MEGAscene • Issue 8 - 2016
SA PARANORMAL
By Allen Tiller For this month’s MEGAscene I wanted to focus on something different. Recently I have seen for sale in Adelaide a number of the old allegedly cursed “Haunting Boy” paintings, so I thought why not write about that, and get to the bottom of the legend!?
More stories accumulated, about misadventures happening to residents in houses where the prints hung. One lady even speculated that the painting may have been the cause for her husband and three sons dying over a span of a few years. A security guard named Paul Collier threw In 1985, ‘The Sun’, a very popular tabloid one of his two prints on a bonfire to test the newspaper in England, published a story in theory that the paintings and prints would its September 4th edition (page 13) with the not burn, he claimed that after an hour in the Headline “Blazing Curse of the Crying Boy”. flames, the painting was not even scorched, this of course led to even more sales for The The story that followed told how, after a fire Sun! burnt their South Yorkshire’s home to the ground, married couple Ron and May Hall, put Strangely, not all the prints and paintings were the blame squarely on a picture of a crying of the same crying boy, paintings by Giovanni boy they had hung in their home. Bragolin and Scottish artist Anna Zinkeisen became associated with the Curse, Zinkeisen A fire broke out from an overheated frypan of had released her crying boy paintings as part oil and devastated the home they had lived in of a study titled “Childhood”. for 27 years, the house was a mess, and one of the only things unscathed in the fire, was After some time (and a lot of newspaper a picture of crying toddler, hanging on a wall. sales) it emerged that Alan Wilkinson had Ron’s brother Peter, was a local fire-fighter, personally logged about 50 “Crying Boy fires his Fire Station leader, Mr Alan Wilkinson said dating back to 1973”. He had dismissed any he had heard of numerous cases of fires where supernatural connection between the fires prints of “crying boys” would be undamaged and the paintings, finding that in almost in devastating house fires, this of course every case, it was human error, or human turned a mundane ‘hot chip’ fire story into carelessness that had started the fire. a leading headline, and propelled the “Crying Boy” curse into the world spotlight. He could not explain though, why the paintings would survive the fires unscathed. The story picked up legs in the next day’s edition, when The Sun reported that readers As the original sun newspaper story began had been phoning in with their own horrifying to fade from readers’ minds, the story of the stories of bad luck related to The Crying Crying Boy paintings morphed into an urban Boy paintings. Quotes were printed in the legend, and spread across the world. Along newspaper such as this one from Dora Mann the way new information was added to the in Surrey “All my paintings were destroyed – original legend; psychics claimed a spirit was except the one of The Crying Boy”. trapped in the original painting, and the fires were an attempt to free itself, other stories A Mr Parks claimed he had destroyed his copy told how the artist’s bad-luck had cursed the after returning from hospital from smoke painting, and that’s why so many bad things inhalation from his house burning down, to happened in its presence. find the only thing untouched in the scorched ruins was a crying boy painting. The Crying Boy legend is still very much alive 32