The Old Changi Hospital (OCH) - Inside The Building

 The Torture Chamber

Perhaps this is the 2nd most scariest place in OCH after the mortuary.  Out of so many wards and rooms, we found one that is remarkably different.  Even for today it has a kind of emergency red-and-white plastic tape barring it off from access.  It didn't seems to safe guard people from any physical danger inside the room, but may be from something else...  This particular room (rather we call it a chamber) unlike the others with open wall ends on top is completely self-contained.  The walls are made of thick solid concrete and unpainted.  

Further inside you will see some concrete built-up structure as if it was used for securing something tight on the floor.  One of the horrible signs is the metal chains with one end set loose and the other end securely fixed on the wall.  It seemed strong enough to tie up a tiger.  And, you can see maroon colored blood stains are still left on the floor.  Absolutely horrible.  One would expect to see such a chamber in a prison but never in a hospital!  But don't forget, this is a military hospital used by the Japanese.  There are many undocumented stories saying that during the war many "important" citizens and POWs were detained at OCH.  Most had never been seen again, and they were believed to be tortured to death over here.

The Torture Chamber

A Mystery Of Underground Bunker

There are rumors saying that OCH has an underground bunker under the hill that connects to the barracks nearby.  We found some suspicious spots that very few people know about.  The first spot is the main lift at OCH inside has a button for going underground.  But the lift now is immobilized.  The second and third spots are the hastily sealed up mound by simply dumping plenty of concrete at the ground floor staircase, and the exit door at the other end of the building got tightly nailed shut respectively.  This clue suggested us to believe firmer that such an underground bunker exists.  

Throughout the 70 years of history from pre-war British occupation to post-war Japanese occupation, it would be beyond our imagination on what secret treasures may have hidden down there.  Having those main entrances to the underground bunker completely sealed up on the ground floor and the fact that we were not able to break in (and we never wanted to do that), we had to look for a secret passage if there is any.  A bold idea though it turned out as a failure is to try search for the secret passage from top-down.  Right on the top of the building there is a small open look-out space.  From there we found a chimney which we suspected is connected to the underground bunker.  

People who were in underground did need some air vent for breathing.  Ok, true enough, this was what supported our believed.  However, like a long tunnel, the chimney was so narrow that can barely allow one person climbing in and out.  By using some special equipment we descended our camera deep down to the tunnel and captured some photos.  We were counting the depth as the camera went down: 1 meter, 2 meter, 3, 4, 5 ...  The tunnel was long and deep even our strongest halogen light could not reach the bottom.  It looked as if it were leading to hell.  

After 20 meters or so, we had found bats resting on the wall of the tunnel for one moment, but they were gone for the next.  What does this suggest?  The tunnel was not dead-ended and down there may live a kingdom of bats!  A thought of it made us shivered.  So for our safety, we called off this exploration, and we do strongly advise people PLEASE DON'T TRY IT.  If you can ever get in, there will be more likely to have another police report of man missing in OCH than you can safely walk out in one whole piece.

 

The tunnel that is speculated leading to the underground bunker

An Eerie Scene at The West

Most people who went to OCH would have asked this FAQ: where is mortuary?  Although they looked up and down, level by level and corner by corner in the OCH compound, they would never find it.  The mortuary is not located in the main buildings but in a small timber house at the most west side of the OCH territory.  There is a small road that connects to it from behind the hill.  Most people wouldn't notice about it.  And that is the idea.  Just like we don't prominently see vehicles that deliver corpses running around the roads.  With the kind permission of the security guard and our privileges from NHB, we were allowed to walk near the mortuary to take a picture.  "There is nothing special there, my friends.  All the fridges are now empty ones", the security guard exclaimed.

 

"The compound was or rather is really haunted. The spirits are especially active on Monday, Wednesday and Friday,” according to the security guard with a definite voice tone.  "Usually we can only see them with their back facing us, they seldom show their front," he added.  Door slamming, lady screaming in the middle of the night is already a norm thing for him.
 
On one particular incident at around 1:45 AM, a strong gust of wind blew suddenly when he was reading the paper, making his hair stood on ends.  As he raised his head to take a peek at the surrounding, he saw two ladies, a Malay and the other Chinese, standing just 1 meter beside him.  When asked about how he feels about his job as a night guard, he said that it was scary in the beginning but he is used to it now.  Up to now, the mortuary was still well maintained.  It allows accommodation up to a maximum of four corpses.

The white quarter on the left is the mortuary. The green light that looks like ghost light is actually the light from the guard house

http://www.spi.com.sg/haunted/ghoulish_trial/main07.htm

The Old Changi Hospital (OCH) - The History

Built in 1930's, together with an A/E opposite the road and several blocks of commando barracks cum Changi prison nearby, the Old Changi Hospital (OCH) is situated at Netheravon Road in Changi villages.  It has quite a long and rich history for being the former hospital of today's modern Changi General Hospital in Simei and Toa Payoh Hospital equipped with world-class facilities.

