Lunatics Radio Hour
Episode 74 - The Curse of The Crying Boy Paintings
Abby and Alan explore the curse of the crying boy paintings that spread panic across Great Britain in the 1980s. The Urban Legend goes that hanging this mass produced painting in your home ends in a fire that burns everything...with the exception of the painting itself. Listen in to learn more.
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Consider donating to Mission Oxygen to help the Covid-19 crisis in India.
---
Check out Abby's book Horror Stories. Available in eBook and paperback.
Music by Michaela Papa, Alan Kudan & Jordan Moser. Poster Art by Pilar Keprta @pilar.kep.
lunaticsproject.com
Listen to Technically A Conversation, anywhere you listen to podcasts.
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Abby and Alan explore the curse of the crying boy paintings that spread panic across Great Britain in the 1980s. The Urban Legend goes that hanging this mass produced painting in your home ends in a fire that burns everything...with the exception of the painting itself. Listen in to learn more.
Subscribe to the Spooky B*tches newsletter here.
Consider donating to Mission Oxygen to help the Covid-19 crisis in India.
---
Check out Abby's book Horror Stories. Available in eBook and paperback.
Music by Michaela Papa, Alan Kudan & Jordan Moser. Poster Art by Pilar Keprta @pilar.kep.
lunaticsproject.com
Listen to Technically A Conversation, anywhere you listen to podcasts.
Bite Me The Show About EdiblesCreate your own tasty, healthy cannabis edibles and take control of your high life! ...
Listen on: Apple Podcasts Spotify
[inaudible]
Speaker 2:And welcome to another episode of the little ticks radio hour podcast. I'm Abby Brinker. I'm here with Alan Kadin. Hello. And today we are talking about crying boys.
Speaker 3:I was waiting for you to introduce yourself or be bonkers
Speaker 2:Or be bonkers. Yes. And your, your Jollyville name is Erwin kablam. Yes, indeed. So yeah, our friends over at Jollyville radio did a spoof, a parody, uh, I don't know, recently, a reenactment of reenactment, uh, Luna tastes radio hour on their episode called spam. And it's it had us laughing very hard. So please go check it out and listen to Jollyville. Well,
Speaker 3:I, I don't remember which celebrity said it, but it has been said that, you know, you've made it when someone in parodies your work.
Speaker 2:Mm that's true. I mean, it's an honor and it was so funny to, to hear their takes on our personalities. It was right. It was spot on. So go, go get a lesson. So today we are here to talk about crying. Boy,
Speaker 3:Nothing is more terrifying than a man showing his emotions.
Speaker 2:No, that's not true that we want more of that. We love that we love when boys go to therapy, everybody's vulnerable. Everybody should cry. I can't be the only one crying all the time, you know, to spread your best efforts. So I was actually introduced to this urban legend by my favorite, uh, email newsletter, spooky. That's right.
Speaker 3:Was this the same, uh, issue where they celebrated large birds?
Speaker 2:No, that was different, but I know that one was important to you. What a title? What a title. Yeah. So we love switching breeding, large birds. They're awesome. They're really fun. Newsletters. They're always spooky and weird and they have awesome. They're both writers, so they're well-written and they have cool personalities and they cover cool topics. So I
Speaker 3:Can't remember which issue you sent to me, but it was something that had like funny sensational title, like celebrating large birds. It wasn't that, but I ended up reading the article just because it got me
Speaker 2:And it's really, really well written. Like it's,
Speaker 3:It's actually like a really interesting newsletter despite the silly
Speaker 2:Yeah, for sure. No, they're awesome. And you know, I think they also poke fun at themselves and they poke fun at pop culture and these weird trends and things that come up. So I enjoy them. I
Speaker 3:Feel like they're doing it right where you just like you rope them in
Speaker 2:Rope a, in with a weird title, get them out of journalism. Yeah. Today's sources. We have an article by Dr. David Clark called the curse of the crying boy. And this is really great research and he's done a lot to, to not just like aggregate the history, but also contextualize it. So I'm pulling a lot from his article and we'll also link that below. Of course, the spooky newsletter firsthand account of curse paintings from YouTube Wikipedia and Atlas Obscura. The belief in cursed objects could be a podcast all on its own. Even when you focus only on haunted or cursed paintings, the folklore and accounts could fill a book. For example, did you know that some believe a painting falling off of your wall is an omen of impending death, especially apparently if it's a portrait,
Speaker 3:Is it a painting of the person say you have a painting of yourself on the wall
Speaker 2:Because you're crazy narcissist,
Speaker 3:You beat me to it. Um, and
Speaker 2:That falls off. Right. Does that mean like your estate is doomed? I would hope so. Or
Speaker 3:If you just have a painting of your great, great, great grand dog, grand dog. Yeah. And that falls off does, is that impending doom wa I mean, no, it's a great career. He's
Speaker 2:Dead. Oh, sorry. You're moving. And your brain is moving so fast.
Speaker 3:Keep up kid. Um, but is it impending doom for the person in the portrait or just the household in which the painting falls?
