Artefacts, paintings, dolls and objects with reported paranormal associations.
Robert the Doll is a straw-stuffed cloth doll dressed in a sailor suit, measuring approximately one metre tall, currently displayed at the Fort East Martello Museum in Key West, Florida. The doll was the childhood companion of Robert Eugene Otto (1900–1974), a Key West artist known as "Gene." Oral tradition, documented from at least the early tw...
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The Myrtles Plantation mirror is a large antique mirror at the Myrtles Plantation in St. Francisville, Louisiana, alleged to be haunted by the trapped souls of Sara Woodruff and her children, who died in the house in the nineteenth century. The mirror is said to show handprints on its surface that cannot be cleaned off, and ghostly faces that ap...
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The Hope Diamond is a 45.52-carat deep blue diamond, one of the largest natural blue diamonds in the world, currently on permanent display at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C. It is one of the most famous gemstones in existence, valued at several hundred million dollars. Its reputation as a cursed stone — sai...
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The Hands Resist Him is an oil painting by artist Bill Stoneham (born 1947), completed in 1972, depicting a young boy and a female doll standing before a glass door through which disembodied hands press from the other side. The painting was listed on eBay in February 2000 with a description claiming that the figures in it moved at night, and t...
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The Dybbuk Box is a wine cabinet reportedly haunted by a dybbuk — a malevolent spirit from Jewish folklore said to be the dislocated soul of a dead person. The specific box at the centre of modern legend is a small wooden wine cabinet purportedly purchased at an estate sale in Portland, Oregon in 2001 and later sold on eBay with a lengthy acco...
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The Crying Boy paintings are a series of mass-produced prints depicting a weeping child — most commonly attributed to the Italian artist Bruno Amadio, who painted under the pseudonym "Giovanni Bragolin" — which became the focus of a major British tabloid panic in 1985–86. The Sun newspaper ran a series of stories claiming that the prints were ...
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Busby's Stoop Chair — also known as the "Dead Man's Chair" or "Busby's Chair" — is a seventeenth-century wooden chair alleged to cause the death of anyone who sits in it. It is associated with Thomas Busby, a convicted murderer hanged in Thirsk, North Yorkshire, England in 1702. The chair was formerly displayed at the Thirsk Museum, where it was...
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The Basano Vase is a carved silver vase alleged to be a fifteenth-century Italian artefact associated with a string of owner deaths. The legend claims it was found in 1988 near Napoli (Naples) in a wooden box, accompanied by a note warning that the vase had brought death to each of its owners since the fifteenth century. According to the account...
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Annabelle is a Raggedy Ann doll alleged to be haunted or demonically oppressed, currently housed in a glass case at the Warren's Occult Museum (now managed by Tony Spera) in Monroe, Connecticut. The doll was at the centre of a case investigated by paranormal researchers Ed and Lorraine Warren in 1970 and has since become one of the most famous a...
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The Anguished Man is a large oil painting — approximately 91 cm × 91 cm — depicting a distorted, screaming human face in dark, expressionistic tones. Its owner, Sean Robinson of Cumbria, England, claims that the painting has been in his family for approximately 25 years, stored in his grandmother's attic, and that since bringing it into his ho...
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