The Crying Boy by Giovanni Bragolin

The Crying Boy: The UK’s Most Famous Haunted Painting

Welcome on this Weird Wednesday! Today we’re hanging a haunted painting on the wall and hoping it doesn’t burn our house down. Sound fun? Then come on in.

What’s fun about paintings (especially portraits) is that, like mirrors, they can be a little creepy. You’re looking at a representation of a person, which is not a person—but in some sense, it is. You can get the same effect with dolls, or people in masks: a little bit of the uncanny valley phenomenon, where something is almost human but not quite, and that’s kind of spooky.

And where do people typically keep paintings, mirrors, and dolls? In their homes. Homes are supposed to be our safe havens, but in the case of a haunted house, your home is no longer entirely your domain. You don’t even get to say who gets to live there with you. And in the real world, what’s most dangerous to a house is fire. The loss of a home to fire is devastating, partly because all your possessions go up in smoke as well.

So a really great scary story would be something like a popular painting, commonly displayed in homes, which is haunted and causes house fires—and you know it’s haunted because the painting is the only thing that doesn’t burn. Sound delicious? The Sun tabloid in England certainly thought so, and they were right.

In 1985, The Sun ran an article claiming firefighters kept finding a painting of a crying boy as the only remnant of house fires. They spiced up the story over the next few months with tales from readers claiming the painting was cursed. It culminated in The Sun burning copies of the painting sent in by their readers, on Halloween, to break the curse.

But the curse wasn’t entirely vanquished (because what fun is that?). Over the years, the story remained alive enough to get new additions: the little boy in the painting was a firebug, possibly of paranormal origin, and he was adopted by the painter, then burned down the painter’s studio, ran away, and died in a fiery car crash.

So what’s the truth of the story? The painting most often associated with the tale is by Italian painter Bruno Amadio, using the name Giovanni Bragolin, who painted quite a few different paintings of crying children. The pieces were mass-produced and very popular in the UK in the 1980’s, which is why they were, in fact, found at the scene of many house fires. The fires, however, had normal, human, living sources—not haunted paintings. It may have been true, though, that the paintings failed to burn: possibly they had a fire-resistant varnish or were printed on wood that was slow to catch fire.

But here on Weird Wednesday, we’re more interested in fiction than fact. So here are some painted writing prompts!

• What’s wrong, little boy? One of the best pieces of the story is that the paintings depict crying children. Which begs the question, why did people want crying children on their walls? In reality, of course, people have different tastes in art, and there’s nothing that weird about it. But you could write a story with the crying at the center. One contemporary claim was that the tears of the boy put out the fire on his own painting, which is a deliciously creepy idea. So what’s he crying about? That’s for you to decide.

• Firestarter. So if the painting causes fires, someone could potentially use it to, you know, cause fires. You could write a character with a grudge against a neighbor or local business, who gives the painting as a gift, hoping for the worst. Or a firebug who uses the painting as his MO, tossing it into a building and enjoying the aftermath. He could have a nemesis in a local firefighter who has to enlist a medium to figure out the fires are being started by a little boy who doesn’t exist.

• Strange and frightening sounds echo through the halls. Starting fires is a pretty spectacular thing for a ghost to do. The worst poltergeists sometimes do it. But it kind of ends everything, because then there’s no more house to haunt. So you probably want your haunted painting to get up to some creepy stuff before the big finish. Haunted paintings with people or animals in them are really fun for a horror story: the painted figures can move their eyes, change position, or even climb out of the painting and roam the house. Haunted landscape paintings can also change, and maybe not as noticeably: imagine gradually realizing that your painting of a tree in summer is starting to lose its leaves.

• The hand that holds the brush. You could write a story focusing on the painter. Did they have a real model or paint from imagination? Why paint the child crying? Did they latch onto a trend of people wanting paintings of crying kids, or was there some other reason to choose that subject? And most importantly, are they responsible for the curse? Maybe the artist painted a child who died in an accident. Maybe they used blood or some occult substance in their paint. Maybe they literally invited a ghost or demon into the painting. Why would they do that, and did it have the result they wanted?

Thanks for spending your Weird Wednesday here. No joke this time: just remember to check your smoke detectors are working.

Sources & further reading:

The Curse of the Crying Boy: Dr. David Clarke, Folklore and Journalism

A Painting of a Crying Boy Was Blamed for a Series of Fires in the ’80s: Atlas Obscura

The Crying Boy: Wikipedia

9 Allegedly Haunted Paintings — And The Disturbing True Stories Behind Them; All That’s Interesting