Wake the Lakes “Weird and Wacky Wednesday” 9-20-23

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 Hastings Advice and Representation Centre in St. Leonards-on-Sea, England, told Insider.com 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, or about $25. “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.'”  Elledge told her she could have it back if she wanted to, and he again placed it in the window — now with a new note, reading, “She’s back!!! Sold twice and returned twice! Are you brave enough???” This infamous “cursed” portrait of a young woman, most recently bought by Zoe Elliott-Brown, 36 has now sold for $2,000 after it went up for auction on eBay earlier this month.