Portals of the Damned: Three Canvas Curses
by M.P. Pellicer | Noir Notebook
Artists often admit that their most haunting creations derive from forces outside themselves. They leave us to wonder: are these works mere portraits, or are they portals to something sinister?
The Rain Woman
In 1996, Svetlana Telets graduated from the Grekov Odesa Art School in Ukraine. Soon after, a suffocating presence took hold of her. For six months, nightmares plagued her, accompanied by the persistent, chilling sensation that something invisible was watching her.
The spell broke on a completely cloudless day. Telets sat before a blank canvas when the detailed contours of a woman suddenly materialized in her mind’s eye. It felt as though an unseen hand guided her paintbrush; in just five hours, she completed The Rain Woman (originally titled Zhenshchina dozhdya “The Woman of the Rain”). She had never seen the subject before.
Telets exhibited the piece at a local salon in Vinnytsia, where art connoisseurs immediately reported feeling the same distinct melancholy that had gripped the artist.
The portrait sold quickly. The customer was a businesswoman who hung it in her bedroom. Within two weeks, Svetlana heard from the woman who was frightened. She said, “Please pick her up. I cannot sleep. It seems that there is someone in the apartment besides me. I even took it off the wall and hid it behind the closet, but I still can’t do it.”
The second person to bring it home hung it in his living room. He found that he soon couldn’t stand the portrait. He returned it and took only half of what he paid for it. He said, “I dream about her. Every night she appears and follows me like a shadow.”
Another man, a skeptic, had already seen the painting before he bought it. His skepticism turned into fear when he started to see the lady with her “white eyes” everywhere. When he returned it to the salon, he said, “At first I didn’t notice how white her eyes were, and then they started appearing everywhere. It seemed that a little more and I would drown in them. I’d rather buy something classic.”
It hung at the Vinnytsia salon Merckx-Furniture in Kyiv. Customers who visited the shop claimed that sometimes you could catch the painting smiling, and to some, there was often a glance of anger.
The publication KP asked the artist if she was looking for a new owner. She said, “I’m in no hurry. I am sure that each painting is born for a specific person. I believe for my ‘Woman’ there will be someone for whom it was painted. I understand that many people don’t need this melancholy in her eyes now. It’s just not interior design. But someone is looking for her —just like she is looking for them.”
According to Archpriest Vitaly Goloskevich, a priest at the Transfiguration Cathedral, Vinnytsia, said:
A person has a spirit and a soul. There are truly spiritual works of art, and there are spiritual ones. And the painting you are talking about represents just such soulful art. But it does not come from God.
Before buying a painting, I would advise you to listen to yourself, to your feelings that remain after contemplating the creation. The artist put into the work the mood in which she was in at the time. And it is unknown who directed the artist at that moment. Therefore, if it was something unclean, then even consecrating the painting will not help.
In 2008, Sergei Skachkov, frontman of the group Zemlyane (Earthlings), read about the painting while flying to a concert in Kanev. The painting appeared on the cover of Komsomolskaya Pravda. He read that the painting had been looking for an owner for 11 years. This is when he decided it should belong to him.
Svetlana was asked to take the portrait to Kyiv for the new customer. She said, “I approached the ‘Woman’ and mentally asked: ‘If you want to live with this musician, make sure everything works out’. And I felt her silent consent.”
She turned the painting over to the musician at a hotel, with the impression that “she herself wanted to leave me.”
Skachkov’s wife later reported that the painting was associated with frequent quarrels, household breakages, and nocturnal disturbances, leading her to hide the artwork when he was away on tour.
No further mention is made of the painting after 2011, and whether Skachkov still owns it.
Is the painting cursed, or is it a question that the buyers were primed to believe it was evil?
The Wraith of Yaxley Hall
In 1739, five-year-old Henrietta Nelson arrived at Yaxley Hall in Eye, England, to live with her great-aunt, Margaret Leeke, after a carriage accident killed her parents. The Leekes had inherited the estate under grim circumstances; in 1727, authorities had found the previous owner, Robert Yaxley, dying on a roadside with a fractured skull and turned-out pockets.
Artist William Johnson painted Henrietta’s portrait in 1780 when she was forty-six. Little did anyone know that the obscure painting that measures only 17 x 13.5 inches would carry such heavy, spiritual residue in the future.
Henrietta lived as a spinster until 1816, when an 82-year-old Henrietta died after falling down her bedroom stairs. To fulfill her final wishes, her cousin Francis Leeke constructed a private mausoleum on the Yaxley grounds. However, in 1836, Francis’s daughter dismantled the structure and transferred Henrietta’s remains to the medieval graveyard of St. Mary’s Church.