Speaker 2:Great question. I originally interpreted it as for the household because in my personal belief, I don't think a lot of people have portraits of themselves unless you're super millionaires. And in that case, like whatever, but
Speaker 3:We might not want to poke fun at people that have portraits of themselves in their home because they're really rich. And we would love them to donate to this podcast. It's a great,
Speaker 2:That's a good point, please. If you're a millionaire or a billionaire, we don't disagree. If you're a millionaire or up, get in touch. You know what? If you're doing our Patriots thousand error, apple, we'll take your money. That's very true. Today. We're here to talk about a very specific belief in a very specific cursed object,
Speaker 3:Something with a painting. Yes.
Speaker 2:Today we were talking about the crying boys paintings. If you aren't familiar, I'd classify this as an urban legend that has a modest cult. Following crying. Boys are a type of painting, which depict, as you might have guessed the image of a crying child.
Speaker 3:I, I know about this. This is like the boys look like Americana type. I'm thinking, uh, not Frank Lloyd Wright. Who's the guy that like the Frank Lloyd Wright, the, the, the guy that painted like the, the rock. That's the guy, Norman Rockwell. I mean like a bunch of like kids
Speaker 2:There are, let me describe it so that we can all visualize it together. I don't know that. I would say Norman Rockwell might close. This sounds familiar. I think you're thinking of the right thing. I don't think Norman Rockwell is the key to success to describe
Speaker 3:It. Norman Rockwell was the first crime boy.
Speaker 2:He was the first boy that ever cried.
Speaker 3:No, no, that was Jesus. We're going to get a lot of hate mail from this episode. Crying boy was Hitler when he got rejected from art school.
Speaker 2:Okay. Well, listen, I'm going to dirt forward. All the emails that come in right to you. Okay. Let's picture what this is together. I mean, you can look it up and we'll post photos of it, but crying. Boy, it's a pretty close up image of the boy. So you see like his face and like his shoulders and he's crying and he's crying. And there's tears.
Speaker 3:Typical victim complex tears painted of the white patriarchy. Exactly.
Speaker 2:Some people suggest that the boy has an orange hue to him as if he is looking at something that's burning. The legend is that the paintings are cursed. They cause house buyers, leaving everything eviscerated with the exception of the painting itself, which remains in perfect condition amongst the ashy remnants. Eviscerated. Yeah. What are you going to pick apart? You can nitpick my word choice. Yeah. It burns down the house. Okay. Is that good enough for you?
Speaker 3:Oh, deceration okay. Would be to like tear to shreds, right? If a bear got a hold of like a torso to eviscerate it.
Speaker 2:All right. Googling eviscerate. Okay. Disembowel a person or animal. All right. To deprive something of its essential content or to remove the contents of a body organ.
Speaker 3:Okay. So if a house is the viscera rated, it would mean gutted, but the structure is intact.
Speaker 2:The goat has been skinned and nearly eviscerated by the bear. Yeah. Myriad little concessions that would eviscerate the project. So CA can be abstract. Sure. Yeah. I mean, I think, I don't know how fires work, but I imagine it does kind of gut things out to some degree. Right?
Speaker 3:Sure. If like everything was completely removed to ashes, I think that would fall under
Speaker 2:It dissembled the house
Speaker 3:Too. But that would indicate that the innards were removed elsewhere. Not completely destroyed.
Speaker 2:I always thought that eviscerate was, maybe I'm thinking of like evaporate, but in my mind, but that's kind of always how I, now I know, listen, I think
Speaker 3:You're confusing evaporate and Emily what's Emily. So Emily
Speaker 2:Means an English major.
Speaker 3:Emily means to burn something and completely turn into smoke.
Speaker 2:Okay. Well that's what the word I should have used. The legend is that the paintings are cursed. They cause house buyers leaving everything emulated. What's the word emulate means to recreate
Speaker 3:A facsimile of,
Speaker 2:Okay, well let's move on. Let's move on from this. All right. So you guys get the idea, right? The paintings, this book, here we go. Long story short, the paintings are believed to cause the fires cause they're a cursed, right? So they putting a painting in your house. You'll have a fire that everything will burn and that the painting will remain untouched. Okay. That's the curse. Another thing that happens is that some accounts claim that the minute the paintings were brought into homes, strange things started to happen.
Speaker 3:Quick point of clarity. Yeah. What year are we in?
Speaker 2:These paintings are, we're going to get into the specifics of all this, but the paintings were sold and created between the fifties and seventies, the curse and the urban legend stuff starts in the eighties, 1980s.
Speaker 3:Okay. Because aboriginally, I'm picturing well, based off the painting, Norman Rockwell. But as soon as we talk about paintings and houses, I picture like Victorian era.
