The Curse of the Crying Boy
- The Time Chair
- 5 days ago
- 5 min read
September 1985 was a peculiar month containing a number of events that would stay in the collective memory of the population for a long time. Just two months after the colossal success of Live Aid, a joint American – French expedition managed to locate the wreckage of the RMS Titanic in the North Atlantic Ocean. The fate of the ship had for a long time been part of a number of other mysteries such as disappearances of aircraft and ships in the Bermuda Triangle, the Loch Ness monster and Bigfoot.
There was a magazine series published in the early 1980s called The Unexplained: Mysteries of Mind, Space, and Time which was published by Orbis Publishing. It was for a time the go-to source for information about the supernatural, UFOs, Ghosts and a wide range of other paranormal phenomena. With no Internet to speak of at the time, research into unsolved mysteries was limited to a very small choice of television channels, books, magazines, storytelling at school and newspapers.
On the 5th of September 1985, the British tabloid newspaper, The Sun, ran a story on a Yorkshire firefighter called Peter Hall, who claimed that undamaged prints of a popular painting were being frequently found amidst the ruins of unusual house fires. Hall alleged that he'd seen at least 50 incidents where prints of the painting had been found in the charred rubble of properties that had burned down. Each time, the prints would be face down on the floor and always undamaged. The following month, The Sun reported on another fire involving the painting which would generate even more interest in the story.
The painting in question was by an Italian artist called Bruno Amarillo who went by the pen name, Giovanni Bragolin, and was a mass-produced artwork called, The Crying Boy. There were numerous versions of the painting, and if you didn’t have one hanging in your house, then you might, like me, have had another mass-produced image which was popular in the 1970s and 80s of three or four wild horses running powerfully alongside one another by the artist, Gull G. Both were very popular at the time.
Up until the story broke, a couple of my friends had a Crying Boy painting hanging above the fireplace in their parlours. Some of you might remember your parents referring to the ‘best’ room in the house as "the parlour", which you weren’t normally allowed to play in with your friends because it was the only room in the house which was kept spotlessly clean and tidy. Thinking back, it does make me chuckle when I hear or read the word nowadays. Parlours were rooms (usually found in larger houses or mansions) intended to receive important visitors such as priests, doctors or dignitaries. I was occasionally allowed in our parlour on special occasions such as Christmas and birthdays, but I don’t recall any dignitaries ever visiting our pre-war, 3-bedroom end-terrace. I did see a priest in there once, but he was smoking a cigar and appeared to be drunk. He was slurring something about someone called the Good Shepherd, a person I never got to meet who, for some reason, was always short of cash, just like I was.
I didn’t read the original Crying Boy story because we never read the Sun newspaper. I first became aware of it when early one Sunday morning, I opened the backyard gate to check what had been discarded in the back alleyway over the weekend. The back alley was always a good source of bits and pieces for the countless crackpot projects I would try and convince my friends to participate in. You could find discarded prams and buggies which were great sources of go-cart wheels and chassis, abandoned television sets with vacuum valves in them which made great hand grenades, and the occasional electronic toy which only had a broken wire or two which was easily repairable if you were a mad scientist like I was.
On this particular morning, amongst the usual bric-a-brac were three or four unusual small piles of what looked like chopped firewood dotted at regular intervals down the alleyway. I walked to the nearest pile and began to sort through the pieces. I noticed that they were part of a larger image like a roughly-cut jigsaw puzzle, which once assembled, revealed itself to be a painting of The Crying Boy. After briefly checking the other piles, I discovered that they too were of the same image.
Later that day I called round to a friend’s house who I knew had a copy of the painting. She told me about rumours of it being cursed and that her granddad had chopped their version of it up with an axe, hence the pile in the back alleyway. It did cross my mind that the use of an axe was a bit macabre when a handsaw would have been just as effective, but it did add a touch of authenticity to the whole drama. If you're going to dispel a curse, then given the choice between an axe or a Black and Decker Jigsaw from Do It All, you're probably going to opt for the axe.
By the end of November 1985, belief in the Curse of the Crying Boy was so widespread that the Sun newspaper was calling for mass burnings of the painting, and plenty of people were happy to comply. Looking back, the whole saga was perhaps an early demonstration of the power and influence of the press outside of wartime over the behaviour of everyday people. At the time, I quickly bought in to the idea, but in fairness, I was brought up in a house with five other people, most of whom had an interest in the supernatural. We had a video cassette recorder and would regularly rent out horror movies such as Amityville and Poltergeist from a bloke who would turn up once a week and open the boot of his car revealing about a hundred video tapes. VHS cassettes cost one Pound each or seven for five Pounds to rent for a week. We also used to stay up late on Saturday nights eating Spare Rib soup whilst watching the Hammer House of Horror with the lights off. Anything remotely supernatural was run-of-the-mill stuff for us, and the Curse of The Crying Boy story fit the bill perfectly.
Since 1985 there have been numerous attempts to explain the Crying Boy phenomena, with arguably the most rational being that of British comedian Steve Punt who investigated it in 2010 for a BBC Radio 4 production called Punt PI. Punt reached the conclusion that the reason the prints had managed to survive so many house fires was because they had been treated with a special fire-retardant varnish. Whereas this might go some way towards explaining the survival of the pictures, it doesn’t demystify the initial cause of the fires.
It’s important to remember that during the 1980s the newspaper industry was far more influential than it is now, and we didn’t have the technology to cross-check their claims. Even as a child I knew that a lot of what was printed, particularly in tabloids, tended to be looking for a ‘good story’, rather than being arbiters of accuracy and scepticism. It’s also important to highlight that the paper which ran the original Crying Boy report would go on to publish the Freddie Starr Ate My Hamster story six months later.
Whether or not there is any causal relationship between the Crying Boy prints and house fires is still regularly debated to this day, but irrespective of how rational we have become thanks to the ‘fact checking’ capabilities of our technologies, there will always be the, ‘what if?’ factor, particularly when it comes to The Uncanny or the supernatural.
Did you have a copy of The Crying Boy painting?
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