On September 4, 1985, a British tabloid published a story attributing dozens of fires to a painting of a crying boy that had been mass produced in the 50s. After each fire, nothing survived but the painting, unscathed. Was the painting cursed by the spirit of the crying boy, or was it a hoax? Conspiracy Theories is on Instagram @theconspiracypod and TikTok @conspiracy.pod! Follow us to keep up with the show and get behind-the-scenes updates from Carter and the team. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Chapter 1: What is the Curse of the Crying Boy?
It's 1982 in Nottingham, England. Jane McCutcheon is cleaning the kitchen. In the other room, her two young daughters are watching cartoons and giggling along. The happy scene was contrasted by the haunting portrait that hung above the fireplace in front of them. It's of a young boy, about 11 years old. He has blonde hair and wears a ragged, oversized shirt.
Chapter 2: What happened during Jane McCutcheon's fire?
There's a sadness behind his crystal blue eyes. Teardrops roll down either side of his face. Then, Jane's two-year-old daughter runs into the kitchen and tugs at Jane's shirt. She points back to the living room, trying to vocalize something. The room is on fire. The ceiling, the Venetian blinds, the furniture. Within minutes, Jane's home is an inferno.
Jane grabs her daughters and flees for safety just as firefighters arrive. As she passes some of the men, one of them exclaims, oh no, not another. He was referring to an item, the painting of the crying boy. Amidst the flames and the ashes, it was left unscathed. And it wasn't the first time it had happened. Welcome to Conspiracy Theories, a Spotify podcast. I'm Carter Roy.
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We've all heard stories about bad omens and superstitions, like how a broken mirror can lead to seven years of bad luck. An open umbrella can insult the home's guardian spirit. Stepping on a crack can break your mother's back. But it's unlikely you've heard that hanging a portrait of a young, crying boy can cause your house to catch on fire.
In September 1985, The Sun, a British tabloid, published a shocking article that caught the public's attention. The headline read, The story detailed the curious case of Ron and Mary Hall, a couple living in Rotherham, England, about 80 miles east of Liverpool. they had purchased an inexpensive painting at a department store some months before.
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Chapter 3: How did The Sun newspaper popularize the curse?
The Sun promised to collect all unwanted Crying Boy paintings. They would stage a sort of exorcism on Halloween night, where they document the whole event and publish it as their spotlight piece. But then, more than 2,500 copies of The Crying Boy were sent to the paper's headquarters in London. People wanted them out of their homes, and McKenzie was drowning in portraits.
Though he himself wasn't particularly superstitious, something told him that they shouldn't be kept in the building much longer. Who knows what would happen? He wanted to burn them all on the roof of the London office, but the local fire department wouldn't allow it. After all, the point was to avoid structural fires, not cause them.
Once they couldn't use the roof, they found a new location, a makeshift pyre in the city of Reading. They arrived just before nightfall on October 31st. Portrait after portrait was piled high to make a massive heap, then a match was lit. The bonfire blazed into the night. They stoked the whole thing with continuous gasoline to ensure it burned.
The next day, the headline read, In the coming months, calls regarding the portrait slowed down. It appeared that the sun had finally put the commotion to rest. The story of the crying boy's curse became relegated to urban legend. But what about those who suffered, who lost their homes? Where was their explanation?
The Sons certainly sensationalized the story, but they never provided an explanation. In fact, McKenzie was even quoted saying, For many, a bonfire wasn't enough. They wanted the truth. Was it a coincidence or a curse? And of course, how had the crying boy always managed to survive?
The sun burned what was left of the crying boy curse, but now people wanted to get to the bottom of the mysterious fires. The key had to be in the painting itself. Some found the portrait's subject matter disturbing, a small young child with darkness in his eyes and two giant tears rolling down his cheeks. They wanted to know why anyone would buy it in the first place.
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Chapter 4: What were the reported effects of the painting?
The painting was sold at popular retailers like Woolworths. Young women and couples were some of the most common purchasers. Jane McCutcheon claimed that she was hypnotized by the image of the boy. During an interview with BBC Sounds, she said that she fell in love with his expressive nature. McCutcheon didn't think twice about buying it. She had the perfect place to hang it.
Right above the fireplace in the family's living room. Like Jane, many became attached to the boy's portrait. So much so, they couldn't bring themselves to part with it even after rumors of its curse started to spread. At the Cube Gallery in London, director of exhibitions Tim Marlowe expressed his own theories on the painting's attraction.
He believed that the little boy may remind people of the cycle of life, loss of innocence, and the inevitability of death, themes known to influence art buyers. Many others, of course, credited the hypnotic nature of the image to something more supernatural. Which leads to the theory that the Crying Boy painting was cursed, and its mesmerizing appeal was a tactic used to rope in unwitting victims.
But what caused the curse? The theory didn't fully fall into place until the public knew more about the painting's backstory. Though people weren't familiar with the artist's name, they did note his pronounced signature, G. Bregolin. After the son's article, people took to public records to find out what they could.
The story originally claimed that the portraits came from an Italian artist by the name of Giovanni Bregolin. But researchers had a difficult time corroborating. It wasn't until 1995 that English school teacher George Mallory finally discovered more information on the enigmatic Italian artist. Mallory found that G. Bregolin was actually a pseudonym for an Italian artist named Bruno Amario.
He was said to be a classically trained painter who spent time in Venice after World War II restoring old paintings. During this time, Amadio released an estimated 65 different works of art, all under the name Giovanni Bregolin. Somewhere down the line, someone caught sight of his work and decided to reproduce the paintings for mass distribution.
According to Mallory, as of 1970, Amadio was still painting the city of Padua in northern Italy. He died in September 1981, just a few years before the stories of the fires began. It seemed Amadio was free from any curses or bad omens in his background, so sleuths turned their attention to the boy in the painting.
