Innocuous items can be found all throughout our homes, but are they as harmless as we
think they are?
This simple garage-sale vase looks benign, but though it may not be inherently wicked,
can we be sure that it didn’t pass through malevolent hands or has some vile past?
Generally, we trust the things we surround ourselves with, but the following three tales
of innocent-looking cursed objects are going to have you questioning whether your stroke
of bad luck is a coincidence, or attached to something in your home.
You may question the validity behind the concept of curses, but that shouldn’t stop you from
determining which of these supernatural tales are inspired by fact… or fiction.
The line that divides the factual from the unreal has long since blurred, the tales we
once thought fantastical now implanted as truth.
To decipher verity from the imagined, you must break from the ordinary and consider
a universe where the outlandish prevails.
Can you expand your mind to see beyond our perceived reality?
Can you decide what's fact or fiction?
It was a proud day for Mike Stetson, but he’d soon find out that the opening of his very
own pizzeria would wind up being a nightmare he could never prepare for.
We take the innocence of those items around us for granted, not considering what may be
attached to them; and as Mike found out, curses come in all forms.
Story # 1: The First Dollar We’ve all seen them hanging behind the cash
wrap, that first dollar bill received once a new establishment is open for business.
For many, that bill is a symbol of luck and prosperity for their new business.
Others simply like to use it to remember their roots and where the business started.
Then there are men like Mike, owner of a pizzeria that opened in the early months of 2014 in
Hartford, Connecticut, who quickly found that not all dollar bills are alike.
Like so many others, Stetson displayed his first single behind the register, framed in
a cheap but workable picture frame.
He couldn’t remember who exactly had handed him the currency, but what he experienced
once it entered his establishment was something he would never forget.
It started mildly enough with the breakdown of a brand-new oven.
Covered under warranty and easily replaced, Mike thought nothing of it, but a day or two
later the replacement would break.
Mike, frustrated, chalked it up to the businesses’ growing pains, but the curious statement of
a patron one day had his mind drifting to something more sinister.
“There’s a heaviness in your restaurant.”
It wasn’t a customer Mike recognized, but there was a look in his eyes that seemed to
borderline madness.
Though he tried to continue business as normal, a third oven would fail, despite being a different
brand and installation team.
On the same night, a flame sparked within the oven and threatened to burn the pizzeria
down, while the alley behind it hosted a “drug-deal gone wrong.”
Both parties involved died in the shooting, one being killed instantly while the other
survived his mortal wounds into the early hours of the morning.
Patrons started to talk about Mike’s bad luck, some even suggesting that his restaurant
was cursed.
He thought nothing of it, allowed the locals to have their insane stories, and went about
business.
And then it happened.
Mike received a phone call at around 2:15 AM on December 5th.
By the time he reached the pizzeria, the fire had been put out, but the damage had been
done.
Though he expected initial reports to point to the oven, which he had replaced with an
entirely different brand, there was no indication of where the fire started or how.
Mike got his answer when he entered the scorched building and saw it laying there in near pristine
condition – the dollar bill, still framed in a blackened case, sitting atop the rubble
of the cash wrap.
Poor, poor Mike.
Can his misfortune be attributed to a lowly dollar bill?
Maybe business wasn’t doing well, so he burnt the restaurant down himself.
But then there’s the patron, the one that felt something “off” about his pizzeria.
Could he sense the negative vibes being emitted from the mysterious dollar bill?
We’ll have an answer for you at the end of this video, but for now, tell us what you’re
thinking in the comment section.
Next, we have an old, ugly, antique mirror - the perfect example of trash-to-treasure.
But as John and Marla find out, there may be something very strange about their new
household addition…
Story # 2: The Mirror John hated it.
The moment his wife, Marla, brought home that gaudy, golden frame and that imperfect glass,
it grated on him in a way that seemed insane.
It was a garage-sale find, somebody else’s garbage that now adorned his walls.
She said there was a story behind it, but he let her tell it while his mind drifted
to something more interesting.
Weeks later, he wished he had listened.
After the first few days, all seemed normal with the dirty glass and antiquated frame,
but one morning as he noted to himself just how ugly it was, something happened to the
glass.
The dirt that permanently coated the surface moved and parted as if to take a silhouette
of a shape.
He questioned his eyes and his own sanity as the outline of a small hand appeared in
front of him.
He would have chalked it up to an early morning after a night of minimal sleep, but he wasn’t
the only one to have seen something in the mirror.
It was three days before his wife had approached him and inquired about the unusualness about
her proud find, wondering if he, too, had tried to clean the liquid marks that dripped
down the glass.
Though he hadn’t seen such a residue, she was receptive to his visions of handprints,
a curiosity she noticed when she bought the mirror but thought it was a smudge from the
homeowner’s children.
She relayed the story to him again and this time, he listened.
He absorbed the mirror’s history, its original place in an old Louisiana plantation and the
tragedy of the family that once owned it.
