Lore 256: Cursed

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For the sculptor, it must have seemed like a dream job.

The city of Denver had offered him $300,000 for a single piece, which he'd have the freedom to design and build from scratch.

It would be a horse, but not just any horse.

A 32-foot-tall, 9,000-pound blue Mustang, to be specific, a symbol of Western transportation, to display outside the Denver International Airport.

It had been the artist Luis Jimenez's own idea.

He was a horse lover himself, after all, and the sculpture was modeled after his own beloved horse, Blackjack.

And so, in 1992, he went to work and the giant two-story Bronco began to manifest.

But it wasn't long before his dream commission became a nightmare.

Things started to go wrong right away.

First, Jimenez suffered a heart attack, but thankfully recovered.

Then his hands began to fail him and he had to undergo surgery on them, pushing the project back even further.

Meanwhile, Denver was getting impatient to the point where they actually tried to sue him for missing deadlines.

With all the setbacks, you'd almost think the universe was trying to stop Jimenez from working on the sculpture.

And perhaps he should have listened.

In 2006, it all came crashing down.

Literally, a section of the statue broke loose, pinning him to a support beam and severing an artery in his leg.

He bled to death there on his studio floor, killed by his own creation.

Today, Blucifer, as the giant blue horse has come to be called, stands exactly where it was supposed to all along, at the Denver airport.

It is bright blue, hence the name, and is reared up on its hind legs like one of the four horsemen of the apocalypse.

Oh, and its most notable feature?

Its eyes, which glow through the night with a demonic red light.

And it didn't take long, of course, for this horse of a different color to gain a certain reputation.

That is, people believed it to be cursed.

But the thing is, while a gigantic, murderous horse may be particularly striking when it comes to art, it's far from the only piece believed to be haunted.

I'm Aaron Mankey, and this is lore.

I know that I'm not the only one who finds ghost stories to be a little cozy, comforting even.

Maybe it's the reassurance that some part of us lives on after death.

Or perhaps it's that ghost stories tend to be full of recognizable, predictable tropes, familiar images that, despite the jump scares and the chills, leave us feeling like we know exactly what to expect.

Spider webs and faces at the window, mysterious footsteps down the long candlelit corridor, and of course, creepy paintings with eyes that follow you wherever you go.

Now, while spider webs and disembodied footsteps are obviously spooky, I can't help but wonder how paintings found their way onto this list.

What is it exactly about portraits that gives us the shivers?

Some think that it could be the uncanny valley, that phenomenon where we feel uneasy when presented with things that look almost human but aren't quite.

Usually the phrase refers to humanoid robots or hyper-realistic dolls, but it seems to me that a skillfully painted portrait could fall under the uncanny umbrella as well.

And then there's the unchanging quality of a portrait.

It's static, immortal even.

After all, mortality is natural, but immortality, that's the realm of monsters, vampires, and demons.

So it makes sense then that these paintings would feel right at home in a ghost story.

Take for example one particular painting hanging in Hotel Galvez in Galveston, Texas.

It depicts Spanish General Bernardo de Galvez, whose eyes are said to follow visitors wherever they go.

And if the stories are true, this might be more than just a mere optical illusion.

Born in 1746, Bernardo de Galvez was a Spanish military leader who fought on the American side during the Revolution.

The city of Galveston itself is named after him, so it's no surprise that there's a portrait of the guy displayed in the city.

This one though, happens to be a tiny bit haunted.

The painting hangs at the end of a long corridor on the ground floor of the hotel, and yes, his eyes do follow you.

But that's not all.

People have also seen a skull appear in the painting, only to vanish.

Others have reported feeling cold and claustrophobic in the painting's presence, and attempts to photograph it have come out clouded and blurry.

According to legend, one particularly polite guest asked permission of the painting to snap a photo, and once she did, the photograph came out clear.

Since then, it's become tradition to ask Galvez's consent for a pic, which, hey, is just common courtesy, right?

Now, paintings that follow you with their eyes are one thing, but then there are the paintings that try to gouge your eyes out.

