The Crying Boy curse

The full file

The "curse of the Crying Boy" began as a local fire report in South Yorkshire in the week after the 1985 August bank holiday, became a national tabloid campaign within days, and ended, as far as the press was concerned, on a bonfire at Halloween. Its birth can be dated to the day, and the fire service's explanation was on record before the story was over.

What was reported

On Monday 2 September 1985 the Rotherham edition of the Sheffield Star ran a page-seven story by John Murphy, "Family Hit by Curse". Ron and May Hall, a redundant miner and his wife, blamed a print of a crying boy, signed G. Bragolin, for a chip-pan fire that badly damaged their terraced council house in Swallownest; their adult son, who had been cooking, was pictured with his arm bandaged. The downstairs rooms were badly damaged, but the framed print in the lounge appeared untouched. Ron's brother Peter, a firefighter at Rotherham, was reported to have warned them that the same print turned up at every house fire he attended.

Two days later, on 4 September, The Sun ran Martyn Sharpe's version on page 13 as "Blazing Curse of the Crying Boy!", quoting May Hall and stating that an estimated 50,000 copies had been sold in British department stores. Over the following weeks the paper printed readers' accounts of fires in homes with the print, and a Rotherham station officer, Alan Wilkinson, was reported to have logged some fifty "crying boy" fires since 1973. The prints themselves were mass-produced reproductions of several different paintings, not one image: many were signed Bragolin, but at least one fire in October involved a print of Childhood by the Scottish artist Anna Zinkeisen.

The record and where it is held

The case stands on this shelf because records made at the time by people other than the families survive: the Star and Sun reports of September and October 1985, and a statement from the South Yorkshire Fire Service printed by the Star. The folklorist David Clarke of Sheffield Hallam University reproduces the original Star clipping from his own collection, and in July 2017 searched the microfilm of five national and six regional papers at the British Library, finding 38 stories between 2 September 1985 and 1 April 1986. The newspapers were not opened for this write-up; their contents are taken from Clarke.

What investigators concluded

The fire service gave its view within weeks. After a further fire in a council house in East Herringthorpe, Rotherham, which it attributed to an electric fire left too close to a bed, Chief Divisional Officer Mick Riley said that a large number of prints had been sold and that any connection with the fires was "purely coincidental". The prints survived, he said, because they were on "high density hardboard, which is very difficult to ignite". Clarke cites the statement from the Rotherham Star of 25 October 1985. The Sun did not print it. Wilkinson himself told reporters he did not accept a supernatural cause and put most of the fires down to carelessness, though he could not say how individual prints came through.

Instead, on 24 October The Sun invited readers to send in their copies for destruction. According to Clarke, drawing on Peter Chippindale and Chris Horrie's history of the paper, some 2,500 arrived. The London and Thames Valley fire brigades declined to take part, calling the plan "a cheap publicity stunt", and on 30 October two van-loads were burned on land near Reading. The paper reported the bonfire on Halloween.

Clarke's later work concludes that the curse was made by journalists. Murphy told him in 2017 that a firefighter at the scene had called the run of surviving prints strange, and that the phrase "curse of the crying boy" was his own: "In effect I think I created the idea that there was a curse."

The leading conventional explanation

The leading explanation is the fire service's own: a very common print on board that resists ignition, hanging in homes that caught fire for ordinary reasons. Its strength is that each part is checkable. The Sun's own sales estimate put tens of thousands of copies on British walls, sold, the paper said, particularly in working-class areas of northern England, where a share of them would be present at house fires by chance alone; the investigated fires had ordinary causes, chiefly chip pans, cigarettes and heaters; and prints on hardboard or varnished board would be expected to outlast curtains and furniture. In 2010 Steve Punt tested a print for BBC Radio 4's Punt PI; by Atlas Obscura's account of the programme, it singed and holed but did not burn through, and Punt and the construction researcher Martin Shipp suggested a fire-retardant varnish.

Its weakness is that nobody counted. There is no tally of how many burned homes held a print and lost it, so the survivals were never set against the losses, and Wilkinson's fifty fires rest on his recollection as reported in the press.

What remains disputed

The fires are not seriously disputed; details of the record are. Clarke cites a 1985 tabloid figure of 250,000 prints sold against The Sun's 50,000. Accounts differ on the artist: Clarke's 2026 paper calls Bruno Amadio, who signed as Bragolin and as Franchot Seville, Italian and places his studio in Venice, while his earlier online account calls him Spanish. The later legend of a Spanish orphan named Don Bonillo comes from an online account by Tom Slemen in 2000, and Clarke found nothing in it that could be corroborated beyond the pseudonym Franchot Seville.

Sources

• Tears for Fears: the curse of the crying boy (archived) — David Clarke, Revenant 13, 137–158, 2026. Dates, names, headlines, Riley's statement, the British Library microfilm search, the bonfire and Murphy's 2017 interview.
• Research archive record for the article (archived) — Sheffield Hallam University Research Archive. Publication details and abstract of Clarke's paper.
• The Curse of the Crying Boy (archived) — David Clarke, first published in Fortean Times 234, 2008; online text 2010. Earlier version of the account; cross-check for the fires, the statement and the bonfire.
• Punt PI, Series 3, Episode 4 (archived) — BBC Radio 4, broadcast 9 October 2010. The programme's existence, date and its burn test of a print.
• A Painting of a Crying Boy Was Blamed for a Series of Fires in the '80s (archived) — Natalie Zarrelli, Atlas Obscura, 2017. Account of the Punt PI burn test with Martin Shipp; secondary summary of Clarke.