In the early 1980s, British firefighters were coming across an odd phenomenon that was occurring a little too frequently for their taste. At various house fires where everything in the house was destroyed and charred, they had been finding paintings of a wide-eyed sorrowful boy with a tear rolling down each cheek that had not so much as a scorch mark on them! These paintings somehow were the only items to come through each fire virtually unscathed.
The artwork became news and The Curse of The Crying Boy Paintings was born when firefighter, Peter Hall, talked about these eerie events to the British tabloid, The Sun. On September 4, 1985, an article was published relating the strange tale. The Crying Boy paintings were mass produced – many people owned one. Once the first article debuted, The Sun’s phone lines were flooded with folks calling in to tell of their own horrific experiences, and how their homes had burned down sometime after they acquired a Crying Boy. Some said they had often suspected the painting was a jinx, and one woman even claimed to have tried to burn it unsuccessfully.
Tales explaining The Curse of The Crying Boy began to spring up with alacrity. Some said the painter had mistreated the boy who was an orphan. Others said the boy set the fires because his parents had died in a fire and he was either acting out the trauma or had been responsible for the fire that left him orphaned to begin with. Psychics claimed the boy’s spirit was trapped in the painting. One woman said there would be no trouble if one kept the picture next to a painting of a Crying Girl. A male stripper called Big Doofer, whose real name was Adrian Martin, claimed the curse struck him when he suffered facial burns during his fire eating act. He blamed it on the painting because he said he had made the mistake of making fun of his wife’s Crying Boy not too long before appearing onstage.
By October of 1985, the Sun advertised the idea of having a huge bonfire to get rid of all the Crying Boy paintings that its readers wished off their premises. The October 31st edition of The Sun reported that thousands of Crying Boys were burned under the supervision of the fire brigade. Just speculating but they must have put them face down and while that should have been the end of it, it wasn’t by a long stretch.
After all, that didn’t get rid of all the Crying Boys. Just the ones that had been handed over. The Sun continued to report on sporadic incidents which evidently came from those who had not relinquished their paintings. The proportions of the legend began to mutate and it was even reported that the Crying Boy would bring good luck to those who deserved it. One gentleman who claimed to have rescued such a painting from the dustbin, reported that he soon began to win money at various gambling pastimes.
Peter Hall, the firefighter who was the Sun’s original source, tried to put an end to the whole affair by giving another interview. He went on record saying that he had originally informed The Sun that it was not uncommon for paintings to survive fires, but, he said, this statement had been intentionally omitted.
Today, a Dutch site is involved in the process of collecting as many Crying Boys as they can by Spanish painter, Bruno Amadio, who allegedly went by the alias Bragolin as well as Franchot Seville. He is believed to be the original painter of The Crying Boy. They are hoping to get their collection into the Guinness Book of World Records. Their site is entirely in Dutch as of this writing, but an English site is supposed to be forthcoming.
Reference:
- www.cryingboyfanclub.nl/ – Dutch Crying Boy site www.kingtutone.com/tutankhamun/curse/ – King Tut: The Curse of the Mummy www.paranormaldatabase.com/ – The Paranormal Database