Take, for example, Man Proposes God Disposes, a painting by English artist Edwin Lancier.

It depicts what looks like the collapsed mast of a ship, draped in tattered sails, along with two vicious polar bears ripping the wreck apart.

Oh, and scattered among the beasts are the remnants of human bones, picked clean.

According to Lanseer, the work was inspired by the tragedy of the Franklin expedition.

If you remember, in 1845, Sir John Franklin and a crew of 134 men set out to explore the Northwest Passage on two steam-powered iron-clad icebreakers called the HMS Erebus and the HMS Terror.

Less than three months later, though, they vanished without a trace.

It's a charming topic for a landscape painting, I know.

Anyway, the Royal Holloway College of London must have thought so because they acquired it to add to their newly growing art collection.

The idea was to buy pieces that would appeal to what was, at the time, an all-female student body.

Somehow a polar bear massacre made sense to them.

As soon as it was displayed in the college though, students who saw it started reporting strange symptoms like headaches and nightmares.

Some students were allegedly so disturbed by the painting that they even blamed failed tests and poor grades on its effects.

Today though, the painting is best known for one specific incident, or rather an alleged incident.

Like most urban legends, the details of the story change, taking place in either the 1920s, 1930s, or even the 1970s.

In any case, as the story goes, a student was unlucky enough to be seated next to the painting during his exams.

He tried to keep his eyes on his paper, but kept feeling the pull, calling him to glance at the painting.

And suddenly, without warning, he snapped and drove his sharpened exam pencil into his eye, killing himself instantly.

Scrawled on his exam paper, they say, were seven words, the polar bears made me do it.

So, is it true?

Probably not.

It's just a legend whispered to incoming students.

But still, Royal Holloway College figured that it's better to be safe than sorry.

So every year during exam season, season, the school takes precautions.

They take a piece of fabric and they cover up the painting.

They are iconic.

The Mona Lisa, starry night, girl with a pearl earring.

I only need to say their name and an image will appear in your mind.

And the same is true for another painting, The Scream.

Rather than depicting a smiling woman or a beautiful sky, the scream has a more unsettling energy.

It features a single hairless figure with hands raised in horror to its face as it utters a hollow, eternal scream.

And all around the figure, the world seems to be warping.

It's an intense work of art, filled with visceral anguish.

But shockingly, this isn't the artist Edvard Munch's most macabre work.

In fact, another much lesser-known piece of his is actually said to be haunted.

The Norwegian painter was born on December 12th of 1863, and from the start, his life was marked with tragedy.

As a young child, he watched his mother slowly waste away from tuberculosis, known back then as consumption.

When she died in 1868, little Edvard was only five years old.

But he had his siblings to keep him company, especially his favorite older sister Sophie.

At least for a while.

You see, Sophie died nine years later, also from tuberculosis.

A few years after that, his only brother died from pneumonia at the age of 30.

Edvard himself barely survived tuberculosis, so it's probably not a shock to hear that his father, a religious doctor, became obsessed with death, possibly a symptom of mental health struggles.

He talked about death constantly, even in front of his children, and frequently spoke about looking forward to his own death and entering the next life.

The young artist came to feel that death was always just around the corner, and he was plagued by haunting visions and nightmares.

Honestly, I think the same would be true for any of us if we had endured what Edvard had.

In his own words, illness and madness and death were the black angels that stood at my cradle.

And yet he had developed an antidote to all of this suffering.

You see, through the loss and the sickness, the fear and the sorrow, He was always painting.

And so into his art, he poured all of the pain he carried in life.

Men with faces downturned in sorrow, women with hollow, empty eyes, processions of people clad in black, pale and narrow as ghosts.

But of the thousands of works of art he created, one small set of paintings captured the many hauntings of his life more starkly than any other could.

It's called The Dead Mother, and if the legends are to be believed, those hauntings it captures might just be literal.

Edvard Munck completed a few versions of the painting between 1897 and and 1900.

The Dead Mother, Death and the Child, The Dead Mother and the Child.

The titles varied, but all of the works shared the same motif.

A dead or dying woman lying in a bed.

