Memoirs of a Superstitious Child

I was an impressionable and superstitious child. I was aided in this by my mother who, despite being a devout Catholic and therefore not really believing in such things, nevertheless said that she had seen ghosts on several occasions in her youth. When my mother and aunt would get together they would sit and talk about growing up in the 1930s and 1940s.

Apparently there were lots more ghosts about then and my mother would tell how she had sometimes seen ghostly shapes of men moving along the road or staring through windows. She said that when she saw them she had never felt scared but instead felt sorry for them.

During this time there was a regular prayer said at Mass praying for rest for the 'Lost Souls'. My mother and aunt both believed that it was this prayer that had helped those ghosts to move on into the next life and that this was why people didn't see ghosts anymore.

In later years I have come to think that the spread of the electric light through rural Ireland during this period may also have been a help but at the time when I heard these stories I believed in ghosts. Even now sometimes in the dark of night I still get that ghostly kind of feeling that I used to get regularly as a child.

There were many things that I was fearful of as a boy. One of them was the abandoned house further down our road. I grew up in the countryside and our house and the old abandoned house were the only two on our road. Even in daylight I would be fearful of passing by this house, with its broken windows and overgrown bushes and trees crowding in around it. When I was passing by on my own during the day the only way I could do it was at a run. At night-time I just couldn't do it at all. The sensation of an unknown and terrible presence was just too much for me and I would get the feeling of something climbing up my back as I got close to the house.

Another things was vampires. One time I stayed up too late and watched a film about vampires. In this film the vampires were trapped inside books. I still remember one scene when a character looked into a freshly dug grave and saw a book at the bottom. He thought it was a good idea for some reason to jump into the grave to investigate the book. When he opened the book the face of the vampire appeared and started to materialise out of the pages. After I went to bed that night I woke up and saw the face of that vampire on my bedroom wall. I did not sleep well that night.

So when one day my sister brought a picture of The Crying Boy into the house I was more than uneasy. What made it seem worse for me was that she knew all about the story behind the picture. I know she knew because she was the one who told us about it. The picture was supposed to be cursed. In numerous houses in England where it was a popular print it had been all that had been left untouched in house fires. There were many reports of houses where the picture was hung burning down and The Crying Boy picture coming out miraculously untouched despite everything else being destroyed.

I couldn't believe that she actually thought it was a good idea to hang this picture in our house! I couldn't believe that my parents seemed to agree or at least didn't mind!

It would have been one thing to buy the picture and hang it up and then eventually find out about the story behind it. During that time you may have become attached to it and be willing to ignore the alleged curse and keep the picture. But to start off from a position of knowing about the curse and still hanging the picture was just unbelievable to me!

The picture was hung in our sitting room which was rarely used anyway except for around Christmas time. Because of its presence the sitting room became like the old, abandoned house to me. I was fearful of being in the room on my own with the picture. Anytime I had to go into the room for something I would try to avoid eye contact with the boy. Whenever I went into the room I felt that crawling feeling on my back. I felt like he was looking at me.

I had forgotten about all of this until I read the latest issue of the Fortean Times which has a feature on The Crying Boy story. It seems that the story was hyped up and publicised in the mid-80s by The Sun newspaper in Britain.

The Crying Boy picture was mass-produced during the 1970s and was very popular in parts of England. Therefore it wouldn't be surprising that it would happen to be in some houses that went on fire for various reasons. It was printed onto hardwood which is difficult to ignite and that is possibly the most rational explanation for why it was likely to withstand fires that might destroy other furnishings.

The story became popular after The Sun carried a report on September 4, 1985 about a chip pan fire in a house in Yorkshire. Ron and Mary Hall blamed the fire on the painting which survived unscathed from the fire which badly damaged the rest of the downstairs of the house. It happened that Ron's brother Peter was a fireman and The Sun reporter quoted him as saying that he was aware of several cases of The Crying Boy painting turning up unharmed in the midst of otherwise destroyed homes.

From there the story grew and grew and was happily spurred on by the editor of The Sun Kelvin McKenzie who said it was a story 'with legs' ie it would keep running.

It is years since I thought about the story. I never knew it's origins before. I didn't realise that The Sun was to blame for some of my sleepless nights as a child. What about 'Kelvin McKenzie Terrorised Me As a Child' for a headline?