The Kennedy Curse.

Way back in the mists of time, a group of primitive London dwellers gathered by the river Thames to finally rid the world of an ancient evil. The source of the evil was lurking in a series of cursed paintings which were now being ritually tossed onto a raging bonfire by scantily-clad women in a bid to send the demons back to the bowels of Hell from whence they were spawned. It was a curse which had first come to light in the old haunted mining town of Rotherham in South Yorkshire, and it would go on to strike fear into the hearts of dozens more victims over the years, with a particularly cruel taste for the lost souls of Northern England. But had this mass burning by the river Thames finally vanquished the ancient evil forever?

Well, I say ancient evil. The pictures were first painted in the 1950s. The ritual burning had taken place on Halloween Night in 1985, and the primitive London dwellers were all employees of The Sun newspaper, including the scantily-clad women who were more frequently spotted posing topless on Page 3. And it was earlier that same year that The Curse of the Crying Boy Painting first reared its tear-stained head in Rotherham and unleashed a blaze of tragedy on any victim foolish enough to display the picture on their wall.

My own hometown of Rotherham has always been a notorious hotspot for unexplained paranormal activity and unfathomable mysteries which have baffled the world’s greatest minds for centuries. Why are so many of the citizens still walking around in shell suits in 2022? Why does Simon find the name so difficult to pronounce? How many midnight murders were committed by The Rotherham Subway Troll and why were they covered up by the press?

And how come I only got third place in the Rotherham Junior Science Fair competition when my entry was clearly the best and all the others were so shit?

We may never discover the answers to all of those burning questions, but it’s possible we might just dig up an answer to this particular question of burning. You see, Ron and May Hall were a bit upset when their house of 27 years caught fire one day in 1985. The modest terraced council house was situated in the village of Swallownest in Rotherham, and it’s believed that a neglected chip pan was the source of the blaze which ripped through the bottom half of the house and totally destroyed almost everything in its path, leaving a trail of ash where important things like furniture and curtains used to be.

I say almost everything, because a single item inexplicably survived the incident unscathed. A painting of a Crying Boy had been flung from the living room wall onto the floor, and appeared to show no signs of damage at all. Not so much as a scorch mark. And this unnerved poor Ron and May, particularly as they had been warned about the dangers of the painting beforehand.

The whole story was first reported in the local newspaper The Sheffield Star, based in the city right next door to Rotherham. Sheffield is like an extended version of Rotherham with even more homeless people and a bigger McDonald’s. As the roving reporter for The Sheffield Star revealed in his piece, Ron’s brother was coincidentally a firefighter called Peter who had tried to raise the alarm when he first spotted the painting on the wall.

Peter had advised his brother to take the painting down, as he recalled several spooky cases in the past where a painting or print of The Crying Boy had been found mysteriously intact following a devastating house fire. He seemed convinced that the paintings were somehow responsible for causing all the fires in the first place, and that the boy in the cursed picture frame was left laughing – well, crying – in the faces of the owners by gloating over the carnage of his own creation.

Ron and May ignored this advice at the time, presuming that Peter had been going a bit overboard on the magic mushroom stroganoff again. But although Peter wasn’t called into action himself to douse the flames of his own brother’s subsequent house fire, Peter’s firefighting colleagues had raced to the scene and backed up his story to The Sheffield Star. Fire station officer Alan Wilkinson explained that he had logged no less than fifty similar cases dating right back to 1973 in which a painting of The Crying Boy had been found completely untouched in the aftermath of a house fire that had pretty much torched everything else, including the plaster on the walls on which the paintings had hung.

Although he didn’t believe that supernatural forces were at work, he couldn’t offer the paper a logical explanation, either. His wife had a go, though. She told the paper that she believed the tears of the crying boy put out the flames of the fire. Well, it’s the best we’ve got to work with so far.

Whilst Alan Wilkinson might not have been silly enough to believe in curses and superstition, it’s interesting to note that when he later retired, he politely refused to accept the parting gift offered from his buddies in the brigade – a framed painting of The Crying Boy.

Ron Hall was hopping mad that the painting was entirely responsible for burning down his house, curiously choosing to overlook the fact that it had been started by an unattended chip pan. He ranted to The Sheffield Star: “I want to burn it to make sure it doesn’t come back! If I find out who painted it, I’ll sue him!” Good luck with both of those things, Ron.

