In 1972, an artist named Bill Stoneham painted a picture that would later become famous across the internet for all the wrong reasons. The painting shows a young boy standing beside a creepy life-sized doll. They are both in front of a glass door, and behind that door are many small hands pushing against the glass. Stoneham looked at an old photo of himself when he was five years old and used that as a guide for painting the boy.
The painting was shown at a gallery in Beverly Hills in 1974. An actor named John Marley bought it. He was in the movie The Godfather and is remembered for the famous horse head scene. A newspaper critic from the Los Angeles Times also looked at the painting and wrote nice things about it, as per Wikipedia. Stoneham explained that the door in his painting stands for the space between being awake and dreaming.
Strange things started happening to people who were close to the painting. The critic who reviewed it died in 1978. People think he may have killed himself. The man who owned the gallery died in 1981. Then John Marley died in 1984 after he had heart surgery. He had already sold the painting before he died. Stoneham said later that he thinks these deaths were probably just bad luck, but he admitted the painting does seem to affect people in weird ways.
So what happened to this supposedly cursed painting?
Nobody knew where the painting went for about 16 years after Marley died. Then in 2000, an older couple in California found it sitting in an abandoned brewery. They decided to sell it on eBay and wrote a warning saying it was haunted. According to what they wrote, their little girl told them the kids in the painting were getting into fights and coming into her bedroom when it was dark.
Her dad supposedly put up a camera that takes pictures when something moves, and he got photos that seemed to show the boy climbing out of the painting. The eBay post became hugely popular and more than 30,000 people looked at it. Many people who saw pictures of the painting on their computers said they had bad dreams afterward. Some said they felt sick or got a creepy feeling. Thirty people tried to buy it, and someone finally paid $1,025 for it.
“THE HANDS RESIST HIM”: THE HAUNTED PAINTING SAID TO COME TO LIFEThe eerie painting spooked many who just saw it. Those who owned it fared worse.
— Weird Darkness®️ (@WeirdDarkness) September 2, 2025
https://t.co/ZKR7MrgLVL pic.twitter.com/lTzKGTQDXe
A man named Kim Smith who ran an art gallery in Michigan bought it. He told websites about paranormal stuff that tons of people sent him emails. Some were prayers from religious people, and one was advice from a Native American spiritual leader about how to get rid of evil. For anyone who likes getting scared by art or movies, this painting is still talked about today as something that really gets under people’s skin, similar to the best horror movies that play on our fears.
All the attention on the internet made people interested in Stoneham again. He told everyone that the painting’s name came from a poem his first wife wrote about his life as an adopted kid. He ended up making more paintings that continued the story. He made one in 2004 called Resistance at the Threshold and another in 2012 called Threshold of Revelation.
One of our prized possessions @HauntedMuseum. “The Hands Invent Him” (Left) ORIGINAL painting by artist & mystic Bill Stoneham which shows us what’s inside the window to his other very famous “The Hands Resist Him” (Right). Stoneham’s art is very active w/ paranormal occurences. pic.twitter.com/U3RenBVkQ0
— Zak Bagans' The Haunted Museum (@hauntedmuseum) March 2, 2019
He also made one that shows what happened before the first painting. That one is now in a museum in Las Vegas that focuses on haunted things. Even with all the scary stories people tell, Stoneham thinks that people just have strong reactions to disturbing pictures. The way the painting mixes innocent childhood images with creepy stuff reminds some people of the best cosmic horror movies that make viewers feel uneasy about things they cannot understand.