Her cheeks are sunken, and her skin is as flat and colorless as the sheets of her bed.

Beside her, facing the viewer, a figure stands with its back to the corpse.

Like the scream, this person also holds their hands to their face in horror.

Their blue eyes are wide and blank, as if processing something unfathomable.

But unlike the scream, this is no amorphous, characterless person.

No, this figure is a child with blonde hair and a little dress, sometimes red, sometimes white.

It's the image of a child confronted with the horrifying reality that their mother is dead.

Now, most historians agree that the dead woman in the painting represents Monk's own mother and that the child is either his sister Sophie or the artist himself.

And honestly, if you've ever lost someone you love, it's hard to look at the painting without feeling a kind of kinship with the child, lost and afraid in the wake of a terrible new reality.

And I mentioned that the painting might be haunted.

So this is what I can tell you.

Those who have seen the painting in person claim that the child's eyes follow you no matter where you go, which, yes, could be an optical illusion.

But it's harder to explain the rustling sound heard emanating from the painting, even in rooms with with no wind or breeze.

And this rustling, they say, doesn't sound like canvas.

No, it sounds more like the fabric of bedsheets moving over a dying woman.

And the most startling of all, some claim that the child will occasionally vanish from the painting altogether, only to reappear later as if nothing has changed.

Naturally, the stories leave us with that one obvious question, is the painting haunted?

It isn't often that we get answers when it comes to things like that.

But in this case, I can definitively say yes.

But whether the dead mother is haunted by actual ghosts or by the artist's intense memories of sorrow and suffering is something that you'll have to decide for yourself.

Edvard Munck was undoubtedly a master.

The Scream, his most famous work, even sold for nearly $200 million back in 2012, the highest price ever fetched at auction for a piece of art at the time.

But art doesn't have to be rare and expensive to be cursed.

After all, what's more threatening than a cursed painting, which hangs in almost every home in a country?

Throughout the 1950s, 60s, and 70s, young couples and working-class families in England would often decorate their homes with mass-printed copies of paintings sold at department stores.

And you're probably envisioning images of the seaside or sheep grazing by a small cottage, something pastoral and idyllic, right?

But it turns out one of the most popular motifs in these prints was actually children, and not just any children.

No, these kids were sobbing.

That's right, people adorned their walls with portraits of weeping children.

There were at least five variations of the print known as The Crying Boy and a couple featuring girls too.

And they fall somewhere between kitschy and incredibly creepy.

But if the legends are true, these tear-stained tots could do a lot more than just give you shivers.

They might also burn down your house.

The year was 1985.

The Sun, the most famous tabloid in the UK at the time, was in a brutal competition with its rival, The Daily Mirror.

You see, they needed more readers, but it would take a story with some real pizzazz to reel them in.

in, a story that no other paper was willing to print, one that would have them scrambling for more.

So, it must have felt like hitting the jackpot when the Sun found out about Ron and Mae Hall.

In early September of 1985, the Halls fled their beloved home of 27 years.

Why?

Well, a fire had broken out in the kitchen, and to the couple's horror, the flames spread fast.

What had begun as a simple stovetop fire had grown into a raging inferno, swallowing everything in sight.

There was no hope of stopping it, so they ran.

Luckily, no one was harmed, but the entire first floor of their home was destroyed.

Well, almost all of it.

You see, something did escape the flames.

It was a painting, or rather a print.

And that's right, while the rest of the downstairs had been reduced to ash, a single copy of the crying boy had survived unscathed.

Oh, and the cherry on top?

Mary Hall blamed the portrait itself for the fire.

The crying boy, she insisted, was cursed.

When the son heard all of this, they didn't see tragedy.

They saw dollar signs, and the reporters drove in for some good old-fashioned sleuthing.

In doing so, they discovered something even stranger than they ever could have hoped for.

It just so happened that Ron Hall's brother Peter was a firefighter.

And when Peter had told his colleagues about the family misfortune, a fellow firefighter named Alan Wilkinson couldn't help but speak up.

Why?

Well, because Alan had seen this sort of thing before.

