When I was in high school in the mid 1970’s my class decided to collect some of the local ghost stories. This wasn’t hard because much of our coastal South Carolina town was built in the early 1700’s and ghost stories were abundant. For the project, my partners and I decided to interview our history teacher, Mr. Hall, who lived in an old rice plantation house built in the early 1800’s that was reputed to be haunted. We went out to the house one Saturday afternoon to interview him.  After we had gathered the information on the household ghost (which most of us knew anyway), he and his daughter’s fiancée, Mr. Jones, decided to tell us another story. That story gave us the creepy-crawlies. From the perspective of adulthood, I think that perhaps the story was concocted for our benefit - both of those gentlemen would have delighted in this. I have changed the names, but the rest of the story is as it was told to us in about 1974.

The other two students and I were sitting in the library and Mr. Hall, the owner of the house, pointed to a picture on the wall. It was a very dark painting. You could see that there was a person in it, and a woodstove with a fire, but that was about it. All the details were lost in the darkness. He said that he and Mr. Jones had had an interesting experience with that picture.

Mr. Hall and the younger man, Mr. Jones, who would later become his son-in-law, were sitting in the library of the Halls’ historic home one evening after dinner. The room was a pleasant room, filled to the brim with books. There were comfortable chairs, a fireplace, and on the wall was a rather dark painting. The picture was dark enough that it was hard to make out anything in the picture; it seemed to be a man sitting by a wood stove, but that was all you could really see.

As the evening passed, Mr. Jones happened to look up at the painting. It seemed to be lighter and easier to see the subject than it usually was. He didn’t think much of it and went back to what he was doing. When he looked up again in a little bit, the painting was clearly brighter and the details were easier to see. He pointed this out to Mr. Hall, who was of course quite surprised. As the evening wore on, the painting changed still more. The grate in the woodstove in the painting began to glow as if there were truly a fire in it. A lit cigarette in the hand of the man in the picture began to glow, too. The subject’s face took on a strange brightness - the men could see his features as they had never been able to before, and things in the background of the picture were clear.

While they were telling us the story, we were all staring at it with wide eyes. Here we were in a house that was supposed to be haunted with two people we respected telling us that the picture we were looking at was haunted - or something. The only bit of atmosphere missing was a dark and stormy night.  I still remember how dark that picture was, and how eerie it looked even in broad daylight. The woodstove in the painting had only a dim orange glow to it and you really couldn’t see much in the picture at all.  

The grate of the stove in the picture glowed brighter and brighter, as did the cigarette in the man’s hand. Mr. Hall and Mr. Jones described the picture as becoming rather devilish-looking with the red glow from the stove in the picture. They could see all sorts of details they had never been able to see before, such a  clock in the background.

Finally, they grew too tired to stay up and watch the picture any longer, and went to bed. The next morning, they immediately went to see the picture only to find that it had returned to its original dark state.

We questioned the men at length, trying to come up with some rationale about why the picture would do such a thing. Was it the anniversary of the artist’s death? The subjects? Did it happen every year? They did not know of anything that would help explain the events - and we left with backward looks and goosebumps running down our spines.

Contributed by She Wolf - retelling (c) 2007