It’s my first time coming here to write, and English is not my first language, so please forgive me for any occasional mistakes. But the situation calls for me to come here and learn more. I (M26) am a high school philosophy teacher. Philosophy has always captivated me, even though it is undervalued, and I truly enjoy fostering critical thinking and challenging students to question everything they consider certain so far.
That being said, it’s ironic that my problem somehow involves philosophy. It started last Wednesday (May 17th) after a class on epistemology for a third-year class. It was the last class of the day, and I was happy to finally go home and rest (even though I love this job, it’s still very tiring to manage around 30 teenagers in a classroom). After taking two buses, I entered my building, took the elevator to my floor, watching the numbers go up. When I got off, I immediately noticed something strange in front of my apartment: a peculiar box was leaning against the door. It was a well-wrapped cardboard box, with no writing on it except my name in bold black marker. I brought the package inside and called the concierge to inquire if someone had made a delivery while I was away, but the doorman denied it. I decided to open it to find out what it was. Big mistake. It was a painting, definitely one of the ugliest I’ve ever seen. I know Immanuel Kant isn’t particularly attractive, but in the painting I held in my hands, they had truly captured a bad angle. The oil painting depicted the Prussian philosopher with a twisted and awkward expression, so I assumed it was a prank, perhaps from a colleague or a student.
“Well, okay, it’s a gift anyway,” I thought, “even if it’s a prank, it’s still nice to know that someone remembers me.” I decided to hang it in the living room, behind the sofa, so I wouldn’t have to look at it when I was sitting down. I went about my routine of watching TV and eating junk food until I fell asleep (and I know, they’re not healthy habits) until I woke up feeling dizzy with my alarm clock ringing, rushing to get to work. I dropped some hints in the teachers’ lounge and during classes, but no one reacted. I suppose whoever did this prank took it seriously.
Nothing different happened until I got home. My neighbor opened the door when I approached and said, “Well, I’d like to ask you not to make so much noise at night, okay? Some people need to sleep.” “But I didn’t…” He had already closed the door. I probably left the TV on louder than I remember. I’ll remember to turn it off before sleeping. The first thing I noticed when I got home was the painting fallen in the living room. Perhaps I hadn’t hung it properly, so I fixed it. That was the first strange thing I noticed: strangely, the philosopher’s eyes were now looking to the right, whereas they initially looked to the left. I know it could be fatigue or work stress, but I can swear to you that his eyes were different.
Of course, there’s the possibility that it was just a trick of the mind. I hung the painting crookedly, and when it fell, it accentuated that, and that’s what I convinced myself of. I continued with my nightly routine, putting on a movie to watch and eating pizza. But the fact is, having my back to the painting made me very uncomfortable. I felt its gaze staring at me, burning into the back of my neck. I turned around five or six times during the movie to make sure everything was okay, and that desolate gaze always met mine from the corner.
I turned off the TV and decided to go to my room to avoid any unconscious noise. When I turned the corner to enter my room, I saw my door (which I had clearly left closed) slightly ajar. In a second, sinister thoughts ran through my mind. I connected this with the fallen painting and imagined that maybe there was an intruder in the house, someone who had been waiting all this time for an opportunity to run off with whatever they had stolen from me, or even worse…
I didn’t take my eyes off the room as I slowly walked backward into the kitchen. I grabbed the largest knife I could find and returned with silent and firm steps. The closer I got, the more the shadows inside the room seemed to grow and reach out to grab me. I pushed the door quickly while pointing the knife in the most threatening way I could. There was nothing but my bed and the fan next to it. No signs of forced entry, no missing items. I began to think that maybe I had become paranoid with all of this and decided to sleep. I think this experience right before sleeping didn’t do me any good since I had dreams of unknown pursuers invading my house to kill me. But by far, the worst part of the dream was the terrible gaze of the painting as all of this was happening. As the figure buried its knife in me and blood dripped onto the painting, the lifeless eyes stared at me with harshness. I woke up sweaty and breathless, feeling extremely uncomfortable. When I left for work, the doorman informed me that my neighbor had complained about noise during the early hours of the morning. He said I was playing instrumental music at an extremely high volume, and the doorman himself confirmed that he could hear it from a distance.
With all of this on my mind, things started getting worse. I felt watched on the bus, as if someone had followed me the entire journey to school. When I arrived, the atmosphere was also strange, with some students more distracted than usual, as if they were in a trance, mentally drifting away. Some of them even mumbled a word or two that made no sense when I started my explanations.
I came home, and as I walked down the hallway of my floor, I definitely heard footsteps behind me. When I turned around, I saw nothing, but when I started walking again, the footsteps continued, matching my pace. When I started running, they started running too. I locked the door desperately when I reached it. My heart was pounding. I decided to look through the peephole and nearly fell backward when I saw a brown eye staring into the depths of my soul. I checked the door lock once again, and when I looked again, the eye was gone, thankfully. I decided to take the painting off the wall and put it back in the box and decided to share it on this subreddit since I’ve heard that you guys understand these things.
Do you think it could be something beyond the ordinary, supernatural, or am I going crazy?In case any of you know anything, please contact me.
Update: I hadn’t been able to put the picture of the painting here, but I believe that with this external link everything is right. And no, I wasn’t the one who took that picture, I refuse to take that thing out of the box, so I tried to look up some information on the internet. I found this in a forgotten art blog in the wayback machine and apparently is the only online reference of this: