Episode 27 - The Crying Boy

The call was like so many others. You never got used to it, not really. The siren went off, the crew got ready. That’s just how it was.

So when the call came in, you were ready. The truck was out and sirens blaring in moments. On your way to the house. It was outside of town a short ways, in a nearby neighborhood. As soon as everything was loaded you were on the road.

The call said the fire was still small, just the one room. That it hadn’t spread yet. Good. They also said everyone was out of the house. That was always the news that made your breath catch in your throat, if someone was still inside.

So all in all, it was a best case scenario. When you arrived at the house, the smoke was coming from a low, corner window. Kitchen probably. That was the usual culprit.

You and the rest of the crew loaded up extinguishers, and your masks, and you made your way inside. The smoke and heat were always intense, even for a small fire. The door was shut, and the captain cleared the way and then broke the door down, letting the fire blast out of the door in a back draft.

Then you were in the room, spraying the fire suppressing chemicals at the root of the flames. They were climbing from a low spot on a wall, and had spread across the wall and ceiling of the kitchen. Looked like an electrical fire to you.

The fight was brief. You never had a good sense for exactly how long it took, always less than you felt like it was. And when it was over, and your team was going through the burned areas, confirming there were no more embers or flame that could bring the blaze back to life, you noticed the fallen painting. It was wide and framed, and it appeared to have fallen from the ruined wall. Most of the room was a ruin to be honest, but the rest of the house was safe.

You lifted the painting carefully to check beneath it, and you drew back suddenly. Not because of what was in the frame. No, within the frame was simply a haunting painting of a crying boy, not your personal style perhaps, but nothing particularly eye-catching about it. What caused you to flinch from the painting was a simple, unnatural fact.

The painting was perfect. Undamaged entirely by the flames that had ripped through the room around it. Even the frame was barely scorched.

In the 1980s an odd panic swept across the United Kingdom. It was a panic inspired by tabloid newspapers, paranoia, and the claim of a few unfortunate home-owners.

It was driven by fear of a painting, and the curse it carried with it.

The Crying Boy is a painting by artist Giovanni Bragolin that grew to incredible popularity between its painting in the 1950s and its burn-out during the mid-1980s.

However, its popularity became its downfall after rumors that the image was cursed began to circulate.

The Curse of the Crying Boy is an odd phenomenon. A fear that swept across a country due to the superstitious claims of a tabloid paper. What was once a popular painting, purchased and kept by tens of thousands of people across the United Kingdom and beyond became a paranoia that ended in flames.

I am Andrew Eagle, and I would like to invite you to join me in exploring the story of a popular painting claimed to be cursed. And those homes which held it burned.

 So come with me Through the Veil and learn the story of The Crying Boy.

This one had been worse. The whole house had burned. By the time you got the call, the fire had spread. The neighbors had called it in. Seemed the owners were out of town and the fire wasn’t noticed until after it had already spread to several rooms.

By the time you and the other crews got there, you could not do much other than keep it from spreading to the nearby houses.

Later, after it had burned out and the place was smoldering, you and the others went in to see what was left. Try to find what started the fire, and to determine that it wouldn’t rekindle itself.

You were in the remnants of the living room. A pair of burned armchairs slumped, defeated, in the center facing a cracked and broken television. Behind them, where a wall once was sat several heavy frames. Photos or paintings that had fallen from the wall. They were covered in ash and soot.

Out of a strange curiosity you approach the paintings. You rub the soot from one. Whatever was inside the metal frame had burned away, the glass that had covered it cracked from the heat.

However, the painting next to it sent chills down your spine. And you felt the hair on the back of your neck stand up as you rubbed away the ash. Beneath the layer of ash and soot was a painting. One you recognized. The same teary eyes of the young child gazed out at you, untouched by the heat and fire.

You fled the room quickly.

Giovanni Bragolin was a popular Italian painter most well known for a series of paintings known as the Crying Boys, although the series included portraits of girls as well.

They were paintings of tearful children looking straight out from the canvas. One in particular, which would later become known widely as The Crying Boy, grew to particular popularity during and after the 1950s.