Very little was actually known about the artist or the origins of the painting at the time. The artist was the presumably Italian Giovanni Bragolin, or at least that’s the name that appeared at the bottom of the pictures. The confusing thing here is that Giovanni had painted more than one of them.

In fact, there were about 65 different variations of The Crying Boy in circulation – each one depicting an innocent young boy wearing a sorrowful expression as his eyes brim with tears which begin to trickle down his cheek. It’s said that the boys in question were reacting in anguish to the turmoil of the Second World War, still very much fresh in the memory when the paintings were completed in the 1950s.

What they did know for certain at the time is that the paintings suddenly became massively popular in the UK from the 1970s onwards, particularly in the North of England. Over 50,000 prints were sold and put on proud display in the living rooms of the unwitting victims.

And this begs the question… why on Earth did so many people want an image of a clearly distressed child next to their chimney breast? I can see why you might want to decorate your interior with a beautiful landscape or a bowl of flowers or a stunning sunset to help elevate the mood of a room. But why a visibly upset child? Why not go one step further and start putting up pictures of a pensioner with the cold barrel of a gun in his mouth, or the remains of a splattered cat on the motorway?

Perhaps adorning your walls with utter misery is just a weird Northern thing. I can remember that my family had our own unique version of The Crying Boy on display for years, but the disturbing thing in this case was that The Crying Boy was me. A photographer had visited my nursery – well, we called it playschool – to take individual portrait shots of all the little boys and girls which would capture the glorious innocence of childhood.

But it’s clear from my own photograph that I wasn’t taken with the idea one little bit. And yet rather than dump the result in the bin where it clearly belonged, my parents were happy to give pride of place on the mantelpiece to this photograph of their teary-eyed little son looking forward to a future of anguish and wretched sobbing. At least it always gave visitors something to laugh about.

But this is one part of the mystery that we can answer right now. The reason that The Crying Boy mainly targeted the people of the North is that Northerners were the ones who were buying it in droves. You could snap up a mass-produced print very cheaply in stores like Woolworths, and the Northerners of the 70s and 80s felt that the painting introduced a bit of elegance and sophistication into their homes. Although there were occasional reports of the curse striking elsewhere, the vast majority of tragic incidents were located in the North, with at least three in Rotherham alone.

And it’s right back to Rotherham we now go to see how the flames from Ron and May’s house fire were fanned in ways that nobody could have predicted. The national media don’t usually take much interest in stories from the local press, largely because local headlines don’t tend to get much more gripping than ‘Woman Finds Hat in Tree’ and ‘Cat Hops into Delivery Van’.

But Kelvin Mackenzie – the editor of tabloid tat The Sun – was intrigued enough by The Sheffield Star’s chilling story to run it in his own paper under the headline “Blazing Curse of The Crying Boy”. One of the images of the Crying Boy painting was quite cleverly captioned “Tears for fears! The portrait that firemen claim is cursed!” In fact, none of the firefighters on the scene had ever claimed that it was cursed, but The Sun doesn’t usually let facts get in the way of a good story.

The response from readers was electric. Although it was originally intended to be a quirky one-off piece, the story ended up running for six weeks as The Sun became flooded with phone calls and letters from readers who had endured their own terrifying experiences with the Crying Boy painting. A pizza parlour in Norfolk had been destroyed by a fire which had obliterated every single painting on its walls – except for the painting of the Crying Boy.

A woman from Surrey lost her home to a fire, just months after buying a print. And two sisters from Kilburn claimed that they had witnessed the painting swaying from side to side on the wall shortly before multiple fires broke out in their home.

Some of the stories were slightly more ludicrous than others. Mrs Farrington from Preston pondered: “Since I bought it in 1959, my three sons and my husband have all died. I’ve often wondered if it had a curse.” One mother from Paignton claimed that her 11-year-old son had somehow managed to catch his private parts on the picture hook, whilst another reader blamed his slide into depression on the purchase of the painting.

Maybe depression is always likely to be on the cards if you’re the type of person who thinks that a picture of a crying boy is going to look quite jolly above the fireplace.

