Welcome to Aaron Manky's Cabinet of Curiosities, a production of I Heart Radio and

Grim and Mild. Our world is full of the unexplainable. And if history is an open book, all of these

amazing tales are right there on display, just waiting for us to explore.

Welcome to the Cabinet of Curiosities. In September of 1985 a fire broke out in a working-class home in Yorkshire England.

In just a few short minutes, everything Ron and Mary Hall had built for 27 years had gone up in smoke.

Well, almost everything.

As the firefighters tramp through the home, putting out the last of the smoldering embers, something caught their eye.

Hanging on the soot-blackened wall was a perfectly pristine painting of a young street urchin with tears rolling down his face.

Upon seeing it, one of the firefighters sighed, the curse of the crying boy painting,

had struck again. In the fall of 1985 a strange phenomenon was tearing across England.

One by one houses were going up in smoke.

Now this in and of itself wasn't unusual.

Every one of these fires had a perfectly normal

explanation, like faulty wiring or a smoldering cigarette. What was strange were

the paintings left behind. In nearly every case, the only thing left untouched by the blaze

was a framed print of a crying little boy. The crying boy paintings weren't uncommon at the time.

In fact, they were hugely popular with working-class Brits.

As the story goes, after World War II, a series of tearful portraits of children started appearing

in Italy, and they were attributed to a few different artists, like Giovanni

Bragoline or Franco-Saville, but in truth these were both pseudonyms for one individual

man, Spanish painter Bruno Amadeo.

Bruno supposedly began painting street urchins as a way to bring attention to the plight of children

...