Like the picture? It’s the Crying Boy. One version of it anyway, because there do seem to be a few different ones around when you start looking. Any and/or all of them are meant to be bad luck though. Or so a lot of people believe.
The original Crying Boy painting was the creation of a Spanish artist and was later copied and mass produced. It was a very popular picture in the 1980s and many a home had a copy of The Crying Boy hanging from the wall.
Then the stories started. People’s houses were burning down and the only thing to survive the flames seemed to be these pictures of a child with tears running down his cheeks. It was very odd and people began to think that the painting was cursed. In fact, on 4th September 1985 The Sun (British Newspaper) ran a story about on the subject, and a Yorkshire fireman called Peter Hall was quoted as saying that copies of The Crying Boy were often found at the scenes of fires, and usually untouched by the flames. He then went on to say that he and his fireman buddies would never allow a copy of the painting into their homes. Ironically, Mr Hall’s brother, Ron, did not see things the same way,and saw his own home go up in flames instead. The picture of The Crying Boy, hung on the living room wall of Ron’s South Yorkshire home miraculously escaped the flames. It was not so lucky when it came to Ron’s boot, which he put through the thing in an act of revenge.
Once The Sun ran their story that was it, and the calls started coming in, as countless numbers of other people narrated the stories of their own experiences with the cursed picture. The Sun ran some of the stories the very next day:
Dora Mann of Mitcham Surrey had bought a Crying Boy and six months later her house burnt down. All her paintings were destroyed except the one of The Crying Boy.
Sandra Craske of Kilburn told first of a friend, and then of her sister-in-law, who had both bought Crying Boys and then suffered subsequent fires.
Linda Fleming of Leeds and Jane McCutcheon of Nottingham both told stories of Crying Boy pictures that remained miraculously unscathed after fires at their homes.
One woman, Janet Wyatt, from the Isle of Wight, had two copies of the painting and was frightened, once she heard the stories, that she tried to burn the pictures. Only to find that they just would not ignite.
The Sun ran further stories on 9th September, 9th October and the 21st of October. In fact,the stories just kept on coming in and The Sun kept on running them. The Crying Boy was big news and other newspapers like The Mail and The Star also ran stories on the subject. Ultimately, though, it was The Sun’s story and they started to organize mass burnings of the picture.
It is certainly a strange story, but is it all just a mixture of coincidence and mass hysteria? Personally, I don’t know. I do know that I would not want a Crying Boy picture hung in my own home (why take the chance?). I also remember seeing a TV programme where someone tried to burn one of the pictures as an experiment. Honest to God, the thing kept going out, and it took three attempts before they managed to get it to burn.
I tried to find out a little about the history of the painting, but I kept encountering different stories and came up with two different painters that were accredited with its creation. I won’t repeat either name here because I do not want to add to the confusion. I will mention, however, that there are a few stories circulating that claim that the boy in the painting was a street urchin and that the artist’s studio burnt down after he had created his masterpiece. There are also a few stories that say that the child later died in a car crash. I have even heard talk of a Crying Girl picture and that if someone hangs both the pictures up together, so that they face each other, the curse is apparantly nullified. What truth there is to any of this I do not know, and as I do not have, nor want, a Crying Boy I just don’t care. It is an interesting tale though and there is even a Crying Boy fan club. If you want to visit it JUST CLICK HERE. The site is a bit confusing though, and just seems to contain a set of different versions of the picture, but perhaps, when I visited, the site was down, or perhaps I was just being a bit thick that day.