The Crying Boy is a painting made by an Italian artist Giovanni Bragolin. It was mass printed and widely distributed post-1950s in different variations of teary-eyed young boys and girls. On 5th Sep 1985, The Sun, a British daily reported for the first time a sensational story around these portraits. The story claimed that during a fire incident at Essex, the firefighters could find only these paintings unscathed amidst an otherwise fully gutted down the house.
Within a few months, so many similar-sounding stories from supposedly true incidents came forward that the crying boy quickly became a national urban legend. Various investigators over the decades tried to explain some seemingly realistic incidents among all the reported. But no conclusive report could ever be accepted. Some speculators even accused The Sun itself of planting more false stories.
It has been more than half a century, but the crying boy portraits are still considered the most haunted portraits in the UK. It is believed to attract a fire tragedy and death, and therefore, hardly finds a place in the drawing rooms there anymore.
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