Another big concern was that the paintings really didn’t appear to burn. Security guard Paul Collier told The Sun that he’d been scared by all the horror stories and had attempted to burn his two copies of the painting. But after tossing them onto a bonfire and leaving them for over an hour, he was alarmed to discover that they hadn’t even been remotely affected by the flames.

After six weeks, panic was starting to take hold, as readers began looking to The Sun for a solution to the nightmare paintings that were impossible to destroy. One idea was simply to give the painting to somebody else and pass on the curse to them, but that sounds a bit mean-spirited to me. Another idea was to hang a picture of a Crying Girl right next to the Crying Boy, as an additional set of tears would cancel out the curse. I really don’t know why nobody suggested just hanging the pictures the wrong way up.

You can work wonders by just turning that frown upside down.

By the end of November, Kelvin Mackenzie from The Sun felt that he’d come up with a better idea to destroy this fire hazard once and for all. After reporting the latest stories of further Crying Boy blazes in a house in Rotherham and an Italian restaurant in Great Yarmouth, Kelvin had a message for his readers: “Enough is enough, folks! If you’re worried about a Crying Boy picture hanging in YOUR home, send it to us immediately. We will destroy it for you—and that should see the back of any curse.”

The ultimate plan was to destroy all the prints of the Crying Boy in a huge bonfire on Halloween Night, but Kelvin’s logic appears to be a little twisted here. The whole point of the Crying Boy curse is that the paintings can’t be destroyed by fire. So, Kelvin’s clever solution of burning them all in a fire kind of contradicts everything his paper had been reporting for the previous six weeks.

Still, the readers didn’t seem to spot the flaw in his plan. Over the course of the following week, The Sun’s offices on Bouverie Street in London were swamped with over 2,500 paintings sent in by terrified readers. They were stacked in 12-foot-high piles across the newsroom, making it difficult for the staff to even move around the workplace.

Now call me a doubting Thomas, but I have a hunch that Kelvin Mackenzie was just treating this as a glorious marketing stunt for his newspaper rather than a genuine attempt to eradicate a curse. Yet it appears that even he was getting a little bit spooked by the tears of the Crying Boy. When one of The Sun’s reporters took it upon himself to actually hang one of the pictures on the wall of the office, Kelvin snapped at him to take it down immediately. Was the curse even getting to Kelvin?

Or was he just grumpy that somebody had moved the portrait of Winston Churchill that was supposed to be hanging there?

He was certainly faced with a problem now on how exactly he was going to shift these 2,500 paintings that his staff were tripping over in the office. His original plan to set fire to them all on the rooftop of the Bouverie Street offices was blocked by the local fire brigades who refused to cooperate in such a silly venture. Maybe they were also secretly concerned that the planned destruction of the paintings would do them all out of a job.

In the end, Kelvin settled for a nice quiet little bonfire by the river Thames, accompanied by a team of Page 3 Girls whose job it was to toss the paintings onto the pyre. They didn’t have their baps out during the stunt as this probably would have posed an additional health and safety hazard. But the “Red Hot Page 3 Beauty” Sandra Jane Moore did pause to reveal her own dubious story of how she had been helping a friend decorate her new flat, and had cheekily defaced a Crying Boy print hanging on the wall by painting red spiky hair on the top of his head. Within just a few days, her friend’s new flat was completely flooded, and the spiky-haired Crying Boy was the only item in the flat to survive the saturation.

The good news is that although it took a little while to get going, the sackfuls of completely indestructible paintings did apparently burn to a crisp on the night, making a mockery of the very myth that The Sun had been perpetuating. For their next trick, I would have loved to have seen them solve the problem of the runaway killer piranhas by drowning them all in a giant bathtub.

The following morning, The Sun triumphantly reported the story under the headline “Crying Flame!” which claimed that the newspaper had finally nailed the curse of the weeping boy for good. They even dragged out a reluctant firefighter to deliver the reassuring quote: “I think there will be many people who can breathe a little easier now.” It appeared that the crappy constructors of codswallop had categorically cancelled the cascading cursed cloudbursts of the continually crying child.

