Are Those Skeletons In My Closet?

Haunted objects, possessed possessions, and grappling with the potential bad energy of Facebook Marketplace finds.

Oct 29, 2026

This is the first story from our 12th issue, themed “THE AFTERLIFE.”

Hi there, housemates.

Missing us? Sorry. Lots of life changes are currently in the works for this editor—and more on that soon—so I hope you’ll forgive me this month if we skip a few of the normal formalities and dive right into THE AFTERLIFE, our 12th issue.

This week, Wrong House is giving you a Halloween double feature. First up: a tantalizing treat from writer Maya Ibbitson about cursed objects, which may or may not be a hazard of the secondhand marketplace. But, as she uncovers, even the most haunted-seeming object can be a blessing. Is bad energy in the eye of the beholder? Read on for her take.

—Lila Allen

⌂ ⌂ ⌂
Like what you see here? Want to support independent design media? Wrong House compensates its contributors, and your support goes directly toward producing more stories. Please consider becoming a paid subscriber.

Written by Maya Ibbitson
Photos by Livia Caligor

Every day in New York, criminally underpriced designer furniture waits to be discovered across all five boroughs. Like the uptown scavenger who finds Gucci in the upper crust’s garbage, I don’t mind doing digital dirty work to find an oyster pink-and-chrome Milo Baughman chair, which now adds a splash of Miami hedonism to my apartment. In my living room, a knotty pine table-slash-bench I picked up on Craigslist sits in front of a gently used West Elm couch, free minus the cost of transportation from one walkup in Harlem to my place downtown. I’m sure many people reading this know the tribulations and triumphs of shopping for vintage furniture online. But after buying a bunch of stuff on Facebook Marketplace last year, my grandmother alerted me to a hidden cost I had never considered: If these objects had accrued negative energy from their past owners, it could rub off on me and cause some sort of psychic transfer. In other words, they could be haunted.

I am not one to strike down this sort of thinking. Last year, the first thing I did when I moved into my new apartment was sage it—and for me, oral tradition and lore count as evidence. Something becomes a verified phenomenon when it has a dedicated Wikipedia page. There, on the list of allegedly cursed objects, are a disproportionate number of haunted paintings, antique chests, and hefty gemstones with names like Hope and Koh-i-Noor. The latter are presumably haunted because they were mined under duress or acquired through cruel circumstances in centuries past.

I assumed that, like Horcruxes, circumstances and intent are the main contributors to whether or not an object carries a bad vibe. Angela Artuso, director of Gotham Paranormal Research Society, pretty much confirmed this when I spoke to her. “Some people swirl in negativity,” she says. “So if there’s an object in their home, I wouldn’t doubt that it’s picking up that energy.”

Artuso asks me if I’ve ever felt a negative charge in a room, and off the top of my head, I can think of a few instances: the uncannily large AMC in Times Square (seeing Backrooms there was a trip), the creeps I got in the cemetery where I used to walk my dog—I could go on. She tells me that some people are more tapped into energy transfer than others. “There are people who will touch a haunted object and nothing will happen to them,” she says. “And there are people who will mess with it, bring it home, and have everything go wrong in their house.” So part of a haunting, it seems, is a perceptive phenomenon—you have to be open to receiving it.

When you look up “possessed objects” on Reddit, most users’ depositions describe sensory experiences in great detail. One Redditor shared the story behind a strange amulet that looked like an old man: “i realized that the man carved into it himself is [sic] missing an eye,” they write. “it sends ridiculously large shivers down my whole body. it put me into a pretty bad paranoid state last night after holding it.” To be fair, these are people using the r/Haunted subreddit to begin with. But if these stories are genuine, are the users actively inviting the uncanny into their lives?

I’m not sure, but I know that confirmation bias, or the psychological concept that one will look for evidence to prove a preexisting belief, is a powerful thing. Artuso tells me about an investigation she conducted for a family that was experiencing slamming doors and mirage-like puddles in their home. They attributed all of it to a massive portrait they had picked up from an antique shop. One night, the portrait fell off the wall, which was when the family summoned Artuso and her team.

“We don’t know if it was the portrait causing everything in the house,” she says. But the best ghostbusters are just looking to make people feel better—so her team told the family to put the painting in a storage unit. When they did, the paranormal activity continued in the house. The portrait came back out of storage: “They didn’t want to get rid of it.”

As with this feared-and-loved portrait, devotion to allegedly cursed objects can be sparked by aesthetic desire. And maybe this is why dealing with cursed objects is so hard: Because the owners—like me, with my possibly-haunted thrift-store finds—have an appreciation for shiny, pretty things. Italian actor Rudolph Valentino’s “Destiny” ring allegedly caused the deaths and misfortunes of six people, including the gem’s would-be burglar and Valentino himself. The Art Deco piece is ethereal, its oval tiger’s eye stone encircled by a silver woven cable. But one would think that after the second or third death, its appeal would have waned.

Today, most objects or decor in the cultural unconscious that are “cursed” or that “hold bad energy” are pretty ghoulish, like the Annabelle doll from The Conjuring or the flesh-bound Necronomicon book from the Evil Dead series. But, like Artuso said, I think that this might just be about perspective. My friend Livia Caligor has an impressive collection of the most stereotypically “haunted-looking” decor you can imagine: old wigs and porcelain-doll lamps decorate her one-bedroom apartment. But to her, these totems bring good luck.

She salvaged a particularly gruesome-looking doll from a scavenger hunt led by her favorite artist of all time, Lady Gaga. “I was roaming the streets for four hours, looking around in the corners and asking people if they had seen any creepy dolls on the street,” she tells me. “People thought I was insane.” A downpour ensued, as did a physical fight among other Lady Gaga fans (also known as “little monsters”), but Caligor ended up scoring a creepy doll of her own. To her, it’s a symbol of perseverance.

“Some little monsters started saying that they move in the dark, though,” she says. “I personally haven’t seen that yet. But I did move it to my living room from my bedroom.” One can never be too careful.

I haven’t gotten rid of any of my Marketplace finds since writing this—none of them are really giving off bad vibes yet, to me, at least. But if I were to go hunting again, I now have an Artuso-approved spiritual firewall: “Set up your protections,” she recommends. It’s up to me, she says, whether that’s a quick prayer to St. Michael, carrying around a few crystals, or “just keeping a level head.” The veil might be thin, but not in my apartment. ⌂