eBay

ATTENTION:

PLEASE BID RESPONSIBLY. DURING THIS TIME OF CRISIS, NECESSITIES ARE MORE IMPORTANT THAN SPOOKY ARTIFACTS. IF YOU HAVE THE DISPOSABLE INCOME, BY ALL MEANS, BID. OTHERWISE PLEASE CONSIDER WHAT IS MORE IMPORTANT.

Will only accept bids from serious bidders with two or more positive feedback. Any 0-feedback bids will be retracted. Please do not take this personally. I just have been trolled many times in the past by fake accounts.

A few years ago I was contacted by an enigmatic figure who called himself Frater XII who loved my paintings and commissioned several occult themed pieces. He in turn inspired many of my art pieces since then.

The man was an extraordinary individual. Besides being a natural charismatic showman, he also had an unending fascination with the occult. He could talk your ear off for hours about weird spooky esoteric stuff. Imagine P.T. Barnum crossed with Aleister Crowley.

Not long ago, I was informed by Frater XII's wife, who formerly went by the moniker Soror XXIV, that he is no longer with us, and in his will, he bequeathed to me six spooky looking bottles sealed with black wax, bound in some sort of twine, and painted top to bottom.

It seems that Frater XII was a self styled magus who specialized in binding malevolent entities summoned and unable to be put down by amateur occultists and dabblers. He would use these bottles as vessels to bind these entities.

According to him, any glass bottle would do. He would use anything he had lying around or found at thrift shops or dollar stores. He even boasted he trapped an entity in a glass Dr. Pepper bottle he had laying around on the floor of his car. He would then bind them in enchanted twine and seal the top with wax from a black candle, using a signet to imprint a sigil into it as it cooled down.

I ended up selling these bottles on Ebay and they have found homes across the country, including a well-respected occult store in Utah where the buyer managed to flip it for $200 and another ending up in the personal collection of an Italian esotericist.

Since then, Soror XXIV has decided to leave the occultist lifestyle and cleaned her home of all related items, sending me several packages of... you guessed it... haunted bottles. Like dozens of them.

Since she knows I can use the money and she wants to get rid of them, she has been sending me more and more when she gets the chance to visit her storage shed.

Up for auction is one of these bottles. This is your chance to own a real occult artifact!

Frequently asked questions:

Q) Are these things for real?

A) Short answer... I believe so?

Long answer... in all honesty, I am an artist, not an occultist. While I have a marginal knowledge of such things, I AM NOT an expert on the occult or spooky stuff, but I do have the word of a good friend who is no longer with us (Frater XII) and his widow (Soror XXIV), who is also a good friend. I believe in the supernatural and I trust their word. Plus I get a major creepy vibe when I'm near these things. Heck, even when I'm near my garage, where these things are being stored in a circle of salt, I get a major case of the jibblies.

I make no guarantees or pretenses. If you're not a believer or on the fence, take them for what they are. An interesting conversation piece that *might* be haunted. A cool tchotchke with a neat backstory. But let it be known, previous folks who bought these from me and know more about the occult and the supernatural than I do have spoken to their authenticity.

Q) If these are real, are they dangerous?

A) According to Soror XXIV, she would never store anything dangerous, let alone give them to me to sell to strangers online. According to her, these are mainly minor beings, servitors to larger beings, or phantoms of those humans who have passed on. Any vessels containing big bads that Frater XII has dealt with are in the vault of an esotericist friend of theirs in Prague.

Q) If these are real, how do I release what's inside?

A) First, why on Earth would you want to do that?!! Second off, Soror XXIV says any secrets to unleashing these things have been taken to the grave with her late husband. She refuses to tell me if simply unsealing the bottle will release anything either. Her advice is "They are sleeping peacefully. Let them rest comfortably". If you insist on opening it, you do you, but I personally wouldn't recommend it.

Q) What's with all the mixed occult symbology and random symbols?

A) According to Soror XXIV the liney-shapes, dots, and squiggles are some sort of insanely complex proprietary glyph system Frater XII invented himself and are hashed with other unrelated marks to make double sure nobody can translate if they found his key. In regards to the occult symbols like the pentagrams, hexagrams, upside down crosses, and the like, Frater XII was, like myself, an artist, even moreso, a showman. He had a flair for the dramatic and would decorate the bottles with spooky symbols to freak out any of the uninitiated who saw the bottles on his shelves.

Q) I opened my bottle. I found the top part stuffed with styrofoam. WTF?

A) First, please heed Soror XXIV's advice of "They are sleeping peacefully. Let them rest comfortably". As far as I know, removing the seal may not release the entity, but it might disturb them. One of my previous buyers removed the seal on theirs and said there was styrofoam plugging up the top part of the bottle. I asked Soror XXIV about this and she told me her guess is as good as mine, but if she would venture a guess, Frater XII may have been using the material as a cork to seal the bottle and to support the wax seal, especially if it is a wide-mouthed vessel. Frater XII was a pragmatic occultist and tended to use whatever happened to be available at the time, especially if it was a hasty situation. Most of the people who opened theirs and shared their findings with me mostly found actual corks or pieces of wood closing the bottle beneath the wax.

Q) The wax seal seems harder than normal wax. What's up with this?

A) I asked Soror XXIV about this. Originally Frater XII used black candle wax, but would find it melts/disintegrates a little to easily. He discovered another means to seal the bottles when making invitations for their wedding. It's a harder more resilient kind of wax used for sealing envelopes which requires a hot glue gun to melt before applying a signet.