Speaker 2:No, no more modern, much more modern. And this is where in the country. This is in the UK. Oh, okay. The other, the other country. The other country. Yeah. So again, some accounts claim that the minute paintings were brought into homes, strange things started to happen. Doors closing on their own hushed voices, increased accidents. That's a theme, a lot where people started to get hurt more. Once the painting came in, it sort of builds and crescendos into the fiery aftermath. Right? Mm
Speaker 3:I'm. Thinking of that, like one episode of ghost hunters that your family and I all watched together, they said that they had a painting that was cursed and causing accidents, but the painting was hung right by a staircase. And it was like in a weird spot and the stairs were like super weirdly shaped stairs. And so people just kept looking at the painting and not paying attention to the stairs and falling down the stairs.
Speaker 2:The thing I like about ghost hunters is that they'll debunk that they'll call it out. They won't let it stamp. That's why we like them.
Speaker 3:And they also, like these stairs are really weird. Like who built these?
Speaker 2:What's the, let's that house with the Winchester mystery house where there's like doorways and things that lead nowhere. What? Yeah. I've heard this one. You never heard of the Winchester mystery house you think I have? I don't know. It's pretty well known. It's like an attraction, you know, like a tourist attraction. Where, where is it? The Winchester mystery house is in San Jose, California. Where's that? You don't know where San Jose is. I actually don't. It's right outside of San Francisco. Got it. The crying boy refers to a specific series of paintings that were mass produced by an Italian painter Giovanni bread Golan, which was the pen name of Bruno R Marillo. And we're going to get into him more at the end. So put a pin in this for now. Cause there's a lot of mystery around the painter himself, which we will address later. I'm a real or I'm a real I'm Maria. Yes. Forgive. All of my pronunciations, the series of paintings is called the weeping children. And the most famous of that is the crank boy. There are varying reports. As there often are with urban legends around the production and release of these paintings. It's mostly believed that there was an original set made by the painter. And when I've been researching, I've seen, there's been 27 originals in some cases, 67, like different versions of these crying children. Got it. And then they were later mass produced. But this one image of the boy is the one that's the most popular. Got it. They were marketed to young couples, which is in itself truly a bizarre legend. Why? I don't know.
Speaker 3:Why do you find the marketing to young couples? Odd? Because we just went through a wedding registry for someone and there were some odd choices. What
Speaker 2:Do you think was out in that wedding registry? Like the spotlight. It was a net. It was a security system. I don't think they think about that. Register was weird. I thought that was very normal. Okay. You're a young couple, right? You and I were a young couple, not anymore. We're excuse me. Don't even start with me. You are a young couple and we're going shopping for art. You know, I'm just saying, catch, get, get into the game. You're be imaginative with me for a minute. We're going shopping for art. You're like, Hey, I have no art on my walls, which is true. Setting
Speaker 3:Yourself up for disaster. We could go ahead
Speaker 2:And do you think we're we're we go to the art store and we're called to the painting of the crying child. Like in what world are people like, oh my God, this sad child. I want to put this. If it's not a museum, why aren't people bringing sad children, paintings enter their home. First of all, like what kind of omen is that? Okay. First are the happy children, even children paintings at all is a very bizarre thing. They have
Speaker 3:Absolutely nailed this market. If someone is going to the art store, then yeah. They can sell them whatever to put on their wall. So they, well, these are
Speaker 2:Mass produced and sold in department stores. So this is not like you're going to a gallery. This is like at filings or JC penny or frickin, whatever Macy's. And you go to the art section at the checkout. Right. And there's a hundred of these on the wall.
Speaker 3:So you, you, you knock that type of art sale.
Speaker 2:No, I'm not knocking it at all. I'm not knocking that. I'm saying, however, I'm not, I just want to come clean. I'm not. Okay. Cause it's sad a little bit like your work I'm knocking the hang crying choice to buy the grandchild. May I please? But I've bought are at a target. Okay. Go ahead. For
Speaker 3:First off. I'm I don't think there's any reason to start knocking the type of art that is marketed in these establishments, because that is the number one place where a lot of artists make their money. And even very large established artists make the majority of their income through their prints on mugs and pillows and posters and all sorts of stuff because yeah, it's great. If you can sell a hundred thousand dollars painting, but think much more, you're going to make, when it's you get royalties on every single little mug that gets printed at Ikea,
Speaker 2:If you're interested in some art of your own, you can head to ticks project.com and click on merge. That's right. Listen, I'm not above it, obviously. I'm not above it, but I don't take issue with the filings sale of our, I take issue with what about young couples are like, I want a sad kid on my wall. My
Speaker 3:Father in the very early part of his relationship with my mother, they got this sad crying clown statue that he loves to death.
Speaker 2:Okay. I don't know. Maybe it's a generational thing then maybe in the seventies, it made sense to me in 2021. I can't wrap my head around it, but you know what? I guess we'll call a spade, a spade
Speaker 3:Getting off track here. You're where you're trying to tell me why the hell these things
Speaker 2:Are haunted. Yeah. Are we all clear on the urban legend?
Speaker 3:Uh, no, not at all. So, well let me recap. Yes, please. Do people bought these paintings that were mass produced. So they are literally everywhere. And there's many accounts of once they bring the paintings back into their home, strange things happen, including their house burning down.
