Haunted Paintings

Here is a short scary story from the My Haunted Life books….

In fact, paintings sometimes feature strongly in paranormal activity. I will give two additional examples to prove my point.

The first is a story that my father told me a couple of times about his childhood. His mother was a bonafide medium, and he grew up with strange goings on just as I did. In fact, this is why he was sympathetic to my dilemma. Apparently, he and his family had once temporarily lived in a flat on the top floor of a three-story building. On the day that they were moving out, he recalled watching the comings and goings of people moving furniture and belongings. Eventually, all was complete, and he and his mother stood outside of their front door as she locked the apartment one last time.

“But Mum, what about this picture here,” said my dad to his mother, pointing to the picture propped up against the wall at the top of the staircase.

His mother looked puzzled for a moment and then asked my dad who it was that he saw in that empty picture frame. My dad had always seen a little old man in the picture with eyes that followed him, and he was more than a little shocked to learn that there had never been any picture in that empty frame.

massive frame ghost furniture

 The second instance involves a week we spent in the family house of a friend in mid-Wales. He had inherited an estate complete with a sizable house by the coast. The house was 16th century, and on arrival, I knew it was haunted. There was no two ways about it. I could feel it, and it was with some trepidation that I knew we would spend a week here with friends and my parents.

The front entrance was into a large, gloomy and poorly lit hall. The darkness wasn’t made any better by the dark wood paneling covering the walls. Frankly, it was creepy.

Things began to happen almost immediately. My parents complained about a sort of ‘darkness’ in their room that pulled their bedclothes off. They swapped to another bedroom. Apparently, that one wasn’t much better either as the door kept opening by itself. Once again, nothing happened to me, though. I was in self-protect mode from the moment we arrived.

However, the creepiest incident yet again involved a portrait. Hanging halfway down the stairs in that creepy oak-paneled hall was the portrait of a man. To be honest, I barely noticed it, but our eldest son told us that when he had gone past it, its eyes followed him, and so he had stopped to look at it to see if he really was being watched by the painting. At this point, the head of the man in the portrait actually came out of the picture and spoke to him. Of course, he completely freaked out at this as you might expect. Whether this was just a young and fertile imagination we will never know; but to him, it was a real and terrifying experience.

The entire week was punctuated with strange incidents, and on the last evening, we had a dinner party outside with the housekeepers who lived nearby on the estate. The conversation naturally turned to the experiences we had had, and they listened nodding their heads. They had heard all of the stories before from other guests and experienced some themselves, too. The bedroom with the darkness, the portrait in the hall…

If you enjoyed this story you will love my creepy occult novel The Last Observer and also the My Haunted Life trilogy of short stories.

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