With its classical design, one can see that OCH is a typical replica of buildings built by British Colonial architects in the early 20's.  Surprisingly OCH was not meant to be a hospital when it was first built (same for the A/E).  The British was planning to have a heavily guarded military location in the east of Singapore.  The site was strategically selected for it is high on top of a hill overlooking the sea surrounding most of the east side and the south side of the island.  For about 10 years before the war, this classical 7-storey high building compound was used as military command quarters and barracks.

During the assault of the Japanese aggression from Malaya in February 1942, Changi was targeted as one of the first attack points.  In a day or two, it was occupied by the Japanese army moving from Puala Ubin.  Soon after that OCH was converted to a military hospital where all the wounded soldiers and civilians were attended to.   After the Japanese Occupation ended, it was converted back to its original self, as a public hospital and later with a Military ward on the third level.

From February 1997 onwards, OCH was closed for its hospital operations were replaced by the new Changi General Hospital.  It got isolated and left vacant there since then.  According to some insider sources, the abandoned OCH will remain as it is but it will be re-open for the 'public' soon during 2005 for the Army Camp or for the Officer Cadet School (OCS) Trainees.

However, stories about the building being haunted started in the early 40's.  The Hospital itself had 70+ years of rich history when it survived from the dreadful World War II that took place from 1942 to 1945, witnessing the fall of Singapore and the brutal tortures towards the prisoners of war (POW) that happened there.  Therefore, seeing spirits of all races and of different nationals wandering around in the compound would be a common sight.

If you are thinking of visiting the hospital in the hope of bumping into a spirit of any nature, go with 2 or 3 friends.  If you go beyond that, you will never see it as they are all hiding behind the window pane or the back of the door WATCHING at you.   But of course, you can go there alone, however you will never find yourself ALONE.

The Old Changi Hospital

The Old Changi Hospital

The Old Changi Hospital

The Old Changi Hospital

http://www.spi.com.sg/haunted/ghoulish_trial/main07.htm

Majestic 12

Operation Majestic-12 was established by special classified presidential order on September 24, 1947 at the recommendation of Secretary of Defense James Forrestal and Dr. Vannevar Bush, Chairman of the Joint Research and Development Board. The goal of the group was to exploit everything they could from recovered alien technology.

Buried in a super-secret "MAJIC EYES ONLY" classification that was above TOP SECRET - long before the modern top secret codeword special access programs of today - Major General Leslie R. Groves (who commanded the Manhattan Project to deliver the atomic bomb) kept just one copy of the details of crashed alien technology in his safe in Washington, D.C.

Ambitious, elite scientists such as Vannevar Bush, Albert Einstein, and Robert Oppenheimer, and career military people such as Hoyt Vandenberg, Roscoe Hillenkoetter, Leslie Groves, and George Marshall, along with a select cast of other experts, feverishly and secretively labored to understand the alien agenda, technology, and their implications.

Einstein and Oppenheimer were called in to give their opinion, drafting a six-page paper titled -Relationships With Inhabitants Of Celestial Bodies.- They provided prophetic insight into our modern nuclear strategies and satellites, and expressed agitated urgency that an agreement be reached with the President so that scientists could proceed to study the alien technology.

The extraordinary recovery of fallen airborne objects in the state of New Mexico, between July 4 - July 6, 1947, caused the Chief of Staff of the Army Air Force-s Interplanetary Phenomena Unit, Scientific and Technical Branch, Counterintelligence Directorate to initiate a thorough investigation. The special unit was formed in 1942 in response to two crashes in the Los Angeles area in late February 1942. The draft summary report begins -At 2332 MST, 3 July 47, radar stations in east Texas and White Sands Proving Ground, N.M. tracked two unidentified aircraft until they both dropped off radar. Two crash sites have been located close to the WSPG. Site LZ-1 was located at a ranch near Corona, Approx. 75 miles northwest of the town of Roswell. Site LZ-2 was located approx. 20 miles southeast of the town of Socorro, at latitude 33-40-31 and longitude 106-28-29-.

The first-ever-known UFO crash retrieval case occurred in 1941 in Cape Girardeau, Missouri. This crash kicked off early reverse-engineering work, but it did not create a unified intelligence effort to exploit possible technological gains apart from the Manhattan Project uses.

The debris from the primary field of the 1947 crash 20 miles southeast of Socorro, New Mexico was called ULAT-1 (Unidentified Lenticular Aerodyne Technology), and it excited metallurgists with its unheard-of tensile and shear strengths. The fusion nuclear (called neutronic at that time) engine used heavy water and deuterium with an oddly arranged series of coils, magnets, and electrodes - descriptions that resemble the -cold fusion- studies of today.