Speaker 2:Yep. We're going to get into the accounts now, but I wanted to set the stage. Okay. Okay. So let's go back to fairly recent history because our story really starts in 1985. Oh. On September 4th, the sun, which is an incredibly popular UK based tabloid publish an article titled blazing curse of the crying boy. Oh, the article tells a story of a fire that broke out in the home of Ron and Mae hall in Rother ham in south Yorkshire, the downstairs of the house was very, very badly burned and damaged. However, the family had a framed painting on a wall, a crying boy, which for some unexplained reason was totally undamaged though. It was surrounded by the charred destruction that had overrun the rest of the room. Ron Hall's brother happened to be a firefighter, which is very important to the rising popularity of this legend
Speaker 3:Because he added the bit of professional clout saying that this painting should have been, uh, emulated.
Speaker 2:Yes. We're going to get into exactly the role that the firehouse, oh, I see what you're doing. I see what you're making fun of me. Okay. The talk of the firehouse after the incident was that there have been multiple cases similar to this one. The firefighters had even created a rule, banning anyone at the firehouse from buying one of the paintings. So essentially right. This happens Ron and may hall have a fire. The crime boy survives. The thing though, is that the sun decides the new saber tides to cover this specific incident. Okay. Just so happens that this guy's brother is a firefighter who, who in this firehouse has a lot to say, which we're going to talk about a lot to say about this, which adds all this credibility in the newspaper article to what's happening. Got it. Okay. One of the firefighters claimed to have responded to over 50 cases of crying boys in the UK dating back to 1973. That's a lot. Yes, though. This firefighter was also adamant and this was like the chief, I believe adamant that he did not believe anything supernatural is involved. So he admitted that yes. I've been to 50 cases where this has happened. I don't though believe that it's supernatural. Yeah.
Speaker 3:I guess it's like how many out of how many fires total, you know, if it's like 50 out of like a thousand, that's a lot, if it's 50 out of a million.
Speaker 2:I mean, I still think it's a lot 50 fires that have an association with a painting. A specific painting is a lot. No. So in the same interview with this plate, with this fire chief, yes. His wife has also interviewed and she releases a statement saying that she believes the tears from the crying boys is what puts out the fires. So what the sun tabloid newspaper did was ran her statement with the credibility of her husband as the fire chief. Right? So they say, you know, they said like wife, a fire, you know, whatever. She probably got an earful that night. And so it started to shape the claim right. Of this into like an actual urban legend. That was pretty cool. The article from 1985 did some digging around the origin of these paintings and found that around 50,000 prints of the crime boys paintings had been sold across north England in various department stores, 50,000, 50,000. Okay. That's actually less than expected you think so? Yeah. Okay. I still think it's a lot. I mean, it's a lot,
Speaker 3:But I was expecting it to sell like millions. Got it. And then it comes down to 55.
Speaker 2:Well, the thing is, this is in 1985 and this is all in the UK. As we get into the nineties, there's reports of these starting to, and I don't know if there's new copies or just that these copies are being, uh, they're appearing in other parts of the world. Okay. The article also noted that they were all signed by G Brad Golan, the credibility of the firefighters who claimed to have seen many instances of this case combined with the power of the sun. One of those popular tabloids of all time, skyrocketed the popularity and belief in the curse of crying boys.
Speaker 3:Sorry. It just sounds like combined with the power of the sun
Speaker 2:On September 5th, 1985, the son ran a followup story on the incident. The article revealed that the paper had been flooded with calls from people who claimed to have curse child paintings at home. Some were terrified that their lives were cursed. Others had written in with their own experiences of tragedy that they attributed to the crying boy. One example, Sandra cask wrote in from north Yorkshire. She claimed that both her sister-in-law and a friend had experienced devastating fires after they hung copies of the crying boy on their wall. Another call came in from Brian Parks, who said that a terrible fire sent his wife and three kids to the hospital from smoke inhalation. Once he got home, he destroyed the painting after he found it on damaged, but not everyone who contacted the newspaper had the same story. Others described accidents, injuries, hauntings, and even deaths that they attributed to the introduction of the painting into their home kids getting hurt, husbands, passing away objects, moving. Some people even claimed that worms appeared in the wall behind the painting after they hung it that's gross. Very gross. One of the people who contacted the newspaper claimed to have tried to burn two of the paintings, but discovered they would not burn, not even like darken, like they couldn't even char them. And I have a quote from them. It was frightening. The fire wouldn't even touch it. He told the sun, I really believed it was jinxed. We really feel doubly at risk with two of these in the house. We're determined to get rid of them. I think I figured out what's going on here. You have a theory. I, I
Speaker 3:I've w what do they say? I've solved the mystery Scooby-Doo yes.
