together mass hysteria,  sorry had a Ghostbusters moment there. Anyways, I am talking about haunted/cursed items and the stories connected with them. Some famous cursed/haunted items with great notoriety are the Hope Diamond, King Tut’s Tomb & the Poltergeist Movies. Some of you may remember a TV  show by the name of Friday the 13^th, not to be connected to the movies in anyway what so ever, but it was a good show and the premise was that an antique dealer made a deal with the devil to sell cursed antiques. The dealer died and so his relatives and a friend went around trying to get the cursed items back that were sold in order to break the curse on them. It seems a bit farfetched, but to this day we still believe in cursed/haunted objects.

The object I am going to investigate is the painting called The Hands Resist Him, which is supposedly haunted/cursed to anyone who gazes upon it. The painting itself, when you first see it, is kind of creepy with a little boy standing in front of a door with hands all pressed upon it while standing next to a doll like little girl with jointed limbs. She stands there holding a dry cell battery, which some people think is a gun, and according to the artist she is actually the little boy’s guide through life while the hands pressed on the door behind the little boy represent paths he may choose in life, not sure how hands equal paths in life, but I’ll go with it for the sake of argument.

Some of the back story of this picture is it was sold on ebay in February of 2000 for over $1000 to an art gallery in Michigan. The gallery in which the painting was first displayed both the owner and the art critic who reviewed the painting died within the same year as one another.  As well, some of the story is that the little boy and girl would come out of the painting at night and cause havoc to those in possession of the painting. And if you gaze upon the painting in real life or even a picture of it on the internet you can get a strange sensation and actually have paranormal activity occur around you.

Now my good friend Jason told me about this little urban legend the other day, as he knows I am very much into debunking these kinds of things, and I felt compelled to do some research and investigate this legend. Now let me say that I am very much into Ghost Hunting and the paranormal, but I like to approach it from a logical common sense aspect and try to debunk and whatever I can’t debunk well then who knows…there may in fact be something to the story.

So I set-up the experiment with my co-host in crime Rob Dimension and we would look at the picture on the internet while having EMF, K2, video and voice recorders going in order to see if we could catch some paranormal activity that is said to accompany the painting. Please check out the video below to see the experiment and any evidence caught:

 

Now in the debunking of this from a research side is that the artist, from what I can find out about him, was that he wasn’t into witchcraft and did not paint this picture under a distressed fashion. So then why and how did this painting, which is becoming an urban myth, get such a story attached to it? Well as I looked into this a bit more it seems it was for money, gee what a shocker there. The painting was not selling on ebay for awhile and so the seller created such a fascinating story in which to sell the painting and got out and around the internet, and it worked too. In fact if you click this link it will take you to ebays write-up on buying haunted/cursed objects off their site: http://reviews.ebay.com/A-Guide-to-Buying-Haunted-Items_W0QQugidZ10000000000778547

Is this such a despicable thing to do to people in order to generate sales by scamming them into believing something that isn’t true…the answer to this questions is yes, yes it is wrong. However it’s been going on for centuries. During the days after the crucifixion of Christ people would claim to be selling parts of the cross or even the tip of the spear that pierced his side, which can be seen in the British museum. What I’m getting at is that the sale of fake cursed/haunted items is and will always be going on, are there real haunted/cursed items in the world, I believe there are, but you need to be aware of the fakes out there and there are a lot of them. Just do a google search and you can find tons of sites/people selling such items and I doubt there are any true cursed/haunted items because if there are would you really be selling it or just trying to get it away from you as fast as possible? If I had a cursed spatula that would make any food it touched taste burnt and it made the walls of my house bleed I am not going to post a sale for it on ebay and wait for the highest bidder, I’m either taking it to a church to get exorcised or I’m burning it & burying it in the backyard of my neighbor.

It’s amazing how we as people desperately want to believe something is haunted/cursed when nine times out of ten there is a perfectly logical explanation for the events surrounding it. As for that 1% of the time that the object really is haunted/cursed then my suggestion to you is to run…run fast and run far.

Be safe and don’t always believe what you hear.

John Cannon
Follow... @JohnCannonTBS