I think the newspaper may have been jumping the gun, though. It’s not as if they had managed to track down every single copy of the painting in existence. Punching the numbers into my Sinclair Pocket Calculator, I reckon that there would be roughly another 47,500 of these damned things still hanging on a wall, poised to strike at any minute. Despite the Sun’s claims, the curse may have been far from over.

But what was the more rational thinking behind the curse? Why was a specific painting so closely associated with so many house fires, and why was it always the last boy standing, long after the flames had died down to a smoulder?

Well, let’s get some of the more sensible explanations out of the way first. One theory is that the spirit of the boy was trapped inside the painting, and he was purposefully starting fires in an effort to destroy the frame and escape the confines of the picture.

Another theory is that the boy was the son of a family of witches who objected to the quality and the gloomy tone of the picture.

And another suggestion is that the artist Giovanni Bragolin made a pact with the devil to sell thousands of copies and become fabulously wealthy at the expense of other people’s tragedies. Some even say that he was once spotted on Brazilian TV confessing to the satanic pact.

Roy Vickery from The Folklore Society had his own theory which he was happy to share with The Sun. He reckoned that the boy posing for the picture had been mistreated by the artist in some way, and he was now exacting his all-consuming revenge on the world.

But by far the most popular theory emerged many years later in 2000, following the publication of a book entitled Haunted Liverpool written by Tom Slemen, a self-proclaimed investigator into all things supernatural. In the book, Tom revealed that a retired schoolmaster from Devon named George Mallory finally managed to track down the original artist Giovanni Bragolin in 1995 to get his side of the story.

Giovanni Bragolin was apparently a pen name for a Spanish artist called Franchot Seville who was living in Madrid. The artist explained to George that he had come across a street urchin wandering around Madrid in the 1960s with a sorrowful expression on his face, and decided that he wanted to capture this boy’s visible heartache on canvas. A local Catholic priest had then warned Franchot to steer well of the young boy who went by the name of Don Bonillo.

Supposedly, Don’s parents had been tragically killed in a house fire, and ever since that day, fires began to mysteriously erupt wherever the crying boy roamed. Franchot told the priest to stick to fairy tales from The Bible, and proceeded to paint portraits of young Don Bonillo whilst offering him welcome accommodation in his studio.

Shortly afterwards, Franchot’s studio burned to the ground, and his career followed suit as his former customers began to regard him as a jinx. An angry Franchot accused Don Bonillo of setting fire to both his studio and his career, and kicked the eternally sobbing young boy back out onto the streets, never to be seen again. Years later in 1976, the book reports on how police in Barcelona responded to a tragic car accident in which a vehicle had crashed straight into a wall and exploded into a ball of flame.

The body of the driver was charred beyond recognition and was never officially identified. But the police found a tantalising clue in the glove box – a fragment of a driving licence which bore the name Don Bonillo. The Crying Boy was clearly a Fire Genii who was destined to go out all wheels blazing but who would leave a fiery legacy within the paintings that he posed for.

Even though this theory is regularly regurgitated on the internet, there are a few problems with it, not least the fact that it’s complete bollocks. David Clarke is an investigative journalist who wrote a piece for The Fortean Times which comprehensively debunked the story as fiction, and pretty much exposed the book’s author as nothing much more than a big fibber.

The original pictures were painted in the 1950s, not the 1960s. There is no evidence to suggest that either the retired schoolteacher George Mallory or the boy Don Bonillo ever existed. And even if the fictional schoolteacher had managed to track down the original artist in 1995 – whose real name by the way wasn’t either Giovanni Bragolin or Franchot Seville – the subsequent interview wouldn’t have been particularly informative, as the artist had been dead for fourteen years.

The Spanish artist’s real name was Bruno Amadio, and much of his life is still shrouded in mystery. He never really took much pride in painting the series of Crying Boy pictures but he quickly figured out that they were his biggest seller by far, so he carried on churning them out under the pseudonym of Giovanni Bragolin to avoid any direct association with them whilst raking in the lucrative profits.

The pictures were particularly popular overseas which is how tens of thousands of them ended up in the discount stores of the UK. But the curse of the Crying Boy wasn’t even restricted to the 65 variants painted by Bruno. When those Page 3 Girls were setting fire to all those prints, they were also burning pictures of crying boys which had been painted by other artists including Scottish painter Anna Zinkeisen. So the curse seemed to extend to pretty much any picture ever painted which depicted a crying child, regardless of its origin.