Speaker 2:Okay. Well, at the end, I would love to hear your theory. Okay. I'll write it down. Just so you know, write it down, put it in an envelope, seal it up and mail it to me. We will reveal it live on the air, but no, we'll, we'll just, we'll just come back to it in a second. Okay. Cause I have a theory too. One account I found on YouTube tells the firsthand story of a young girl in Lisbon Portugal who lived with her father, her mother had passed away. And so they only had each other one day, the girl was walking down the street and she saw the painting in a shop at an art store presumably, and was completely drawn to it. And her father agreed. There was something almost supernatural about it. Why? It just, it had the mem it had a mesmerizing effect on them. Okay. And do you want to look it up so you can see what's it called? Crying boy.
Speaker 3:There's like a thousand. Did you
Speaker 2:Write painting after it? Or is it just sad? Chills? I mean
Speaker 3:This crying boy painting, these are really creepy.
Speaker 2:I agree. And so, as a young couple, do you now understand why it would be weird to put one on your wall?
Speaker 3:Uh, this was not what I was picturing. This doesn't look like Norman Rockwell at all. No. This looks like Rembrandt painted a sad child.
Speaker 2:Yes. That's a better description. Yeah. I mean, everybody look it up. If you're not driving, like look it up because I think it's important to have the visual.
Speaker 3:Yeah. It's pretty, I would not want this staring at me in my home. Yeah.
Speaker 2:A lot of, obviously the accounts are like that. The eyes fault, you know, typical what you would expect,
Speaker 3:Right? Yeah. Okay. Well burn it all.
Speaker 2:So the father surprised the daughter with the painting for her birthday. She loved it and would spend hours looking at it, trying to figure out the boy and what his origin story is. Then they started to notice strange things after they brought it home murmurs, whispers door slamming, weird accidents around the apartment. One day when the father was getting groceries, a fire started in the apartment. The little girl was drawing in the living room and soft-spoken flames coming from the other room. The girl started to panic as the fire surrounded her. She was, of course, obviously terrified. And just as she heard the sirens coming down the street, her father bursts into the apartment and rescued her. They're both badly burned and lost everything except the painting. Oh good. So this is a first-hand account. So not everything, but they lost their whole life. Like that's, you know, that's really on Halloween, 1985, the son decides to make their big splashy conclusion to the crying boy series in their paper. Splashy.
Speaker 3:They got a hot, was that your own word? Yeah. Okay. Why? I was just curious. You think I should change it? No, I think it's great. I've just never heard you use the word splashy before.
Speaker 2:Right? I don't talk about tablets much, but I usually think they're pretty splashy. So they got a hot babe, Sandra Jane Moore to pose as she burned a van load of crying boy paintings, the headline red sun nails curse of the weeping boys for good. So the sun had organized mass bonfires and burnings, encouraging people to burn their copies of the curse, painting to rid the world of this terror. Okay. Many people sent their paintings into the sun to be burned. And so that's what this mass fire was for a while. Thanks simmered a bit with the urban legend, right? Until things start to get really meta in March of 1986, which is the following year. People start to connect the dots that ever since the son's crying boy, birding stunt things had started to go south for the paper. The paper's owner was a company called news international that had endured protests in bursts of violence outside one of its production, plants, arrival, paper printed, a story claiming that the sun cursed itself by burning the crying boy paintings. You follow me.
Speaker 3:Okay. So the newspaper helped orchestrate. When you keep saying the sun, it's all, it's all, there's never a son, son. It's always the newspaper, right? Or was there a son involved in the story? No, it's the sun paper. Okay. Gotcha. Sorry, just for a moment. It's a sun newspaper. Th the, the, the paper themselves were solely responsible for orchestrating the mass burning of it. These paintings.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So they were, they were the ringleader. They were trying to make like this huge. It was
Speaker 3:Exactly, but a fun one to, to banish the curse from the, the shores of the UK. Yes. Okay.
Speaker 2:So they, they, they kind of announced, right? Like sending your paintings, we're going to do some mass bonfires. Everybody burned your painting. A bunch of people sent their paintings into the sun or drop them off or whatever. So then they had this huge photo shoot, or they burned a bunch of them and they had like a model,
Speaker 3:Sorry, this is just like total amateur hour here. You can't get rid of cursed objects just through physical destruction. Tell me more. You need to, you know, all the rituals have to take place. Otherwise you're simply releasing the evil back into their rituals. I mean, it depends. I mean, you really want to get into the nitty gritty because now we got to be talking about what type of cursed object we're talking about a painting, a painting. Okay. Well still, you know how to get curse. What kind of curse is on it? Do, is it affiliated with a certain type of hollowed ground? You know, there's a lot of factors that go into this. If you are just blatantly destroying an object, you're simply releasing the curse into the world and it's going to re manifest possibly in a greater sense.
Speaker 2:Exactly what happens in twin peaks. Oh, okay. Spoilers. The show came out in the nineties. It's too late to be spoilers. Okay. People started to believe because the son, the company runs into some bad, there's a bunch of protests going on, like some bad publicity themselves. So rival newspapers. Start to say that the sun cursed themselves by burning these paintings. Yeah. So you with me here, I'm right there with you. So people continue to try and counter curse the paintings, trying new experimental tactics, like placing a crank girl, painting next to the boy in some strange effort to offset the supernatural side-effects counter curse. Other people tried to be kind to the painting, thinking that the sad boy just needed some love.
