{"id":6154,"date":"2017-06-23T12:29:26","date_gmt":"2017-06-23T11:29:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/verityholloway.com\/?p=6154"},"modified":"2017-06-23T12:29:26","modified_gmt":"2017-06-23T11:29:26","slug":"tears-for-fears-the-curse-of-the-crying-boy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/verityholloway.com\/?p=6154","title":{"rendered":"Tears For Fears – The Curse Of The Crying Boy"},"content":{"rendered":"

I have a recurring dream. I’m at my grandparents’ house, the one with the grotty pink shag carpet that enveloped my toes when I was small. I’m alone in the house, wandering through dark rooms with\u00a0orange\u00a0floral curtains and\u00a0vases of\u00a0papery Honesty, gathering dust. I touch\u00a0the doorstopper that looks like a slab\u00a0of chocolate but smells of burned things. The bath towels are\u00a0scratchy with age.<\/p>\n

In my dream, I never look up at the Crying Boy.<\/p>\n

\"IMG_6299<\/a>He disappeared from my life long before I was old enough to know his folklore, but even as a kid under ten, I could have told you that painting\u00a0was cursed. The boy\u00a0stands in a void, the ruffles of his infant blouse reminiscent of a Tudor\u00a0prince awaiting the block. Something has made him cry. Not the tantrum of a little boy who’s just flushed his Lego down the toilet – there’s dread. We can’t see who or what he’s looking up at. And what is he pleading\u00a0for? Comfort? Forgiveness? Mercy?<\/p>\n

You’ll know The Crying Boy. Your own grandparents\u00a0probably\u00a0had one.\u00a0Somehow, during the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s,\u00a0context-free devastated\u00a0children struck a chord with the British public. There are dozens of\u00a0versions of the Crying Boy, and by 1985, an estimated 50,000 prints of one Crying Boy variant had been\u00a0sold in Britain.<\/p>\n

It isn’t the first time the British have flocked to purchase pictures of children they aren’t related to. Where nowadays you might have a calendar of Yorkshire Terriers in your kitchen,\u00a0Victorians exhibited their softer side by collecting sentimental pictures of children. This gauze of innocence\u00a0still applied\u00a0if you were a single man, and even if said children were unclothed (looking at you, Lewis Carroll). Sentimental infants go\u00a0in and out of fashion – look at those unspeakable\u00a0Anne Geddes bumblebee babies, for instance – but the Crying Boy has an altogether more intriguing\u00a0history.<\/p>\n

\"cryingboy2\"<\/a>In September 1985, Ron and May Hall lost their home in that most retro\u00a0of household disasters – the chip pan fire – leaving them with nothing but an intact Crying Boy. Days earlier, the couple had laughed at Ron’s fireman brother as he\u00a0warned them of all the times he had attended blazes where the child had hung weeping on the walls. “Peter told us he wouldn’t have the picture in his house,” May told The Sun<\/em>, “and nor would his friends at the fire station.” Maybe Peter and his friends just weren’t\u00a0tacky as all hell. Or maybe they were onto something.<\/p>\n

\"cryingboy4\"Crying Boy disasters\u00a0flowed steadily into The Sun’s<\/em> mail room. Kevin and Julie of Rotherham lost their home to the flames. The couple were left with nothing but the clothes they were wearing and the infernal\u00a0child on the wall. More than one\u00a0reader claimed\u00a0their\u00a0children mysteriously died following the\u00a0purchase of the painting. Someone swore they saw their Crying Boy move.\u00a0One of the Sun’s<\/em> pin-up girls – Sexy Sandra, 21 – played a trick on a friend by giving her Crying Boy spiky red hair, only to find the house wrecked by floods the following day. The boy, of course, was fine.<\/p>\n

For those who don’t know, if it’s printed in\u00a0The\u00a0Sun<\/em>, it might as well be printed on Beelzebub’s toilet paper. ‘Enough is enough, folks’, they wrote, as if the Crying Boy were some kind of foreigner, leftie, or feminist. ‘If you are worried about a crying boy picture hanging in your home, send it to us immediately. We will destroy the painting for you, and that should\u00a0see the back of any curse there may be.’<\/p>\n

Soon enough, The Sun<\/em> had a pile of Crying Boys, and Sexy Sandra was armed with a can of kerosene to sort them out. The paper’s\u00a0fine arts correspondent, Paul Hooper,\u00a0was relieved to report that no muffled cries\u00a0were heard as the paintings turned to ash.<\/p>\n

\"crying<\/a>The South Yorkshire Fire Service were forced to issue a statement assuring the public their Crying Boys would not turn on them, but their chip pans might.\u00a0The Boy was\u00a0a running joke in the fire service for years afterwards. Prints became the retirement gift du jour<\/em>, but the picture retained an aura of bad luck long after\u00a0the tabloids ran out of fuel. I recently\u00a0saw the Boy donated to a charity shop, only to be immediately thrown in a skip by the management for being ‘too spooky’.<\/p>\n

The legend of Crying Boy lived on. Who was the model? Some say he was an Italian war orphan. Others\u00a0said he was a runaway who disappeared after posing for his portrait; his anonymity played nicely into the cultural\u00a0fascination with child murder victims. At school in the 1990s, we had The Boy Ghost who heralded your death if you caught a glimpse of him wandering the corridors. Children are inherently creepy. You can’t have innocence without acknowledging the threat of corruption and death.<\/p>\n

The Crying Boy has entered urban legend, where he belongs. Thanks to the Internet, The Sun<\/em>‘s campaign of burning can continue, despite\u00a0a BBC documentary\u00a0in which a leading expert in the field of cursed paintings explains\u00a0that varnish can have fire retardant properties.<\/p>\n