Harry Truman kept the technical briefing documents of September 24, 1947 for further study, pondering the challenges of creating and funding a secret organization before the CIA existed (although the Central Intelligence Group or CIG did exist) and before there was a legal procedure of funding non-war operations.

In April 1954, a group of senior officers of the U.S. intelligence community and the Armed Forces gathered for one of the most secret and sensational briefings in history. The subject was Unidentified Flying Objects - not just a discussion of sightings, but how to recover crashed UFOs, where to ship the parts, and how to deal with the occupants. For example, in the -Special Operations Manual (SOM1-01) Extraterrestrial Entities Technology Recovery and Disposal,- MAJESTIC-12 -red teams- mapped out UFO crash retrieval scenarios with special attention given to press blackouts, body packaging, and live alien transport, isolation, and custody.

http://www.majesticdocuments.com/documents/intro.php

Chupacabra Attacks in Chile

El Chupacabra has been crawling all over Chile in the last few months, raising many new questions about this mysterious creature, and resulting in astonishing claims about its origin.

 
It stands three to four feet tall, has a flexible row of spines down its back, eyes that glow red and long, sharp fangs... some even say it has wings. This is how eyewitnesses have described the strange, unworldly creature known as El Chupacabra - Spanish for "the goat sucker." The creature, as elusive as Bigfoot and as terrifying as a demon, earned its name from the way it kills its victims (mostly farm animals, including goats) - by sucking the life blood from them.
Chupacabra first made the headlines in 1995, when several attacks were reported in Puerto Rico. 

The small island still claims the most number of attacks to date, but slaughtered chickens, ducks, goats, cats, dogs and other small animals have been attributed to Chupacabra in Mexico, Central America, South America and even parts of the Southern United States.

During April, May and June of 2000, however, there were reports of a spate of attacks coming out of Chile. The mysterious deaths of farm animals followed the same pattern as those in Puerto Rico and other countries, and descriptions from eyewitnesses who claim to have actually seen the creature in Chile match the hideous features detailed in previous accounts.

The stories that came out of Chile - many reported in Chilean newspapers - had an incredible twist. A few of the dreaded creatures, they said, were actually caught and killed... and then their bodies were taken away by representatives of U.S. government agencies. That was the claim, anyway.

The Attack Begins

The recent attacks began in April, and newspapers carried stories of the mysterious deaths of close to 200 goats, sheep, chickens and rabbits in northern Chile. At first the deaths were blamed on packs of wild dogs, but one trademark feature of the killings turned the suspicion on the legendary Chupacabra. The respected Reuters news agency reported that some of the animal victims "had incisions in their throats and their blood had been sucked out." The report also said that "detectives swept the zone with night vision equipment and that blood-curdling sounds were heard in the dark, causing residents not to venture outside."

Victor Espinosa, an investigator for Chile's Ecology Department, was said to take hair samples and footprint castings for examination. "The paw prints do not match those of horses, cows, goats, pigs, felines or wild dogs," Espinosa said. And, according to Dr. Virgilia Sanches-Ocejo of the Miami UFO Center, Espinosa also said that evidence shows that the animal walks on two legs and only attacks hot-blooded animals and not snakes or lizards of the region.

http://paranormal.about.com/library/weekly/aa062600a.htm

Chupacabras

The now-famous chupacabras first came on the scene, as far as we know, in the summer of 1975 when several farm animals in Puerto Rico were found dead. The bodies had strange puncture-like marks on their necks. The sightings intensified in the 1990s as the chupacabras' appetite seemed to grow. In some cases, farmers reported that literally hundreds of their animals were inexplicably slaughtered. Invariably, the animals were not eaten by any predator, but were horribly mutilated or drained of blood - hence the name, "goatsucker." In 1991, a male dog was found dead, with nothing inside. "It was as if all had been sucked out through the eyes," the report said. "It had empty eye sockets and all the internal organs had disappeared."

For a while, the carnage seemed to be confined to the island of Puerto Rico, but toward the end of the 1990s and into the 2000s, sightings began to be reported on other Caribbean islands, in Mexico, Central America, Chile and even the southern U.S. in Florida, Arizona and Texas. In April-June in Chile of 2002, in fact, it was reported that authorities had even captured the chupacabras, which may have been taken away by people representing the U.S. government.

The descriptions of the creature over this time has remained fairly consistent :

• three to five feet tall
• dark gray facial skin
• coarse hair on the body, and several reports said it has a chameleon-like appearance, with the ability to change from purple to brown to yellow
• black eyes, or glowing orange or red eyes
• a wolf-like or canine nose
• sharp fangs
• short forearms with three-fingered claw-like "hands"
• a row of fins, spikes or quills running down the length of its back
• stands on two powerful-looking hind legs and clawed feet
• often hops on the ground, like a kangaroo, rather than walks (at least one witness claimed it could leap as far as 20 feet in one bound)
• some reported bat-like wings that enable the chupacabras to fly
• it makes a hissing noise that often makes witnesses nauseous

The chupacabras phenomenon continues up to this day, with the recent reports of attacks continuing to come out of South American countries, including Chile and Argentina. In many of these cases, chupacabras - although not seen - was blamed for the deaths of chickens and other farm animals that were mutilated and drained of blood.