And this goes some way to explaining the first part of the myth. The reason why so many pictures of crying boys were linked with house fires is simply because there were just so many of them, and the rules for inclusion were pretty flexible. It’s a bit like saying that hundreds of fires occurred in homes which just happened to have a fridge. You don’t immediately blame the fridge.

Back in the ’80s, you’d be far more likely to blame a discarded cigarette or an overheated chip pan for the real source of the fire. Unless you lived in the North, in which case you’d fall asleep in bed with a lit cigarette whilst leaving an unattended chip pan burning downstairs, and when you woke up in the morning to a fiery inferno, you’d immediately start threatening to sue the artist of a painting that you and everyone else had hanging on the wall.

House fires were generally more common in the 1980s anyway, thanks to those discarded cigarettes and lack of smoke alarms and dodgier electrical equipment in the home. I can remember a time as a kid when a house literally a few doors up just blew up in the middle of the night and made the national news. I think it was a gas leak which just blew the top right off the house at around 3am, waking up the entire street except for myself.

I just slept right through all the drama. Thankfully, nobody was seriously hurt, but the house was utterly destroyed, leaving a curious new gap in the neighbourhood. And my older brother got the whole next day off school because his sleep was disturbed, whilst I got sent to school as usual as punishment for being such a heavy sleeper.

But none of this explains how the paintings always seemed to survive every house fire, despite everything else in the home getting reduced to ash. British comedian Steve Punt felt that he might just have stumbled across the answer in a 2010 episode of his comedy podcast Punt Pi which investigated unsolved mysteries.

After talking to some of the victims of the curse, Steve and researcher Martin Shipp attempted to get hold of a copy of a vintage Crying Boy painting and set fire to it. Apparently, delivery of the Crying Boy was “inexplicably delayed”, although I suspect this may have been Steve just trying to ramp up the spooky tension.

But here’s the funny thing. When it finally arrived, that picture really didn’t burn. It was exposed at length to a naked flame which reached two feet in height, and yet when the picture was inspected afterwards, there was barely any damage at all. The string had burned to a crisp, and the flames had created a tiny hole in the picture, but aside from that, The Crying Boy was completely unhurt.

Steve and Martin conducted further tests at the Building Research Establishment in Watford, and concluded that the painting had been treated with a fire retardant varnish which protected it from any serious damage. It was also printed onto a high-density hardboard which would be incredibly difficult to ignite. So it would seem that a varnish and a hard-density hardboard rather than a curse was keeping those Crying Boys safe from harm.

Another point to bear in mind is that the string holding the painting would be one of the first things to deteriorate in a house fire, which would result in the painting falling flat on its face on the floor which would offer further protection to the print.

The high-density hardboard wasn’t even a particularly new theory. Some of the clever Rotherham firefighters had suspected this all along. At the height of The Sun’s high-profile campaign, Chief Divisional Officer of the South Yorkshire Fire Service Mick Riley released a public statement which explained that the hardboard was most likely protecting the seemingly indestructible paintings.

Mick was becoming increasingly concerned that The Sun’s campaign was diverting everyone’s attention away from the real causes of a house fire, and he felt that homeowners should be more concerned about taking fire safety precautions in the house rather than getting all wound up about a picture. Mick grumbled: “Fires are not started by pictures or coincidence.”

Sadly, The Sun didn’t give much coverage to the statement, preferring instead to speculate on the alternative theory that the soul of a disgruntled voodoo child was inhabiting the picture frame. If only we’d listened to Mick Riley rather than a guy who was just trying to shift a few more copies of his shitty newspaper.

The curse didn’t entirely disappear, and even relatively recently, there have been fresh reports of Crying Boy house fires around the world, including yet more cases in good old Rotherham. And even today, panicked homeowners are still hiding the paintings in garden sheds, positioning them right next to fire extinguishers, or donating them to charity shops, just to be on the safe side.

Perhaps the mystery hasn’t been entirely solved. For starters, if the paintings really were so indestructible, then how did The Sun manage to destroy 2,500 of them with relative ease in 1985? Were they even burning the right pictures or were they largely just pissing about?

