A painting of a young boy with brown hair and tears on his cheeks. Painted by Italian painter Bruno Amadio, using the name Giovanni Bragolin. Low resolution image used for purposes of critical commentary on the specific work in question, under fair use guidelines.

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Hey, y’all, it’s Weird Wednesday! Where on some Wednesdays, I blog about weird stuff and give writing prompts.

Today: The Crying Boy: The UK’s Most Famous Haunted Painting

Welcome on this Weird Wednesday! Today we’re hanging a haunted painting on the wall and hoping it doesn’t burn our house down. Sound fun? Then come on in.

What’s fun about paintings (especially portraits) is that, like mirrors, they can be a little creepy. You’re looking at a representation of a person, which is not a person—but in some sense, it is. You can get the same effect with dolls, or people in masks: a little bit of the uncanny valley phenomenon, where something is almost human but not quite, and that’s kind of spooky.

And where do people typically keep paintings, mirrors, and dolls? In their homes. Homes are supposed to be our safe havens, but in the case of a haunted house, your home is no longer entirely your domain. You don’t even get to say who gets to live there with you. And in the real world, what’s most dangerous to a house is fire. The loss of a home to fire is devastating, partly because all your possessions go up in smoke as well.

So a really great scary story would be something like a popular painting, commonly displayed in homes, which is haunted and causes house fires—and you know it’s haunted because the painting is the only thing that doesn’t burn. Sound delicious? The Sun tabloid in England certainly thought so, and they were right.

In 1985, The Sun ran an article claiming firefighters kept finding a painting of a crying boy as the only remnant of house fires. They spiced up the story over the next few months with tales from readers claiming the painting was cursed.

Check out the blog post for the whole story and some writing prompts, such as:

Firestarter. So if the painting causes fires, someone could potentially use it to, you know, cause fires. You could write a character with a grudge against a neighbor or local business, who gives the painting as a gift, hoping for the worst. Or a firebug who uses the painting as his MO, tossing it into a building and enjoying the aftermath. He could have a nemesis in a local firefighter who has to enlist a medium to figure out the fires are being started by a little boy who doesn’t exist.

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