Henrietta’s portrait spent nearly a century away from the manor, hanging in the home of a family friend in Norfolk, where guests routinely complained that the painted eyes followed them. During its long absence, fire destroyed two wings of Yaxley Hall in 1922. Once the portrait returned to the manor, locals frequently reported seeing a specter matching Henrietta’s painted likeness wandering the grounds—a spirit denied rest by the destruction of her tomb.
At one point, the painting was in the collection of Rev. Edmund Farrer (1848-1945), a prolific English clergyman and genealogist known for his extensive research into church heraldry and portraiture in East Anglia. He was the one who detailed the history of Henrietta Nelson. It was sold as part of his effects on June 30, 1951, and came into the possession of antiquarian Bryan Hall.
The portrait was stolen in 1995. The knife-wielding robbers held Bryan Hall at knife-point and tied him up while they stole 100,000£ of paintings and antiques. He warned that Henrietta might wreak revenge on the robbers who stole her.
He said, “Her ghost follows the portrait wherever it goes, and over the years, many people have experienced unusual occurrences caused by the lady in the wide-brimmed hat.”
Several months later, the thieves were arrested, and some of the items were recovered, but not Henrietta’s portrait. Seven years would pass before she returned to Bryan Hall.
Then in 2004, it appeared at a Bonhams auction (sale 11166, lot 347) as part of “The Contents of the Old Rectory, Banningham, Norfolk.” The auction was held at Mr Hall’s home at Banningham Rectory, eight months before he died.
According to local stories, Henrietta Nelson’s spirit was said to walk the grounds of Banningham Rectory while the painting was in Hall’s possession. Her face in the portrait was also rumored to change expression.
No recent public sales, museum holdings, or named private collectors appear in available records. Has it returned to Yaxley Hall? There is no way to tell if Henrietta has followed her portrait.
Portrait of a Lady
The lady in question is Paz Pardo de Tavera, wife of the artist Juan Luna. He produced the work in 1890, which was two years before he murdered his 28-year-old wife. The painting is said to cause misfortune and death to anyone who owns it. The source is said to be the spirit of Paz. She brought death in car accidents, misfortune in finances, miscarriages, and ill health.
Juan Luna de San Pedro y Novicio Ancheta was a Filipino artist born in 1857. He would go on to study art in Europe and live in poverty while producing many of his famous works, until he won prizes for some of his paintings.
In Paris, he rubbed elbows with Filipino artists and intellectuals, among them Trinidad and Felix Pardo de Tavera (1859-1932), who would eventually introduce him to their sister.
Felix and Trinidad were doctors. Their father was among the casualties of the 1863 Manila earthquake. The children were then taken under the wing of their uncle, Joaquin Pardo de Tavera,
Felix produced sculptures and is the most decorated Filipino sculptor throughout Philippine history.
In 1886, Luna married Maria de la Paz Pardo de Tavera y Gorricho, who was born in the Philippines, a mestiza of Spanish-Portuguese extraction. She belonged to a very wealthy political family in self-exile from the Philippines, and had lived most of her life in Paris. Her mother, Juliana, did not approve of the match but was convinced by her sons.
In the six years of their marriage, Juan and Paz had two children, Andres and Maria de la Paz.
In 1892, Luna lived with his wife, her two brothers, and his mother-in-law at Villa Dupont on Rue Pergolese in Paris. Next to the cottage, Luna had his atelier or studio where he worked on his paintings.
There are various versions of what happened in September of that year. But one thing is certain, which is that it was precipitated by Luna suspecting his wife was unfaithful to him. She had spent two months in Mont Dore recovering from the death of their daughter Bibi. Upon her return, he threatened her with a revolver, but she admitted nothing; of one thing he was convinced, which was that his wife did not love him any longer. He told her that they, along with their son Andres, would leave for Spain.
It was said that Paz was terrified of her now paranoid and violent husband, and she was convinced by her family to stay in Paris and obtain a separation from Luna. Whether she didn’t want to leave in the first place, or she was convinced by her family, on the day they were to leave and the luggage was packed, Luna came to the house and found a solicitor waiting with his two brothers-in-law.
Later, he told police this story:
“His wife and mother-in-law were locked in the bedroom upstairs. Then he heard them crying out from a window, ‘Help, help my husband wishes to kill me.’
I understood it all. I was caught in a trap. My wife and mother-in-law wished to pretend that I struck them, and the solicitor and my two brothers-in-law who were below in the garden were there as witnesses. Thus my wife, her mother and her brothers would gain their point — namely, be able to issue against me a writ of divorce.”
