Family forced to lock B&B bedroom after finding 'painting of their son' inside

A fun holiday soon turned into a creepy encounter for one family when they discovered an unsettling "painting of their son" in a "spooky" bed and breakfast.

The Stevenson family, who moved to Sweden from the UK in 2021, were on the way home from a skiing holiday and needed a pit stop on the long drive home - but none of them could have predicted what they'd find inside their holiday let.

Mum Jennie explained that they stayed at a "secluded" property for the night in a bid to get some rest. But after making a strange and unsettling discovery, sleep was the last thing on their mind.

The family were getting ready to sit down to dinner in the communal dining room when they noticed something wasn't quite right. "My daughter just went, 'Mum, there's a picture of Barney on the wall,'" Jennie recalled.

When the mum-of-three took a closer look, she found a painting of a child that looked almost identical to her seven-year-old son. The mum said it was "disconcerting" and the family were left freaked out.

The artwork, called 'Flowers in the Meadow' by Swedish painter Carl Larsson, depicts a little girl, but she looks remarkably similar to the youngster, except for her long hair. In the painting, the child can be seen wearing a hat and is surrounded by flowers.

Thankfully, Jennie and her husband weren't too spooked by the painting and Barney found the whole thing funny. However the parents did describe the B&B as an "old-fashioned" property with "creaky floors". Jennie said: "Woke up at some point to a terrifying papery noise (think riffling of pages or a deck of cards) but we all survived."

Sharing what happened on X, the mum said: "Just arrived at our secluded rural B&B to find a painting of our youngest child depicted as a small girl. There's absolutely no terrifying precedent for this, so it's probably fine."

One commenter on social media speculated the noise could be "the child trying to escape the painting". A second asked: "Any witches nearby?" Jennie replied: "In Sweden, Easter is when all the witches fly to the Blue Mountain, so I'm going to assume yes?"

In the morning she revealed they'd locked the door of their bedroom after hearing the strange noise. "Update: we all survived the night and are now safely 300 km south. Did wake at on point to hear an unusual papery sound, as though someone was flipping the pages of a book.

"Locked the door, obvs, and was tempted to lock the children in their own room, but, ftr [for the record], I did not."

And Barney, she joked, was loving all the social media speculation after her tweet went viral. "Barney was planning on becoming a doctor who was so good at medicine he could rid the world of all disease and/or an engineer, but says that now he is already famous, there's no need to bother," Jennie laughed.

Meanwhile, a hen party were horrified to discover a fake wall and secret staircase inside their rented AirBnB apartment after stumbling upon it accidentally. TikToker Alexa (@heyylexa2) and her seven friends were in San Rafael, California, celebrating her hen do at a luxurious four-bedroom home on the waterfront and were excited about getting into the hot tub, when one of them discovered what they thought was a solid wall was actually fake.

Pushing it back revealed the hidden staircase to a flat upstairs, which freaked out the group. Trying to put it out of their minds, they carried on their revelries - only to realise the CCTV cameras in the garden were moving to follow what they were up to.

The women then called the police for a welfare check after a strange man turned up at 11pm claiming to be a technician who needed to work on the heater. When a light came on through a window upstairs, they saw him stare out at them from behind the blinds - and called the police to come out.

When they arrived, officers searched the entire property and confirmed there was a second unit upstairs accessed through the fake wall. A large amount of surveillance equipment had been left upstairs, prompting Alexa and her friends to immediately pack up and drive two hours home.

In her final update, Alexa revealed AirBnB had refunded the group's entire stay, but claimed the holiday hosting platform had deleted her negative reviews of the property.

A version of this story was first published in April 2023.