If you’ve spent much time on Twitter, you’ve probably stumbled upon the account Cursed Images. The feed simply consists of tweet after tweet of creepy images with no context but a seemingly random number. For example, cursed image 6172 depicts a limousine caught apparently attempting to traverse a muddy ravine; cursed image 2001 is a flash photograph of a strangely decorated home’s stairwell lined with menacing-looking Furbys’ cursed image 40523 catches a horse eating out of a dumpster; cursed image 32314 (above) finds a man huddled in the corner of a bathroom overflowing with white bread. The New Yorker doesn’t reveal the identity of whoever runs the Cursed Images account, opting for absolutely no context, (they even refuse to speak to the writer, Jia Tolentino, on the phone), but they speak with her via email and reveal some interesting thoughts behind the account. Read in partial below, in full via the New Yorker.
The Cursed Images account, which has rapidly amassed more than eighty thousand followers, is anonymous; the bio simply reads, “all these images are cursed.” It’s become one of my favorite things on Twitter, a social network that tends toward cacophony. Within an avalanche of news and unprompted disclosure, accounts that offer untethered and untimely dispatches from nowhere can work like a reset button, a split-second rem cycle. My favorites—like Samoyed Bot (dogs), Magic Realism Bot (Borgesian assemblages), Cartoon GIFs (snippets of traditional animation), and R.L. Ripples, a.k.a. @TweetsofOld (early newspaper clippings)—are consistent, single-serving, non-sequitur interludes. Never urgent and devoid of persona, they provide a break for the brain.
But what I find soothing about Cursed Images is also what makes the account creepy: the images grab your attention and leave it blank for solid stretches of time. Among the most recent images are a man in a suit walking down a green path into the darkness, lit by a spotty flash (568); a person in a homemade-looking cat costume pushing another homemade cat in a wheelchair (27443); a series of dolls and shoes nailed to a tree trunk (372); and a crowd of people on aquamarine bleacher seating, crammed perfectly above a diagonal line of shade (340). They are little snapshots of a world arranged by a spooked, mischievous, possibly malevolent presence—although the specifics of that presence still escape me, as the Cursed Images administrator declined my phone call, wishing to remain indistinct.
So we e-mailed. I asked if the administrator had always had a freaky imagination. “To this day, I waste a ridiculous amount of time watching videos of dolls supposedly caught moving on camera,” the administrator replied. “My family travelled a lot when I was a kid, and, wherever we went, I would read about the urban legends for that area, or any interesting paranormal sightings. When I was nine, my mother and I went to the Sallie House”—a white brick residence in Kansas, notorious for stories about the ghost of a little girl—“and we met someone who was supposedly tormented by Sallie. I can’t recall if we started going to these places because I was interested in them, or if I became interested because we kept going to these places.”
Cursed Images only follows two accounts on Twitter: the official account of the child actor Frankie Muniz—that’s a joke, the administrator told me; Frankie Muniz does not run Cursed Images—and Uncursed Images, which supplies attributions for the Cursed Images photos. “Not too long ago, someone mentioned that they recognized a few images as professional photographs, and suggested I start crediting the artist,” the administrator wrote. “Usually when I find these images, they’re submissions given to me without sources, so I wasn’t sure how I’d find the photographers. Knowing the story behind these pictures kind of takes away the creepy feeling, but I’m incredibly thankful that someone is taking the time to credit artists for their . . . interesting work.”
Knowing the stories behind the cursed images does not always make them less creepy. “Cursed image 1783,” showing a woman encased in medical equipment with balloons wreathing her face, is from an Associated Press story about a woman in Memphis who died after a power failure shut off the iron lung she’d lived inside for almost sixty years. “Cursed image 1627,” showing a terrible plasticine figure in a waste-green pool, is from a Daily Beast story about a seventy-year-old man named Robert whose pastime is dressing up as a life-size doll. These images hew to the Freudian description of the uncanny: a sense that something once familiar has become terribly strange. Seeing a flock of flamingos crammed into a dirty public bathroom is uncomfortable, whether you know that the photo was taken at the Miami Zoo during Hurricane Andrew or not.
*Cursed Image via Twitter
