The Crying Boy, The U.K.’s Most Haunted Painting
Giovanni BragolinVariations of The Crying Boy were widely popular in the U.K.
In the 1950s, artist Giovani Bragolin created a series of paintings depicting young, teary-eyed children. For some reason, mass-produced prints of these paintings proved to be incredibly successful all over the world — more than 50,000 copies of the paintings were sold in the U.K. alone.
One painting in particular, known as The Crying Boy, seemed to be followed by tragedy. In 1985, The Sun published an article called “Blazing Curse of the Crying Boy.” It detailed the experience of May and Ron Hall, whose home in Rotherham burned down. The cause of the fire was a chip pan that overheated and burst into flames, destroying nearly everything on the ground floor — except for a print of The Crying Boy.
The Halls claimed it was not a chip pan that had started the fire, but The Crying Boy himself.
Normally, such a claim would have been a one-and-done occurrence for The Sun, who frequently published tabloid news stories. In this case, though, one firefighter said that he had been at the scene of 15 different home fires where everything was destroyed. In each instance, the only thing that remained was a print of The Crying Boy.
The Sun soon published a series of articles reporting on this strange phenomenon. They claimed that a home in Surrey had burned down six months after the owner purchased a copy of The Crying Boy; a pizza restaurant in Norfolk was destroyed by a fire, leaving only a copy of the painting; and that a woman on the Isle of Wight had unsuccessfully attempted to burn her copy of The Crying Boy, after which she was plagued with terrible misfortune.
Bragolin was known to paint children from poor circumstances, so countless theories surfaced that attempted to explain why, exactly, The Crying Boy was cursed. Some claimed the boy had died in a fire, and now his spirit was trapped within the painting.
Whatever the truth may have been, The Sun certainly riled up the public’s fear around the painting, and on Halloween 1985, the newspaper gathered hundreds of copies of the painting and set them on fire.