He and his wife spoke in front of the mirror, and as she relayed the history, he swore he
could see the handprints forming again.
That’s when she got to the part where a mother and her two daughters were murdered.
John didn’t care to hear the rest, figuring he knew how it ended.
They let the mirror remain with them, at first wondering if their imaginations were getting
the best of them; but the occurrences wouldn’t stop, regardless of how much John and Marla
tried to reason with their minds, the handprints returned and that liquid stain refused to
dissipate.
It hadn’t been a month when Marla decided she couldn’t live with the possibility of
owning a haunted mirror and, with no objections from John, donated it to a local thrift store,
feeling a slight bit of pity, for whoever owns it next.
Was what John and Marla experiencing a case of an overactive imagination?
Could the dripping simply have been an imperfection on the old glass?
But what of the handprints?
Did John see them form right before his eyes or were they there this whole time, imprinted
by the hand of a former owner’s child?
We’d love to tell you whether you should believe this tale of the antiquated mirror,
but we have one more story to share.
For now, let us know what you think in the comments and then sit back for a story about
a painting so haunted and cursed that it’s known from around the world…
Or is it?
Story # 3: The Haunted Painting When Thomas came to the decision to become
a firefighter, he expected to hear some weird stories.
He’d heard of the lonely housewife that calls simply to garner the attention of the
firemen of her local house and the child that called in a panic because his ball got stuck
in the roof and his parents refused to help.
He never expected to have a weird story of his own to pass down, especially not within
the first few months of joining the Mountain’s Edge Firehouse.
The start of it came with a case of arson, a homeowner tired of paying his overprized
mortgage.
After the fire had been extinguished, Thomas took notice of something peculiar in the ruins
– an unscathed painting that had somehow survived the raging fire.
It was an unsettling depiction of a crying boy, a little too lifelike for his tastes.
It was peculiar that the painting hadn’t been burnt, especially considering the house
was a pile of ash on the ground, but that peculiarity didn’t quite hit him until a
month later.
When the call came in, the entire firehouse recognized the address as that of their colleague,
Frank.
Luckily, Frank nor his wife were home when the fire mysteriously sparked, but there was
something at the scene that Thomas recognized.
It was the painting, again found face down on the floor, seemingly untouched by the fire.
When Thomas finally did get a hold of Frank once the shock of his damaged property subsided
a little, he asked him about the creepy painting.
When Frank found it in the ruins of the first house, he knew his wife would like it and
so he removed it from the scene, a revelation that started to initiate discussions of curses
and misfortune.
Thomas tried to ignore the claims of a cursed painting but found it impossible to do so
when, two months after Frank’s fire, there was a third fire that the painting curiously
survived.
Frank swore he had the painting destroyed, yet there Thomas found it, coated in soot
and nothing else.
He attempted to rationalize the painting’s presence at three different fires but found
himself unable to do so.
His presence in the firehouse didn’t last much longer as he transferred to a quieter
side of town, one more suitable for a child to be raised in – one not somehow linked
to a creepy painting of a boy.
Could one painting cause so much trouble or was it just a matter of coincidence?
Was the first house really a case of arson, or maybe there is something sinister about
this painting of a crying boy?
But what about Frank’s home, clearly he wouldn’t have started the fire.
We’re dying to know what you have to say, so let us know in the comments.
Are you ready to find out if you can decipher between fact or fiction?
Let’s look back at tonight's three stories and find out which were born from reality
and which were fabrications of the imagination.
Where do you stand on the story of Mike and the cursed dollar bill?
Do you think there was some connection to reality in that tale?
If so, we’re sorry to say, but we fooled you on this one.
This story was a creation of our own minds.
Would be a tragedy to happen to a pizzeria though, no?
What about story # 2, the gold-trimmed mirror with a bit of a ghostly handprint problem?
We probably made that one up on our own, right?
There’s no way it was inspired by a true story – oh but it was.
The mirror in question is that of the Myrtle Plantation.
As the story goes, the 200-year-old painting is haunted by the spirits of the Woodruff
family’s matriarch and two daughters.
Their murderer was allegedly a slave named Chloe, who used an oleander-laced cake to
poison them.
Their souls are thought to be responsible for the handprints and dripping marks.
Finally, we can trust a story about a fireman finding a cursed painting, responsible for
the burning of three homes?
Believe it or not, you can.
The story was inspired by The Crying Boy, a portrait of an adolescent boy.
Legend has it the Giovanni Bragolin painting was found in multiple burned down houses across
Essex, England, completely unscathed by the fire.
While it’s believed the original was covered in a fire retardant, there has been no follow
up on the other copies of the eerie painting.
How well did you in tonight's video?
Did you look past the deception of our world and define the oft-blurred line that struggles
to separate lies from the truth?
Let us all know in the comment section below and should you find the urge to test your
perceptions again, be sure to subscribe and join us next time when we ask you to decide
what's fact... or fiction.