Prints of many of Bragolin’s paintings were mass-produced and sold until the early eighties. It seemed his popularity would continue to grow as well, until fears of a curse centered around one of his most popular paintings cast a pall over the series.

In 1985, a couple of fires, along with alleged but unfounded stories published in a tabloid paper, led to the curse’s wide-spread reputation and a public panic.

Maybe a reporter got the details from your report. Maybe one of the other fire-crew members spoke to the paper.

It didn’t really matter how, but the story was out. One of the tabloid papers published what you’d found. The same painting, impossibly undamaged at the center of several dreadful house fires.

You recognized the two fires, but the paper listed nearly a dozen more. Some from far enough away they could have been true, but most were nearby, and you would have known if they had really happened.

The paper was claiming, outrageous as it was, that the painting was somehow to blame. That it was cursed.

It seemed to be purposefully drumming up drama. That’s what tabloids did you supposed. You could only hope whatever they were trying to rile up died down quickly.

When The Sun published their article, the Blazing Curse of the Crying Boy, they swiftly ended the popularity of Bragolin and his work.

The story described the experience of a couple whose home was destroyed in a fire, leaving behind only the painting unharmed by the raging flames.

The couple claimed the painting was cursed, that the curse was the cause of the fire, and thus the Crying Boy was to blame.

Perhaps the first story alone would have faded into obscurity, and the public would have moved on, if it had been just that story. But shortly thereafter, the Sun published another article, this time with claims from a firefighter.

The firefighter said that he had been to several house fires, over a dozen, over time, where everything was destroyed except for one item. The only thing that survived each fire was The Crying Boy.

Quickly, the public latched on, and suddenly every fire in the United Kingdom seemed to be blamed on the cursed child.

The Sun capitalized on this and began publishing account after account. As the public panic grew, the paper published a solution. A bonfire, held under the supervision of the fire brigade, on Halloween night of 1985. Hundreds of copies of the painting were collected and burned.

Since its introduction, the curse has had a number of explanations.

Some set out to explain the curse, to address why this painting is cursed. Others attempted to investigate how the painting survived the fires, operating on the basic assumption of skepticism. Curses aren’t real of course.

Some claim that the boy was a member of a Romani family. Due to wide-held prejudices, it was claimed that his parents cursed the painter and the painting since it had been done without their permission.

Another version says that the boy’s parents were killed in a fire, and yet another fire broke out at the studio while he was being painted. For whatever reason, he was haunted by flames, and his likeness, captured in such detail maintained that curse.

The final cause offered for why this painting is cursed is that the boy died in a fire shortly after being painted, and so his spirit haunts the portrait, echoing his death through it.

The more skeptical minded attempted to explain why the painting would survive when everything else was destroyed in flames. It was found that many of the prints of the Crying Boy were printed on naturally fire retardant materials. With concentrated effort they would burn, but if kept from the ravages of heat even indirectly, it would often barely scorch.

The theory goes that the string that would be used to hang the painting would often give way to the flames before the painting would be exposed. Thus it would fall, often face-down and be protected from the heat.

Whether you are a skeptic or a believer, the story of the Crying Boy offers something.

On the one hand, it is the story of a powerful curse, an object so empowered it caused hundreds of fires if you believe all the stories.

On the other, it is the story of a public panic, stoked by fear and, some might argue irresponsible, journalism. A group of people moved to such paranoia that they blamed an inanimate object for their suffering and even organized events to destroy that object en masse.

In the end, I don’t suppose it really matters if the painting is cursed or not. It only matters that for a short time, people believed that it was.

Thank you for joining me for this episode of Through the Veil. I hope you enjoyed. I encourage you to subscribe to receive new episodes weekly wherever you listen as we continue our exploration of folklore, myth, and magic.

If you are enjoying the show, and have subjects you would like to hear covered, please email me at throughtheveilpodcast@gmail.com or reach out on Twitter, you can find me @ThroughVeil.

As always, thank you, for listening.