Stories of haunted paintings have circulated for centuries, and we love these tales because they suggest that the creative process can conjure something far darker than Vantablack. Do some artworks hold evil energy—one that manifests in mysterious and nefarious ways to the detriment of those who come into contact with them? There’s no way to know for sure, though there are plenty of paintings in museums and private collections that are rumored to be cursed, inhabited by restless spirits or filled with malicious energy. Their effects range from merely unsettling to downright terrifying; those who spend time in the presence of haunted paintings report experiencing everything from subtle feelings of discomfort to full-blown paranormal experiences, misfortune and bodily harm.

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The tales they tell are classic: strings of unexplained bad luck, feelings of dread, eerie whispers, ghostly presences and bizarre phenomena. Sometimes just viewing a print or even a photo of a haunted painting can trigger supernatural occurrences. True believers accept that the emotional force of an artist or the intensity of the experiences of their subject can leave an indelible—and malevolent—mark on a work. Often, that mark is left by the artist’s own personal torment, but in other reportedly haunted paintings, dark rituals associated with a work’s creation imbue it with forces beyond our understanding.

Much like ghost stories, the idea that a painting can hold a curse or be haunted taps into our collective fear of death and the unknown. The artworks below have become objects of both fascination and fear, captivating those who are drawn to the darker side of the art world. Whether they are truly haunted or simply haunting is up to you to decide.

Munch readily acknowledged that his work was darkly personal in nature—”I paint not what I see, but what I saw,” he wrote of works like Death in the Sickroom. Munch’s painting of a child standing before her dead mother, unambiguously titled The Dead Mother, has a particularly haunting reputation. It has been in the collection of the Kunsthalle Bremen since 1918, but previous owners of the work reported that the eyes of the child seemed to follow them and that they heard the sound of sheets rustling or whispers from the painting. And sometimes, according to rumors, the girl disappears from the canvas.

Zdzisław Beksiński’s darkly dystopian surrealist paintings are ominous and unsettling in and of themselves—add in the fact that in 2005 the artist was murdered in his home and things get more interesting. An untitled work from 1972 is........

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