Speaker 3:Oh wow. We're getting some weird people here.
Speaker 2:So now they're introducing multiple paintings or befriending the painting.
Speaker 3:You got to roll up the painting and smoke it.
Speaker 2:So you may be asking what the hell is the deal with the artist
Speaker 3:Was. So it's all the same artist, right?
Speaker 2:We're going to get into it. But yes, the crying boys is one artist.
Speaker 3:Okay. W w is he alive during all this? Yes. Great. What does he have to say? Cause I'm sure they wanted to interview him.
Speaker 2:He's very mysterious. And that's one of the huge factors that makes us urban legend. So popular is that he's just very mysterious. Right? So how
Speaker 3:On a scale from one to mysterious, how mysterious seven
Speaker 2:To start? He has multiple pseudonyms. The paintings are signed as Giovanni, bruh Golan. I think it's Jebur Golan, but he is believed to be Bruno. I'm a Dio, but also sometimes pronounced Bruno. I'm a Dillo, I'm a dealer. So sometimes it's spelled differently is what I'm saying. Angelo brick. Olin is also another, another pseudonym. And some people think he is the artist Francho Seville signed
Speaker 3:Count de[inaudible]
Speaker 2:While we may not know his name, we do know that he was classically trained painter. We also know that he was painting in Venice, Italy after the war. He's also thought to have done some work restoring paintings. Okay. So now we're going to get into like the really urban legend part, like the origin, the urban legend theories of the origin story. Okay. I'm going to say all of these are, are unclear, unlike unreferenced urban legend theories. Right?
Speaker 3:Okay. So all of these are from the FBI archives.
Speaker 2:That's right. Yes. The X-Files. So some believe that he painted a child who had burned down his own house and that the child was said to be named Don Benito. Another version of that assembly that the, the boy who inspired the crying boy was adopted against his will by a priest was abused by the painter and was consumed by a fire in the 1970s. There's a third version that he had painted children from an orphanage in Spain. And the orphanage had burned down later after the painter had gifted the painting to them. So that he went to the, the, this orphanage. He painted the kids. He gave the orphanage, the painting and the orphanage burned down. Oh, I know sad. Another version claims that the painter had a pact with the devil due to his inability to make money as an artist. Yeah. Another claim so that the painter verified that the child was inspired by a quote unquote street urchin. He had encountered in Madrid, a Catholic priest. Aidid the boys Dominio, a kid who had been orphaned after his parents died in a fire. The story goes that the priest had warned the painter not to hang out with the kid because he had a reputation around town as the Diablo, wherever he was fire followed. And of course the painter does really well for a while before his studio burns down and his life is ruined.
Speaker 3:So his studio did burn down.
Speaker 2:These are all like legends. None of this is verified.
Speaker 3:There should be records somewhere if like he did. In fact, Mino make a written contract with the double cause go to the town
Speaker 2:Board. Let's go to the town board, the town board. Yeah. The town board, some of the paintings that emerged during what I'm going to call the crank boy panic in me, eighties were actually painted by Scottish artist, Anna zinc unseen. So with the rise of the internet, right, obviously that feeds all urban legends. There's also a book from 2000 by Tom Solomon, which is about like Liverpool, local, urban legends. And it includes unverified incorrect information about like the origin of this, right? Because of that, you can now look up the crying boy in this book, which is based on nothing. And there's, which again is like, w w you know, the point of urban legends is that they it's like creepy pasta today. Right.
Speaker 3:Right. You gotta, you gotta be fair here. You writing a book on urban legends and making sure all your sources are verified is gonna make for a really short
Speaker 2:Book. No. Yeah, for sure. But I'm just saying, like, to, to, to drive the point home that none of like the, like what happened was this guy had a pseudonym, so he's impossible to track down the painter. And so people's imaginations on a wild, you know, let's get into the nitty gritty of this. We have to acknowledge the role that mass media plays in folklore, especially modern folklore in 1985, the sun newspaper was trying to fight for the attention of readers and sell copies. It is no surprise that a tabloid newspaper would print sensational material. In fact, it's part of their business model, investigative journalists, David Clark points out that much of the backstory didn't emerge until the two thousands with Tom Slomin's book on urban legends. And that most of that information is unreferenced and not accurate. Okay. I want to hear your theory,
Speaker 3:As soon as you started saying how sometimes the whole house would burn down or not burned down, but like everything would be charred and black and the painting itself would be the only thing on touched by flame. Yeah. That reminded me a lot of a shoot I did with the fire department where sometimes it, it was weird. Like one eye object would be perfectly fine despite everything else just being completely charred. And that is fascinating. Yeah. Right. And like, it draws your attention, but all that says is there is so much flamer target built into certain things
Speaker 2:Like our, like our pajamas as kids. Remember that. Exactly.
