Bedtime Stories!

11. The Hands Resist Him

*It's a story of a haunted painting of a boy and a doll with a gun standing beside him...People claim that the painting would come alive in the night*

The photograph parents took of him when he was 5 years old wasn't worth a thousand words. It was worth a million nightmares.  

Stoneham regularly played outside with one of the girls from the neighborhood in his childhood. During one of these occasions, his parents had both kids pose in front of a glass door for a photograph. They couldn't have known that, two decades later, Stoneham would transform the mundane childhood photo into a terrifying painting that has become the stuff of Internet legend.   

It is called "The Hands Resist Him," and since Stoneham finished the work in 1974, three people associated with it have died.   

The year was 1972, and Stoneham's first wife Rhoann had just penned a poem called "Hands Resist Him." It was about Stoneham's experience of being adopted and never knowing his biological siblings. At the time, the couple lived in California. Stoneham was under contract with gallery owner Charles Feingarten to produce two paintings a month, for a fee of $200 each.  

Stoneham wrapped up his contract in 1974 with a large gallery show put on by Feingarten. There, "The Hands Resist Him" was purchased by actor John Marley, famous for his role as the movie producer in The Godfather—the character most people remember for a scene where he wakes up to find a severed horse's head in his bed.   

In 2000, the painting resurfaced in a listing on eBay. The family selling it wrote a horror story of a that reads like something out of a bad Stephen King knockoff:"WHEN WE RECEIVED THIS PAINTING, WE THOUGHT IT WAS REALLY GOOD ART,"

"AT THE TIME WE WONDERED A LITTLE WHY A SEEMINGLY PERFECTLY FINE PAINTING WOULD BE DISCARDED LIKE THAT. ( TODAY WE DON'T !!! ) ONE MORNING OUR 4 AND 1/2 YEAR OLD DAUGHTER CLAIMED, THAT THE CHILDREN IN THE PICTURE WERE FIGHTING, AND COMING INTO THE ROOM DURING THE NIGHT." this was their review.

The father of this young girl set up a motion-sensitive camera in her room to show his daughter there was nothing to be afraid of. Instead, he saw the boy crawl from the painting.

"The last two pictures purport to show the doll coming to life and using a 'gun' held in her hand to force the boy to leave the painting," 

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Do you have any paintings on the walls ?