Incredibly, this wasn't the first time a crying boy print had been found unharmed in a burned house.

In fact, he claimed to have personally tallied a whopping 50 cases between 1973 and 1985.

A cursed portrait that not only burns down houses but happens to be hanging right in the homes of many of their readers?

Well, it was too good to be true as far as the sun was concerned.

They had found their big lead.

They ran Ron and May's story with the headline, Tears for Fears, the portrait that firemen claim is cursed.

And from there, chaos broke out.

Immediately, they were flooded with calls and letters from readers with stories of their own.

One woman in North Yorkshire said that she, her sister-in-law, and a friend had all experienced fires shortly after buying a crying boy print.

Another woman in Surrey claimed that six months after buying a copy, her home was destroyed and all of her paintings burned.

Except, of course, for that one.

Another man claimed that he had destroyed the print after a fire had left his wife and three children hospitalized, only to return home to find it back on the wall, completely unharmed.

And he wasn't the only one who wrote in about attempts to burn the prints, only to be horrified when the images refused to burn.

Some rumors even claimed that the fires could only be quenched by the child's tears themselves.

As stories emerged, so did rumors about the painting's origins.

Roy Vickery, Secretary of Folklore Society, suggested that perhaps the painter had mistreated or harmed the child model in order to get him to cry for the painting.

All these fires could be a child's curse, he said, his way of getting revenge.

Mind you, these were not organic confessions.

The Sun went looking for them.

Before acquiring Vickery's perfect quote, they had approached another folklorist, Georgina Boyce, who didn't lean into that sensationalized curse stuff the way that they hoped, so they dropped her from the article.

And all those stories from readers?

Well, the paper had put out a call soliciting readers to submit their experiences, and with it, a chance to be published.

It seems that the Sun had single-handedly created a legend.

But they couldn't keep it up forever.

The public's interest would only last so long after all.

And so like any good story, the legend of the crying boy needed one last thing.

a grand finale.

The Sun put out one final request to readers.

If you send us your crying boy portraits, the paper promised, we'll destroy them for you.

Suddenly, hundreds of paintings were sailing through the postal service, all with the same final destination.

The newsroom was soon overwhelmed with crying boys, cluttering cupboards, stacked on desks, teetering in piles on the floor.

Before they knew it, the sun had acquired at least 2,500 of them.

The time for the grand finale had arrived.

Staff from the paper filled two large vans with the paintings, drove them out to a safe location, and then, after stacking them into a towering pyre, lit them on fire.

This time, the paintings burned just fine.

Finally, the sun proclaimed.

The curse was broken.

The human imagination is an incredible thing.

It's given us operas and architecture, sonnets and sculpture, and of course, countless paintings.

Yes, our ability to envision the world not only as it is, but as it could be has changed the very fabric of history.

But there is another side to that coin.

Just as we're capable of imagining incredible beauty, we're also able to dream up unspeakable horrors.

And look, whether or not you buy into the idea of ghosts and curses, it's easy to see how an act act of imagination could lead people to believe these works of art are haunted.

They're disturbing images, after all.

And when a newspaper insists that these unsettling prints might just burn down your home, well, that's a hard thought to shake.

And I get it.

When a story like this shows up as an obvious tabloid money-making scheme, the instinct is to dismiss it out of hand.

But while the sun may have been painting with broad strokes, no pun intended, they might have been onto something as well.

Because, you see, the crying boy did have a real tendency to survive house fires, but not necessarily because it was cursed.

It turns out these prints were coated with a fireproof lacquer and printed on dense compressed board.

In other words, they were super difficult to burn.

But that still begs the question, why were so many houses containing the crying boy burning down in the first place?

Well, for that answer, we have to remember who the buyers were.

These were inexpensive prints that were popular among working class households.

In fact, the town where Ron and Mae Hall had lived, as well as a number of other families affected by the so-called curse, was a working class mining town.

In other words, the people who tended to own these paintings were primarily from lower income brackets.

And as we know from countless other stories throughout history, the safety codes in less moneyed areas tended to be a bit lacking.