And why was it that only multiple variations of Crying Boy images by different artists just happened to be protected by high-density hardboard and fire retardant varnish, when pictures of anything else at all always seemed to perish in the flames?

There are a couple of final flickering footnotes to the saga. Within months of The Sun’s bonfire by the Thames, the paper’s parent company News International endured a painful period of strikes during which print unions began violently picketing the company’s new production plant in Wapping in protest at the modern facility which was pushing traditional printing methods out of the picture. The tense unpleasant drama dragged on for a whole year, and the Western Morning News paper poked fun at their rival by suggesting that The Crying Boy had exacted his revenge on Kelvin Mackenzie and his buddies, just not in the way they were expecting.

Here’s an even weirder incident that’s completely true. Our sensible firefighting friend and early bird myth debunker Chief Officer Mick Riley later received an unexpected knock on the door of his home. It was an anguished local female resident, clutching a copy of The Crying Boy and wailing that she didn’t know what to do with it.

Mick kindly took it off her hands, and suggested to his wife that they should hang it up in the house, but his wife point-blank refused. So instead, Mick took it into work and mounted it on the wall of the fire station just for a bit of a giggle. As soon as it was spotted by one of his miserable superiors, he was ordered to take down the painting immediately.

On that very same day, one of the ovens in the upstairs kitchen randomly overheated for no apparent reason and burned the dinners of the brave crew to an inedible crisp. Hardly a great tragedy, but think of the fire officers who were deprived of their sausage, eggs and beans that day. Could the Crying Boy still be destined to have the last laugh or at least shed the last tear?

And much more importantly, will Simon ever feel brave enough to display The Crying Boy on the wall of his own office? If he wants one for free, I heard a rumour that there are stacks and stacks of abandoned Crying Boy paintings littering up the banking next to the river Thames, each and every one of them in surprisingly pristine condition.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the origin of the Crying Boy painting?

The Crying Boy paintings were first painted in the 1950s by an artist named Bruno Amadio, who used the pseudonym Giovanni Bragolin.

Where did the curse of the Crying Boy painting first come to light?

The curse first came to light in the old haunted mining town of Rotherham in South Yorkshire in 1985.

How many variations of the Crying Boy painting were there?

There were about 65 different variations of The Crying Boy in circulation.

Why were the Crying Boy paintings particularly popular in the North of England?

The Crying Boy paintings became massively popular in the UK from the 1970s onwards, particularly in the North of England, where they were sold cheaply in stores like Woolworths and were seen as introducing elegance and sophistication into homes.

What was the response from readers when The Sun newspaper reported on the curse?

The response from readers was electric, with The Sun receiving numerous phone calls and letters from readers who had experienced their own terrifying encounters with the Crying Boy painting.

What was the plan to destroy the Crying Boy paintings?

The Sun newspaper planned to destroy all the prints of the Crying Boy in a huge bonfire on Halloween Night in 1985, but the local fire brigades refused to cooperate, so the bonfire was held by the river Thames with the help of Page 3 Girls.

What was the real reason the Crying Boy paintings seemed indestructible?

The Crying Boy paintings were treated with a fire retardant varnish and printed onto a high-density hardboard, which made them difficult to ignite and protected them from serious damage in house fires.

What was the reaction of the South Yorkshire Fire Service to The Sun’s campaign?

Chief Divisional Officer Mick Riley of the South Yorkshire Fire Service released a public statement explaining that the hardboard was most likely protecting the paintings and expressed concern that The Sun’s campaign was diverting attention from real fire safety precautions.

What happened to the Crying Boy paintings after The Sun’s bonfire?

Even after The Sun’s bonfire, reports of Crying Boy house fires continued, and homeowners still took precautions like hiding the paintings in garden sheds or donating them to charity shops.

What was the impact of The Sun’s campaign on their parent company?

Within months of The Sun’s bonfire, the paper’s parent company News International endured a year-long period of strikes and violent picketing at their new production plant in Wapping.

Sources

• Original Decoding the Unknown video: The Kennedy Curse.
• Hero image source by Anna_Zoccolo / openverse, by-sa.