The Crying Boy painting

Prints of a painting of a weeping child, sold in department stores, that were blamed for house fires in the 1980s, including one in Rotherham reported by The Sun.

According to David Clarke, The Sun, then the most-read tabloid among English speakers, ran a story on page 13 of a 4 September edition that blamed a curse on the painting. Ron and May Hall of Rotherham, a South Yorkshire mining town, told the paper that a cheap picture of a crying toddler was to blame for the fire that gutted their terraced council house. The fire began in a kitchen chip pan, in the house they had lived in for 27 years, and spread fast.

Atlas Obscura, summarising Clarke's research, says Giovanni Bragolin and Seville, names found on the prints, appear to be pseudonyms of a Spanish painter, Bruno Amadio. He trained in Venice after the Second World War and probably painted 20 to 30 crying boys. Department stores stocked prints of them during the 1970s. Clarke found no evidence that two other names linked to the paintings, George Mallory and Don Bonillo, belonged to real people. Anna Zinkeisen painted her own series of crying children, and those were said to be cursed as well.

The comedian Steve Punt looked into the story for BBC Radio 4's Punt PI, in an episode first broadcast on 9 October 2010. He asked why the prints kept coming through house fires untouched. After fire tests by the Building Research Establishment, the programme concluded that the prints were coated in a varnish with fire retardant in it. It also found that the string holding each picture burned through first, so the picture dropped face down and the flames missed it, Wikipedia says.