A creepy portrait of a little girl that was bought and returned twice at a UK charity shop went viral for being “possibly cursed.”

But the shop manager told Insider that “nothing evil happened here” — and he wants people to stop calling him about it.

Steve Elledge, the manager of the HARC charity shop in Hastings, told Insider that the painting was first donated in a batch with about six or seven others. He said they were “all quite normal,” but that the girl in the now-viral painting “did have a very odd look about her.”

“We just thought, that’s nice. It had a bit of weight. It looked like it had quality, but it was a bit dark and all that,” he said, so they attached a price of £20. “We didn’t even think about it or anything. We just were like, yeah, we’ll stick that in the window, that’ll sell.”

A woman came in and was taken with the painting, Elledge said. The next day she came in, saying she couldn’t stop thinking about it and had to buy it.

“So she did,” Elledge said. "And then three days later she brought it back saying there’s some creepy aura about it. ‘Nothing good’s going to happen from this picture.’ "

Elledge said he offered her money back, but she told him to keep it and left. So the painting went back in the window, this time sporting a note saying, “Possibly cursed?”

It was “a humorous thing as none of us believed it,” Elledge said. He had no idea the creepy portrait would become an internet phenomenon.

“No one here thinks it’s a real cursed picture,” Elledge said (though he said his colleague put her hand up to say that she did believe in it).

A second woman then bought the painting, but brought it back three days later. She was “a bit distressed,” Elledge said, saying that “everything’s gone wrong.”

“I said, why don’t you destroy it?” he said. “She says, ‘No, that would make it worse.’”

  • Mex
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    610 months ago

    His curse is to be rung up constantly about the painting.

  • @o0joshua0o@lemmy.world
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    210 months ago

    This guy knows nothing about marketing. If he was smart, he would really play up the mystique around the painting. Tell callers it’s too fraught with mystical power to be discussed over the phone. Keep it locked up and shrouded, and only unveil it at designated times after giving people a solemn warning. I’ll bet it would fetch a very high price that way.

  • @GCanuck@lemmy.world
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    110 months ago

    Time to quadruple the price and sell it up as a cursed object. Shit, put it in a dark back room and sell tickets just to see it. Make them sign a disclaimer that any loss of humanity or soul will not be worth he fault of the owner.

    Dude’s sitting a minor fortune here with this nonsense. (Fortune being a nice dinner at a semi-fancy restaurant. Not retire in the countryside fortune.)