Speaker 3:It's weird when like the curtains are totally fine in a fully charged out room, just because it's, they're doused with so, so much flavor target and the materials that they're made out of Kevlar strands or whatever we'll Kevlar is bad example. Cause that would chart. Um, but still be completely impervious to flame. Was that literally
Speaker 2:The point of having kids pajamas be flavored so that the kids wouldn't catch on fire or was it a by-product of something? Cause to me, that's, that's crazy. I'm going to speculate
Speaker 3:That it was a selling point. Say the house is on fire. Right. The last thing painting the house is on fire. The last thing that you want is your kid's pajamas to catch on fire as they're trying to flee from the house. For sure. Yeah. So, you know, if you are a parent and you have a choice between flame proof pajamas and Joe super flammable, all, you know, ultra burnable pajamas, right? What are you going to choose? It's a hard, hard decision. I mean, now it's not because don't swaddle your kid and flame-retardant just, what does that do? I mean, these are very harmful chemicals, carcinogens. They are carcinogens, you know, there's been a lot of movement to try to bring like all natural, uh, materials that are naturally flame-retardant back into the home just to try to get all the, uh, you know, petroleum based, everything out.
Speaker 2:Got it. Interesting. So tell us your theory about this.
Speaker 3:I think that in the printing process, because they're all from the same factory or whatever, just turning out these mass produced paintings, there was some layer of flame-retardant put into them.
Speaker 4:Ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, you're.
Speaker 2:A BBC radio program tested the materials of the paintings. It was found that they had been treated with a fire retardant via the varnish on the painting itself. It preserved the paintings as the wall crumbled around it. And as the wall burned, the painting often fell face first onto the ground and was protected from further damage. There you go. So here's the thing though. You know me, I'm not going to go down without a supernatural fight. I'm not going to go down without questioning. Right. So like, yeah, we got a bunch of fire resistant paintings. We got a bunch of creepy paintings of kids. Yeah. I'm with you. Right. My question is this. And I don't know, I would need to look at the statistics, but the overlap, like the fact that that firefighter had seen and again, take it with a grain of salt. But the firefighter had, had claimed to have seen 50 cases of fires in homes when there was only 50,000 of these printed it too. To me, it seems like it wasn't like one time this happened. There was a lot of people who were like, holy, this happened to me. Maybe it was, were house fires just incredibly common then I don't know. You know? I don't
Speaker 3:Know. Maybe. Yeah. Yeah. It's, it's tough to come to conclusions without all the data you need. Like the full you need the full well let's do it anyway. Okay. Only 50,000 were printed. Yes. So one out of a thousand homes that had this painting had a fire.
Speaker 2:Well, this was this one firefighters experience though. Show assume, you know, and again, none of it's real, but like,
Speaker 3:Well, one fire chief, right? I don't know how fire chiefs work. If they run their one little fire precinct fires, firefighters don't have precincts. I don't think a one little firehouse firehouse. Yeah. Or is he like the equivalent of like the fire commissioner, you know, that oversees all the firehouses Gordon. Exactly. It, all of the firehouses in all the UK. Well, yeah.
Speaker 2:I mean then it would be a different story
Speaker 3:Also. Like, is he going on the calls himself? How does he know that this painting was there? Or is it the type of thing where the firefighters know about this? Because it's like a funner or legend at this point. And so they're actively looking for the painting. Right. And how many times does it just get embellished?
Speaker 2:It's all, they're all good questions that I don't have the answer for. I wish you did. My question is this, regardless of the mysterious origin of the painter, this wasn't that long ago, and this was produced, it was mass produced by a company and it was sold in department stores. So the fact that there's no paper trail that people can like figure out where it originated a little bit better to me is, is kind of shocking. Like this wasn't like a hundred years ago, this was in the eighties. It was produced. I feel like we could get to the bottom of it. If we really tried.
Speaker 3:The one thing I want to say about that is I did a documentary years ago on an artist that sold his work almost exclusively in malls and that sort of okay. But it's like the kiosk at the mall. Yeah. Either like the little place that sells the calendars, the framing shop, the Furbies th the Furbies remember the Furbies I know what a Furby is.
Speaker 2:I used to have a kiosk of Furbies sure.
Speaker 3:Different than the painting kiosk. Sure. But anyways, these are for the type of people that would like to have art, but don't know the first thing about it and are only going to buy art if they happen to see it on their way to the checkout. Right. You know, but again, that's where the money is and nothing wrong with that. So he did the majority of his work in businesses like that. Okay. And trying to track this own guys' portfolio was nearly impossible because he kind of sold his rights away. No, because every few years he would change his name. Why it's an artist thing where every, he, he would release all of these paintings under one name. He would release this other set of paintings, other this under this
Speaker 2:Other, for each series, he has sort of
Speaker 3:Changed sorta in, you know, he was new center guy and it was, you know, a reinventing yourself process, whatever. But also it was a marketing thing where you can, you appear to have all these different works from all these different artists in this one little kiosk and it's all one guy. Got it. That's interesting. So all that is to say is the world of that is very convoluted.
