The Crying Boy
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The Crying Boy is a mass-produced print of a painting by Bragolin that was popular in Britain in the 1980s.
On September 4, 1985, the British tabloid newspaper The Sun reported that a fireman from Yorkshire was claiming that undamaged copies of the painting were frequently found amidst the ruins of burned houses. He stated that no firefighter would allow a copy of the painting into his own house. Over the next few months, The Sun and other tabloids ran several articles on house fires suffered by people who had owned the painting. (Since house fires are by no means uncommon, and since a not insignificant portion of the British population owned a copy of The Crying Boy, it was to be expected that the two would often coincide.)
By the end of November, belief in the painting's curse was widespread enough that The Sun was organising mass bonfires of the paintings, sent in by readers.