So maybe, just maybe, the fires had nothing to do with the paintings at all.

Perhaps they were rooted in a popular fad, economic disparity, and cheaper building materials.

What if the homes those paintings hung in were the real danger to the people who lived there, not the art they seemed to like?

Which, at the end of the day, is a far more frightening kind of curse.

If macabre paintings and suspicious sculptures make you uneasy, maybe it would help to break them down into ingredients: paint, wood, canvas, and plaster, simple materials that aren't half as terrifying as the sum of their parts.

But what happens when an artist chooses a more bizarre material to work with?

Because I have one more story left to tell you that explores just such a thing.

Stick around through this brief sponsor break to hear all about it.

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From the outside, it's nothing special.

Sitting quietly in the small town of Kutnohora in the Czech Republic, about an hour's train ride outside of Prague, the Church of All Saints looks like your typical old chapel.

Gray Greystone walls, stained glass windows set in Gothic arches, steeple towers, and a small cemetery out back.

But the inside, well, that's another matter, because stepping through the entrance feels like a descent into hell.

You see, the Church of All Saints is known more commonly by another name, the Bone Church, and it won't take you long to figure out why.

According to the legend, it all began back in 1278.

That was the year the king decided to send one of the local abbots on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem.

Maybe it was to reward the abbot's good work, or perhaps the king just thought the guy was due for a vacation.

Whatever the reason, this abbot, Henry, headed off, and like any good tourist, he returned home with a few souvenirs.

He had decided to fill his bags with something extra special.

Dirt.

Yes, actual dirt.

And this wasn't just any dirt.

No, Henry had gathered soil from none other than Golgotha, the site of the crucifixion of Christ.

And when he got back, he sprinkled this holy ground all over his his own abbey's cemetery.

When word got out, people flocked to the abbey by the tens of thousands.

They were obsessed with the idea that some of the holy land was right there in Bohemia.

Now, if you're picturing Woodstock, you'll need to adjust your mental image.

This was a pretty quiet crowd.

Very quiet.

You see, the thousands of people who flooded Sedlick burial grounds were dead.

Everyone wanted to bury their deceased loved ones in this little patch of holy ground.

And so the cemetery filled up faster than anywhere else else in the area.

And then it kept up filling some more.

Later on in the 14th century, the Black Death arrived.

Then in the 15th century, the Hussite Wars ravaged the area.

And both events led to more and more dead bodies.

So many, in fact, that they were forced to bury those corpses in mass graves in the Sedlik Cemetery.

By 1511 though, there wasn't enough room for bodies to fit into the ground, and so they decided to dig them up.

Now, the legend says that it was a half-blind monk who had been tasked with gathering and stacking the remains inside an ossuary, after which his sight was magically restored.

And while that story may or may not be true, his work definitely is, because today the Sedlik Ossuary at the Church of All Saints contains between 40,000 and 70,000 human skeletons, all on full display.

But that wasn't always the case.

Apparently they were stored in the church basement for centuries until 1870 when a wood carver named Frantischek Rindt was tasked with arranging the bones.

And when I say that this guy arranged the bones, well, that might be an understatement, because I'm telling you, he went all out.

There is an eight-foot chandelier made of human bones dangling from the ceiling.

A crow made of bones pecking at a real human skull.

There are towering pillars of skulls topped with statues of cherubs holding golden horns.

There's even a massive coat of arms on one wall depicting the Schwarzenberg family, the same family that commissioned Rind's work.

Oh, and like any artist, Rindt signed his creation by writing his name in, that's right, human bones.

It sounds macabre, I know, but for those who visit the ossuary, the artist's intention is clear.

All of these people had lives.

They baked bread, they danced, they tilled their land and loved each other and suffered and labored, and at the end of it all, they died.

Whatever their differences had been in life, they were all brought here together to the ossuary, one bone indistinguishable from the next.

There in the church, in the eyes of God, all had become equal.

This episode of Lore was produced by me, Aaron Mankey, and was written and researched by Jenna Rose Nethercott with music by Chad Lawson.

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