Book cursing really took off in medieval Europe when scribes would endure backbreaking, eye-dimming, hand-cramping work to meticulously create a single book. And they wanted to protect those books. Not just because they represented so much painstaking labor, but because stealing a book often meant stealing a one-of-a-kind set of human knowledge in the days before mass production. Book curses were like an ancient form of copyright protection. Except when you broke that copyright, instead of jail time and fines, ravens would peck your eyes out. Or worse.
The practice of book cursing continued to at least the nineteenth century, long past the era when a book was a cheap commodity not exactly worth a person’s body or soul. The curse at the beginning of this book originated in Germany in the 1800s, written by an unknown scribe who might have been more interested in playing around with language than in supernaturally protecting his work. Each line of the curse began in Latin and ended in German.
Serious effects of other book curses throughout the centuries include roasting in a frying pan, contracting fatal illness, drowning, being torn apart by pigs, and suffering death and damnation. Capital punishments all. So, hopefully, you didn’t steal this book.
Cursed
in the
Attic
They turn up at flea markets and estate sales. Are found in overflowing garages and stuffed basements. They shake out during moves and spring cleanings. A piece of furniture. Or a bit of décor. A toy. A piece of clothing. They’re innocuous. And maybe they’re cursed. Most cursed items are not expensive diamonds and archaeological finds. They’re everyday objects, the sort you can find anywhere in your house. And that’s what makes them so dangerous. In this section, you’ll learn about chairs that kill anyone who sits in them, paintings that can burn houses down, boxes you don’t want to open, jewelry and dolls more dangerous than guns and swords, and more. All of which don’t look much different from what’s in your attic right now.
The Crying Boy Paintings
CURRENT LOCATION:
VARIOUS
PAINTED BY:
BRUNO AMADIO AND ANNA ZINKEISEN
DECADES OF ORIGIN:
1950S–1970S
PAINTER PSEUDONYMS:
GIOVANNI BRAGOLIN, FRANCHOT SEVILLE
There’s bad art, and then there’s bad art. The former doesn’t conform to conventional ideas of aesthetics, creativity, and skill. The latter burns down the house of anyone who hangs it above their mantel. A good example of this second type is an infamous series of European paintings, all called The Crying Boy.
This particular cursed object story is of relatively recent vintage. It comes from the 1980s, the same decade that told us Smurf merchandise was full of demons and rock bands were brainwashing listeners by hiding Satanic messages on their albums. It was a fascinating decade of modern mythmaking.
On September 4, 1985, the British tabloid The Sun published an article entitled “Blazing Curse of the Crying Boy.” The story was republished from a regional rag from Rotherham, which had run the story two days earlier. It was the perfect eye-yanker of a headline. But the article that followed delivered on its promise.
The story centered on a tragedy suffered by the Hall family. A large section of their house had been gutted by flames, except for one item: a cheap department-store painting of a teary boy. Now, that in itself wasn’t the kindling for the legend. After all, fire is fickle — in a house turned ash, something inevitably survives. What fanned the flames was a quote from a fireman at the scene. He asserted that the artwork was one of many such mass-produced crying child paintings that always seemed to survive fires and that the fire department had amassed some fifty examples of them since the early 1970s.
Three astounding ideas can be extrapolated from the fireman’s assertion. One: that these generic paintings had been surviving fires for more than a decade. Two: that houses with these paintings seemed prone to fire. And three: that the incendiary powers of the portrait didn’t lie solely with the original but could be transferred through copies. In a world overrun with mass-marketed goods, this is probably the most horrifying idea of the three. But the takeaway, at least according to The Sun, was clear: every print of The Crying Boy was cursed.
The idea terrified a sizeable number of owners of the reproductions. After The Sun invited readers to send in their prints, it received 2,500 renderings of sad children from across England. Interestingly, they weren’t all of the same boy. Some included multiple crying children. And sometimes the subject was a girl. But all of the paintings depicted children who, apparently, cried tears that could extinguish fires.
The Sun burned all the portraits in a pyre on Halloween. Afterward, the paper published a photo of the blaze attended by a blonde woman in a fire hat and jean shorts, one of its controversial Page Three girls.
The legend grew from then, cultivated over years by both media coverage and public interest. A backstory for the subject of the original painting was fleshed out. Reportedly, the boy’s name was Don Bonillo, and he accidentally killed his parents in a fire in their home in Spain. Fire followed the boy wherever he went, giving him the nickname Diablo. Orphaned, the boy was kept and abused by a priest, and then also abused by the artist who painted his weepy portrait. His short life ended in a car explosion in the 1970s. An iconic crying child can only have a sad life, after all. The child was never identified. And, as was already mentioned, there’s no single child subject; multiple versions of these paintings feature different crying children.
As for the painter, the name Giovanni Bragolin is a common signature on the crying child paintings. But Bragolin doesn’t exist. At one point in the chain of lore it was hypothesized that Bragolin was a pseudonym for another painter named Franchot Seville. But Franchot Seville doesn’t exist, either. Both Seville and Bragolin were found to be pseudonyms for a Russian doll of a Spanish painter named Bruno Amadio, who did exist.
Amadio painted lots of crying children portraits, copies of which were sold in department stores all over England throughout the ’50s, ’60s, and ’70s. Complicating matters further, another artist, Anna Zinkeisen of Scotland, was creating portraits of depressed adolescents and offering prints through the same channels. Both were deceased by the time the curse rumors began to bubble up.
Many of the extremely specific story details, especially surrounding the subjects of some of the paintings, were published by The Sun and another British tabloid, the Daily Mirror, both of which aimed to capitalize on this incendiary story to the fullest extent.
A quarter of a century later, the story was still going strong in the United Kingdom. In 2010 Steve Punt, a comedian with a BBC show, decided to test the legend on television. He got his hands on a copy of The Crying Child and burned it on camera. (You can see the footage on YouTube.) Remarkably, the painting didn’t burn. The fire merely scorched one corner.