Turns out Animal Crossing: New Horizons fake art is extremely haunted

(Image credit: Future)

The Animal Crossing: New Horizons haunted art is the perfect way to celebrate the spooky season.

Sure, it's up for debate whether it's literally haunted, but it's definitely not normal for a painting to blink. Right? That's what players have been dealing with ever since Animal Crossing: New Horizons art was added to the game back in April. On the brighter side, it turns out that the forged versions of the artwork may be even more interesting and fun to collect than the authentic ones - if you don't mind a little spine-tingling weirdness every now and then.

The only reliable way to acquire art in Animal Crossing: New Horizons is by heading up to Redd's rusty fishing trawler/art gallery and taking your pick of his current selection. Redd has no problem with selling counterfeits alongside the genuine article, and he's also a strong believer in the principle of "buyer beware" - in this case, by inspecting each piece of art thoroughly to make sure it's identical to its real-world counterpart.

In previous games, I only ever fixated on those little visual tells: the Mona Lisa's non-existent eyebrows, a terra cotta soldier's anachronistic shovel, the Girl with a Pearl Earring keeping her eyes closed. But as Twitter users found out, it gets a lot weirder. Reader beware: scary-ass painting.

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They aren't all so overtly creepy. Some of the fake paintings just have odd things on their back like somebody's lost key:

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Or we could go back to creepy again with this sinister shadow figure.

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Some of the forged artwork even exhibits special behavior when you interact with it, like this faux ancient Japanese sculpture that floats into the air like a damn alien artifact.

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While you'll need to sniff out the authentic art pieces to complete your museum collection, now I'm tempted to put that goal on the back burner and fill my entire town with freaky counterfeits. Just make my entire town as haunted by fake art as possible. Do you think my neighbors would mind? Haha, nevermind, I'm the resident representative - I can do whatever I want!

If you need something wholesome to balance out that uncanny art, maybe sign up for the player-run New Horizons weeding service.

Connor Sheridan

I got a BA in journalism from Central Michigan University - though the best education I received there was from CM Life, its student-run newspaper. Long before that, I started pursuing my degree in video games by bugging my older brother to let me play Zelda on the Super Nintendo. I've previously been a news intern for GameSpot, a news writer for CVG, and now I'm a staff writer here at GamesRadar.