r/UnexplainedPhenomena7

When I was 13 and my little sister was 11, our mom took us to a yard sale in our small town. While we were looking through furniture and old pictures, we found a painting of a girl who looked eerily similar to me. She had the same general features, except she had darker hair, extremely pale skin, completely black eyes, and a thin, slit-like scar underneath her left eye.

My mom knew I loved spooky shit, so she asked if I wanted it as we flipped it over. The painting had been made in the same month and year I was born, and its title was my middle name. My sister and I immediately felt uncomfortable. My mom, however, was apparently completely unfazed by the haunted-doppelgänger situation and bought it for me anyway.

My sister and I had shared a bedroom our entire lives, so I hung it on our wall when we got home. Our dog, Bubbles, hated it. Whenever she came into our room, she would stare at it, growl, and act completely on edge.

That first night, my sister begged me to put it in the closet because it creeped her out. Truthfully, it creeped me as well, but that was also exactly why 13-year-old me liked it. Apparently, my survival instincts hadn’t developed yet.

I put it in the closet, and that’s when things started happening. For the next two weeks, we heard blood-curdling screams coming from the closet.

My dad had no idea any of this was happening. I honestly don’t think he knows even now. My sister and I kept trying to convince ourselves we were imagining things, but our dog would bark and freak out, too.

Eventually, my sister was so scared that she went to stay with our cousin. When she came home, she told me she had a plan: we were going to destroy the fucking thing.

By this point, I wasn’t arguing. We ripped the painting into pieces, gathered every scrap we could find, and took them outside to burn them. We stood there watching until there was basically nothing left.

Then I went back inside, and when I walked into our room, sitting on my bed was the eye from the painting. The black eye with the scar underneath it. I remember dropping to my knees because I could suddenly hear those screams again, except this time they were deafening. Then I felt what too me seemed to be blood coming from my eyes, ears, nose, and mouth. My sister came running into the room with our dog and asked me what was wrong. The second she came in, everything stopped. There was no blood, no screaming, nothing.

Later that night, I swear I saw my grandmother come into our room and tell me everything was going to be okay. She had died when I was two years old. After that, it all stopped. We moved not long afterward. That painting wasn’t the only strange thing we experienced in that house, but we haven’t experienced anything like those incidents since moving away.

There was, however, one more time I saw the girl.

When I was around 20 or 21, I was driving alone on my way to work when I glanced into my rearview mirror. She was sitting in my back seat. I recognized her immediately: the pale skin, dark hair, black eyes, and scar underneath her left eye. I panicked so badly that I nearly wrecked my car. I pulled over as quickly as I could and turned around.

My back seat was completely empty.

I’m almost 29 now, and I still have no explanation for what happened in that house or what I saw in my car years later. I know how this sounds. All I can do is describe what I remember experiencing. One thing’s for sure, though: I have never brought home another creepy-ass yard sale painting.