The true stories behind 10 spooky paintings

Some pictures are frightening because of what they show. Others become frightening once you know the story behind them. The ten works below come from very different worlds: an Italian painter-poet of the 1600s, Goya's prints, the Netherlands where American painters gathered in the 1880s, Japanese ghost tales and a New York horse race. Every fact here comes from the museums that hold them.

Salvator Rosa's witches at dusk

Salvator Rosa painted witchcraft at four times of day. In the scene at dusk, his hags gather around a cauldron while a conjured skeleton soars above them, holding an hourglass, a sign of how short life is. In its other hand the creature holds a capital letter A with a plumb line hanging from it; the Cleveland Museum of Art explains these as ancient signs of the moon and of judgment, standing for the night-time judgment the witches are handing out below. A wax effigy on the ground recalls the love magic described by the Roman poets Virgil and Horace.

Rosa was a poet as well as a painter. In his own poem "La Strega (The Witch)", a jilted woman lists the ingredients of her black magic: "ground powders, mystic gems, snakes and owls, stinking blood". In the 1600s painting was called "mute poetry", and Rosa liked to treat the same themes in both arts.

The only beautiful witch Rosa painted

The first scene of the same series takes place at dawn. A young witch plunges her knife into a writhing amphibian while birds with sharp beaks circle her. According to the museum, she is the only beautiful enchantress Rosa ever painted, and her power to turn men into animals recalls the goddess Circe. Rosa turned that classical figure upside down and made her openly violent. Her calm face makes the raised human hands among the birds even more disturbing.

Goya's bogeyman

In plate 3 of Goya's Caprices, a mother and her two children face a figure wrapped in a blanket: el coco, the Spanish bogeyman. The children are terrified, but the mother smiles. The Art Institute of Chicago reads the print as Goya's criticism of the habit of using fear to make children behave. There is even a spelling mistake in the caption: Goya wrote the Spanish word for "comes" with the wrong letter, an easy slip because b and v sound alike in Spanish, and he corrected it in later editions.

A giant phantom with a smirk

Goya returned to false fears in a print of soldiers cowering before a towering spectre. At first it looks like an image of the fear of death or defeat in wartime. Look closer, says the museum, and a smirking face peeps out of the phantom's sleeve: the colossal apparition may be a hoax. The museum reads it as Goya, with his usual irony, mocking superstition and irrational fear.

The Ghost Story

In the 1880s the Netherlands drew a number of American painters, among them Walter MacEwen. His best-known painting shows a group in a Dutch interior listening, completely absorbed, as a woman at a spinning wheel tells a frightening tale. A young girl clutches her doll.

A hundred ghost stories, and a candle for each

Katsushika Hokusai planned a series called One Hundred Ghost Tales in 1831 and 1832. Its title refers to a game: people gathered at night to tell scary stories and put out a candle after each one, until the room was completely dark. Hokusai apparently meant to make a hundred prints, but the series was never finished and only five designs are known.

This one tells the story of Kohada Koheiji, a Kabuki actor drowned by his wife's lover, who came back to haunt the couple. His skeletal ghost pulls down the mosquito net and peers at the two of them asleep in bed. The tale was popular in the 1700s and inspired a novel and several plays. The bright blue in these prints comes from Berlin blue (Prussian blue), a pigment that had just become affordable. It may look cheerful to us, the museum notes, but Hokusai's audience linked it with death and the occult.

Oiwa in the lantern

The pale face bursting out of a worn paper lantern is Oiwa, from the famous ghost play Yotsuya Kaidan. A woman who wanted to steal Oiwa's husband sent her poison disguised as face cream. It scarred her at once, and her eye began to droop, as it does in the centre of the print. When Oiwa understood the trick, she became hysterical and accidentally killed herself. After her death she took revenge on her rival, her husband and others. The writing on the lantern asks us to pray for her soul.

The ghost who counts plates

Another print from the same series shows the legend of a woman killed by her husband because she broke some plates by accident. Her body and the broken dishes were thrown into a well, but her ghost rose every night to haunt him, in the strange shape Hokusai gives her here.

A ghost by the lamp

Tani Bun'ichi, the adopted son of the master painter Tani Buncho, painted a ghost beside a lacquer lamp stand. A very similar painting by him belongs to Zensho-an, a temple in Tokyo. It once belonged to Sanyutei Encho, a famous storyteller of ghost tales, who gave his collection of ghost paintings to the temple. A gold inscription on the lamp stand dates the work to the twelfth month of 1810. In it Bun'ichi admits that he did not like painting ghosts, and only tried after listening to a man named Ono.

Death at the racetrack

Albert Pinkham Ryder's painting began with a real horse race in New York in 1888. One of his friends bet five hundred dollars on it, and when the horse lost, the friend took his own life. Ryder answered with medieval symbols: Death rides around the empty track as a skeleton with a scythe, and a snake, a sign of temptation and evil, slides through the foreground. He worked on the picture for several years and was very reluctant to part with it.

A skull wreathed with roses

Odilon Redon made three portfolios of prints inspired by Gustave Flaubert's novel The Temptation of Saint Anthony, about a hermit tested in the desert by fantastic visions. Redon first worked in charcoal and tried to bring its deep black into his lithographs. The prints follow the dark mood of the book rather than its actual scenes, with invented monsters and figures in otherworldly settings. Redon felt they captured Flaubert's strange universe; in his own time, the museum says, they were largely misunderstood.