Speaker 2:It's like that. Do you know that documentary in quotes, documentary exit through the gift shop, the Banksy film? Yeah. It's all about like, questioning, like what is our, and you know, if you mass produce something, is it less, you know, it's very relevant to this?
Speaker 3:Well, I I'm actually glad you brought this movie up. Oh. Because it is hypothesized that the original crying blood was made by Banksy. I'm honestly surprised that we talked, we had a whole episode about haunted portraits and we never talked about the picture of Dorian gray.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And actually in the research, there's a lot of other cursed paintings, like actual ones that I found that people have like similar account, you know, different burning things. But that there's like these cult followings of urban legends around, I think we could certainly do. There's a lot more to tap here, you know, as there usually is, I mean,
Speaker 3:Off the top of your head, so picture Dorian gray, that thing from Ghostbusters, what else you got this other one, this other one.
Speaker 2:It's like the painting of a boy with a doll, but they look very, it's like kind of an uncanny valley situation, but there's lots of like urban legend around it. Cool. Yeah. And, and there's, you know, it's also like if you look at slender, man, slender, man started as a photo as a Photoshop photo for a photo contest online. And if you think about that, it's very in line with the urban legend of a painting. Right. It's an urban legend of an image
Speaker 3:And yeah. And that people add their own gravitas to it and look
Speaker 2:At the world in all of the things that have come out of, you know, for good or bad of Slenderman incorporated. Yeah. Seriously. You know, so they're like urban legends themselves are just so fascinating and it's so fun to some degree to get wrapped up in the belief of them. But it's also really interesting to like unpack why things became that way that they did, because it's usually a reflection of culture society of the time, you know,
Speaker 3:I'm right there with you. I think they have kind of fallen to the wayside a bit as things get wrapped up in more like internet myth, you know, it's not really tied to, ah, this one little spooky town it's any small town can become that town. Yeah. Oh for sure.
Speaker 2:Mine did when I was young.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Yeah. Like in how many people had the story about their friend that the brother knew that took LSD and then stood on the corner because they thought that they were a glass of orange juice.
Speaker 2:Well, I've never heard that one before that happened to your brother's friend.
Speaker 3:That's the point it's, you know, this was originally told to me as like, yeah, my brother's friend did this. Um, and yeah, they take LSD and then they stand on the corner for like 12 hours because they think that they're a glass of orange juice and if they move they'll spill and it's like, wow, that's intense. And then years later you find that story on the internet. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah, exactly. I think, cause when we were kind of at that age, we had this, we were like the first internet generation. Right. So we had this weird overlap between being in both worlds a little, you know, where like we, me and my friends would run through the woods and we found this like red house. It was just a red house. We would go after school almost every day and just look at it. And we're like, it's haunted. Like, can you see the meat hooks hanging like, oh man, we would go and just stare at this house for hours and be create in our minds, this backstory. And we believed it. But then we would also go home on aim
Speaker 3:On like AOL instant messenger for you
Speaker 2:Kids. Yeah. And like, you know, look up old legends and things and, and all of that played into, played into it in a different way. And so I think, yeah, it's interesting because we were kind of the overlap and not to say kids nowadays, like don't have, you know, real life, urban legends and things like that. But I realize are perfect. No, but I just wonder like how much of it is like inspired by like creepy pastas or Reddit posts versus how much of it is they're in their neighborhoods. And they run into the old creepy man
Speaker 3:Down the street. Right. How much is gas is like I RRL and how much is from cyberspace,
Speaker 2:Right? Yeah. I mean, it's interesting too. Anything about localization, like you said now, like my haunted Barnes story could be uploaded and everybody could be seeing a haunted barn in their town. That's obviously a really broad example, but it could be anywhere.
Speaker 3:Well, I'm glad you brought up that the barn was red.[inaudible] do you remember? I remember why barns are red.
Speaker 2:Yeah, because of the rest you told me several days ago that the Barnes would get rusty, they would turn red and then now they just paint that they paint them red because that is the American tradition
Speaker 3:Barnes got rusty. All right guys, that's our episode. What did I get wrong? So you were so close a component of iron oxide actually acts as a sealant. So people used to just paint their barns with a compound based off rust, because that would preserve the wood. And it was way, way cheaper than paint or other kinds of sealant, especially when you're just making everything yourselves. Yeah. So that's why to this day barns are still painted red. Not because they need to be traditionally sealed, but just because that was the traditional color that they always used to be, as I said, as exactly.
Speaker 2:Thank you for clarifying. Well, thank you guys so much for listening. Hope you had fun with this one. We're coming back next week with a much bigger, bigger and exciting topic. So we're really excited to jump into that. Yeah. This one was small and stupid. No, no, not to say it was smaller, stupid, just out where, you know, I've been working on this big project that we get to, we get to reveal next week. So anyway, stay safe, stay spooky. Be well, be safe. We love you all.