‘The Anguished Man’: the haunted painting made with the artist’s blood
A figure in front of a blue background. His skin a cracked, flaking orange. His face strangely expressionless save for a gaping mouth open in what looks like a scream. One eye socket barren, the other has a flash of white and green buried deep within it. No, this isn’t a description of my sleep paralysis demon, this is a piece of art.
Namely, a painting called, understandably, The Anguished Man. One that came into the possession of Sean Robinson, a YouTuber from Cumbria, who immediately decided to post a video about the painting to his YouTube channel, where he detailed everything he knew about the painting. It wasn’t all that much because the person he’d inherited it from, his grandmother, hadn’t known much about it either. What she did know, though, was deeply disturbing.
Because The Anguished Man is no ordinary oil painting, because according to Robinson’s grandmother, the paints used to create it were mixed with the artist’s own blood, and shortly after it was finished, the artist took his own life – Robinson’s grandmother would also never, ever tell him the identity of this mysterious painter, no matter how much he asked, and he asked a lot… I mean, you would if this monstrosity were hanging on your Grandma’s study in between the chess set and the geraniums, wouldn’t you?
That was the first video that Robinson produced, but the second was somewhat more distressing. He said that he’d set the painting up in the house he shared with his family (one can only imagine how the family meeting went to decide that). That pretty much from that moment on, the strangest things had started to happen. He’d heard crying in the house that hadn’t come from his family. The painting had inexplicably fallen from the wall it’d been hanging from. Sometimes he’d seen a mist form in front of the painting.
Most chilling of all, sometimes he’d seen the figure of a man in front of it, before he looked again and found no one there.
What exactly is The Anguished Man?
It all sounds like a pretty amazing story. The question then becomes whether that’s what The Anguished Man is at its core, or whether it’s a hoax. The two sound like they should be very similar, but looking at Robinson’s activity on social media, it becomes difficult to tell whether this is a Marble Hornets-style found footage web series or whether Robinson is actually trying to get us to believe that he lives with a haunted painting in his hallway.
The story deepened when Robinson posted a few other videos that seemed to depict the “paranormal activity” that surrounded the painting. Things like a door swinging shut on its own accord and the painting moving by itself. Y’know, the kind of things that could be easily explained by editing tricks and practical effects and would have been pretty cool had this been trying to tell a story. The line between a story and a con is pretty thin, especially when it comes to YouTube series, but the longer the charade was kept up, the more depressing it seemed to get.
Eventually, Robinson answered the question of whether this is a hoax or not by organising a seance that was documented for his YouTube channel. Any further queries can be comfortably answered by the most recent video on his channel, a delightful little video which features the story of The Anguished Man, “retold by AI”. Whatever the hell that means.
The painting’s still a decent prop, mind. Gotta give ’em that, I guess.