I saw that same thing on the tv news last year.
The news media folks love that sort of stuff - anything that makes Christianity seem like rank superstition.
My impression of RCism growing up in Northern California came from similar types of reports on the tv news. I remember one in particular: a local Mexican-American woman had baked a tortilla that seemed to have the face of Jesus on it. It was deemed "miraculous" by the locals, who were showing up by the hundreds to venerate it.
Such reports made it easier to dismiss RCism out of hand as folk mythology (even though no official church spokesman had endorsed the miracle tortilla).
Reports of icons that beat people for their sins will no doubt have the same effect for Orthodoxy.