Roy Vickery, the secretary of the Folklore Society in London, suggested that all these fires could be part of the child's curse, his way of getting revenge. But revenge for what? Who was the child? Was there any connection to Bruno Amadio? Unfortunately, we don't have many details surrounding the claims that have been made, their legitimacy, or even who made them.
But some believe the boy was an orphan who dealt with trauma in his childhood. Trauma that manifested in the portrait and spread to its owners. Then, in 2000, The Sun printed a follow-up piece on the crying boy, which included Amadio's backstory.
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Chapter 5: What was the public response to the painting?
The child ran off and was never seen by the artist again. From here, Amadio's career took a dark turn. No one would hire him and he became a local pariah. Perhaps this is the reason he changed his name and relocated in the years following. We don't know. But in 1976, just outside of Barcelona, a car exploded, killing a 19-year-old boy. His name? Don Bonillo.
Ironically, the Diablo may have met his fate in a fiery crash. The Sun's article in 2000 gave a history that supported the idea of a curse. Whether it was true or not, paranormal investigators clung to the anecdote and used it to take their research to the next level. In 2010, Steve Punt, a comedian and self-proclaimed private investigator, decided it was time to put the curse theory to the test.
Punt brought his own The Crying Boy portrait to Sir Ralph Harvey, a pagan exorcist, and Annie Mills, a psychic medium. Punt kept the painting concealed in a large bag for the first half of their session. He wanted to see if they might receive any kind of energy from the portrait that would suggest a curse. The moment Punt walked in, Mills claimed that she sensed an immediate shift in the air.
Then her hands began uncontrollably shaking. She then made a strange claim. The object was giving off a sense of impoverishment. there was a serious discomfort surrounding the piece. Punt showed the duo the portrait, and the two claimed they knew nothing of its backstory, which included the fires it caused.
But Mills picked up on energy that told her the boy did not have a long life, and he might have died in a fire. Harvey told Punt that he believed the image could be exercised, meaning he was certain it possessed supernatural abilities. But there was one giant problem with the theory of the curse and its connection to Don Bonillo, the kid in the Crying Boy painting.
Not all of the portraits were of the same child. In fact, Amadio actually painted an entire series with at least five known variations. And some of the portraits the son collected were from the painter's other series titled The Crying Girl. So there were different children. Granted, it was easy to confuse one for another.
Each child was under the age of 12 and seemed to be from an impoverished background with ragged, dirty clothes and all expressed the same haunting sadness. But that means that Don Benio could have been any of the children in the Crying Boys series. And if that was the case, his curse couldn't affect them all.
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Chapter 6: Who was the artist behind the Crying Boy painting?
Perhaps the son didn't want to call attention to the fact that there were different prints. If they had, their stories might not have sold as well. The mystery might have been written off. The son also didn't share another odd detail. Some of the prints weren't even from the same artist.
A few were part of a project titled Childhood, a similar series of portraits painted by Scottish artist Anna Zinkeisen. So there wasn't just one portrait from one artist. There were multiple portraits from multiple artists, each one with a different subject and backstory, which makes it almost impossible to blame the curse on Don Bonillo.
Which means that, more likely than not, the portraits were never cursed.
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In the 1980s, British tabloids were reaching a daily circulation rate of nearly 5 million copies, and they had far more influence over people than they do today. The Sun's reach could have easily caused a collective obsession, and mass hysteria can be incredibly destructive. It causes deep irrational anxiety and fear, which can then feed into a public frenzy.
It can cause rash emotional outbursts and widespread panic. Take, for example, the Salem witch trials, which you might be familiar with. They led to the hanging of 20 women after a population became convinced that innocent people were practicing witchcraft and cursing their neighbors. In the mid-1980s, The Sun was in a heated battle with rival publications like The Daily Mirror.
The crying boy's story fell into editor McKenzie's lap at the perfect time. He was likely craving a hot story that would make waves, and he succeeded. The Sun was actually the first source to associate the painting with terms like jinx, fear, curse. But the truth was that most people who submitted their paintings to be burned never suffered any harm.
It was a precautionary measure driven by irrational fear. But the power of the human mind should never be underestimated. When comedian and investigator Steve Punt arrived at the now-retired McKenzie's home in 2010 to do a follow-up on the story, he arrived with the portrait in tow. Years later, McKenzie still didn't want it in his home.
He never experienced the first-hand effects of the curse himself, and he knew all of the holes in the story because he created them, not to mention McKenzie and the son claimed they ended the curse. And still, McKenzie managed to convince himself of his own lie.
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Chapter 7: What theories exist about the boy in the painting?
A fire had overwhelmed another couple's home in the city of Rotherham, the exact town where the legend had begun. Stan Jones, the man who owned the home, said that he had purchased the painting for two pounds at a flea market nearly ten years prior. But this wasn't the first time he lost his home to a fire. In fact, it was the third time. And the portrait outlasted the home every single time.
Thank you for watching Conspiracy Theories. We're here with a new episode every Wednesday. Be sure to check us out on Instagram at The Conspiracy Pod. If you're watching on Spotify, swipe up and give us your thoughts or email us at conspiracystories at spotify.com.
For more information on the Crying Boy paintings, amongst the many sources we used, we found The Martians Have Landed, a history of media-driven panics and hoaxes by Benjamin Radford and Robert E. Bartholomew, and researched by David Clark, extremely helpful to our research. Until next time, remember, the truth isn't always the best story, and the official story isn't always the truth.
This episode was written by Lori Marinelli, edited by Chelsea Wood, researched by Brian Petras, fact-checked by Cara Mackerlein, and video editing and sound design by Alex Button. I'm your host, Carter Roy.