For Atlas Obscura, Natalie Zarrelli wrote about the infamous ‘crying boy’ paintings from the ’80s that allegedly caused fires in the UK. This was before I was born but I remember hearing about it years later and the moral panic it caused, fuelled by The Sun (scumbags).
On September 4, 1985, British tabloid The Sun published “Blazing Curse of the Crying Boy Picture!” a story about a very unlucky painting that caused fires, supported the comments of a local fire station officer. These paintings, the firefighter said, turned up mysteriously unscathed in fires across the U.K., all of which started spontaneously. It was well-known; he would never think of owning this cursed painting himself. “The couple had laughed off warnings” that their painting was cursed, wrote The Sun. Let all other heed the warning, and get rid of their own giant paintings of crying children immediately.
The article goes into who painted these crying boys, as there was a lot of misinformation about the artist’s identity, and why they survived the fires that they were in (spoiler alert: they weren’t supernaturally fire resistant).