After finding the bedroom locked, he went downstairs and grabbed a revolver. He shot one of his brothers-in-law, Felix Pardo de Tavera, who was wounded and would survive. He broke down the bedroom door and then the bathroom door, where both women were hiding, and shot them both. His mother-in-law died instantly, and his wife, who was shot in the head, would linger for two weeks before dying. Luna tried to shoot himself, but a servant took the gun from him.
Later, Luna admitted he was prey to intense jealousy when it came to his wife. It was rumored that he had no money, and the family was kept by his mother-in-law. If they divorced, he would lose this monetary support.
Police arrested him, and he went to trial for the crime in February 1893. Like the murder, there are two versions of the outcome. In one, he was acquitted, and he moved to Madrid five days later. In the other, he was found guilty, but because it was a crime of passion, he was given a light sentence, which was banishment from Paris. He left with his son, Andres, who was 5 years old and witnessed the murder since he was in the bathroom when his mother and grandmother were shot.
It was rumored that Dr. Trinidad Pardo de Tavera decided to burn all of Luna’s paintings in his possession, and for years, there would be none of his works in any Pardo de Tavera household.
The doctor continued to live in Paris and died in 1925. He is buried in Père-Lachaise Cemetery.
Luna returned to the Philippines in 1894, and he was arrested in 1896 for sedition. His brother belonged to the Katipunan Movement, who were described in the newspapers of the time as a murderous secret society, whose object it was to secure the freedom of the Philippines by putting to the sword all the Spaniards in the archipelago. Luna was pardoned and left for Spain.
Five years after he killed his wife, Juan Luna died on December 7, 1899, in Hong Kong when he heard of his brother’s death at the hands of soldiers loyal to General Emilio Aguinaldo. He was 42, and buried at Happy Valley Cemetery, but in 1920 his remains were removed and kept at his son’s house, and later transferred to a niche at the Crypt Chapel of San Agustin.
The portrait was originally titled Paz Pardo de Tavera, before it was changed to Portrait of a Lady. How the painting made its way back to Manila is a mystery, and the nexus of its curse remains just as obscure.
Its first owner, Manuel Garcia, sold it after business took a downturn.
There was mention of a couple who owned it in 1980, and their house in Forbes Park burned down, but the painting was saved.
Then it came into the hands of Betty Bantug Benitez, who died in a freak automobile accident in 1981, when a car she was a passenger in drove off the road and hit a tree.
Vicky and Tony Nazareno purchased it next, and soon after, the family closed one of its biggest stores. Then Tony got sick when his carotid artery swelled, and the doctors couldn’t figure out what was producing this symptom. He also started to experience high blood pressure. Eventually, the couple would separate, and Tony Nazareno’s condition got worse. He died in 2005.
The painting was exhibited at art shows during the 1980s. This is when Imelda Marcos saw and acquired it. It was hanging in the office of the Philippine president when Ninoy Aquino was assassinated in 1983. Aquino was a political opponent of President Ferdinand Marcos, who would be exiled in 1986. Then it went to the home of Imee Marcos Manotoc, during which time it is said she suffered a miscarriage.
Susano “Jun” Gonzales, a famous art restoration expert from the 1970s and ’80s, did work on the Luna portrait. He would be gruesomely murdered about a dozen years after he worked on it.
It was donated to the Metropolitan Museum in 1986, and on the opening night in 1987, the spotlight over it exploded. No other lighting in the museum behaved this way.
One of the biggest mysteries is the true identity of the woman in the portrait. She doesn’t look like Paz Pardo de Tavera. Her skin color is too light, which leads some to believe it was a favorite model of Luna’s named Mademoiselle Angela Duche. Others believe she is an idealized version of Paz. But would a jealous man like Juan Luna paint his wife with a partially exposed breast?
Comparison to other works of Luna’s points to the fact that it was Angela Duche who posed for the portrait.
Another portrait produced in 1892, the year Luna would kill his wife, The Parisian Life has an unnamed model, whom some believe is his wife or Angela.
Juan and Paz’s son Andrés “Luling” Luna de San Pedro (1887-1952) would go on to become a successful architect. He designed The Crystal Arcade, which was inaugurated in 1932, built on land owned by his maternal family. During WWII, more than 80% of Manila’s structures were destroyed. The Crystal Arcade was located in the area of the fiercest combat. After the war, the first floor was occupied by stores, and the second floor was used for storage. It never regained the elegance of its original design and was razed in the 1960s.
Some believe the structure was burned down because Luling kept the urn of his father’s ashes there.