 

 

Chupacabra's Sketch

http://paranormal.about.com/od/chupacabra/a/chupa-from-hell.htm

The Dover Demon

At approximately 10:30 PM on April 21, 1977, 17-year-old Bill Bartlett was driving to his home on Walpole St. in Dover, Massachusetts, with two friends. They were in his Volkswagen traveling north on Farm St. when Bill noticed what appeared to be an animal climbing over the stone wall on the left hand side of the road. As he got closer, the car's high beams illuminated the creature. It was a strange being, like nothing he had seen before. Bartlett said, "It looked like a baby's body with long arms and legs. It had a big head about the same size as the body, it was sort of melon shaped. The color of it was... the color of people in the Sunday comics." He could see fingers on the creature’s hands. As he watched, it turned its head and looked at him with glowing orange eyes like glass marbles. It had no other facial features. Bartlett compared the texture of the thing's skin to that of a shark. His friends, engaged in conversation, did not see the thing as they drove past it going 40-45 miles per hour. Bartlett had the creature in view for about six seconds. Frightened, Bill stopped the car about ¾ mile down the road and told his friends what he had seen. They debated whether they should go back or not before returning 15 minutes later. Perhaps due to fear, they stayed in the car. They didn’t see any creature. Bartlett dropped his friends off at their homes, then went home and drew a picture of what he had seen.

About 2 hours later, around 12:30 AM, April 22, 1977, John Baxter, age 15, was returning home from his girlfriend’s home on Miller Hill Road in Dover. He had been walking for about half an hour and was less than a quarter-mile away from the intersection of Miller Hill Rd. and Farm St. when he saw a figure about 150 feet away walking towards him. Baxter noticed the figure’s enlarged head and thought it might be M.G. Bouchard, a boy he knew who lived on that road and had a deformed head as a result of a childhood illness. He continued walking down the road, getting closer to the approaching figure. Baxter said, "As I was getting closer I could see that it was very small... the only thought that came into my mind was this- it was this kid walking home from a party, or something, which he usually does at about 12:30, and I called out to him- this was at a distance, still of about fifty yards, and I just kept walking and there was no reply and whatever it was kept walking and as it got nearer and nearer I noticed- I could tell it wasn’t M.G. because it was much too small, and M.G. would have called out to me anyway, so I just kept getting closer and I was wondering, you know, 'who is that'... Finally, I was about 15 feet away from it when I stopped and it stopped [NOTE: this distance was later measured to be approximately 26 feet- CP]- well I stopped when it stopped- we just stood there- I was looking at it and I’m sure it was looking at me- I could barely see the shape of it... And I said one more time, 'Who is that?' And so I took another step towards it, the only thought I had was that it might be a very small person like a 4 or 5 year old, and as I took this step it just ran so fast into the woods on my left. It was just so fast, you know, one second it was there and another second it wasn't and I could hear it going through the woods, across a stream- a little brook. I didn’t hear the feet in the water so I didn’t know there was a brook there. And it continued up to the edge of a field which was about 25 or 30 feet through the edge of, like, trees... At the edge of the road there's an embankment that goes down- sort of like a small gully, 'cause then it rises up on the other side, and I did, you might say, pursue it. I went in the same way it went, down the hill, and I stopped- I almost went into the brook- and I stopped at the bottom of the bank, I could see it- it was about level with me in ratio with the height of it, you know, its head was about level with mine, because it was up a little higher than I was... It was standing on one rock that was about two or three feet from the tree, and it was leaning against the tree... and I could just barely discern the feet or whatever, you know, holding onto the rock sort of molding as I’ve said before to the shape of the rock..." He could clearly see the outline of the creature's body visible against the dark sky. It was then that he got his first good look at it. "All these thoughts going through my mind, you know, 'what is this? A monkey, maybe?'… As I was looking really close there I could see the eyes… it was looking at me… I just stared at it for another few minutes… and then I just got all these thoughts that maybe it was something really strange, 'cause, you know, nothing ever happened to me like this before, so I didn’t know what to think. So I finally got the thought that maybe it wasn’t as safe as it looked, 'cause the way it was staring at me it just seemed like it was- I don’t know, I got all these feelings that it was thinking to itself, or waiting to spring or whatever, you know, and so I backed up the bank kind of fast and my heart started beating really fast…" Baxter went to Farm Street and got a ride home. He drew a picture of the creature that night. It had glowing eyes and was identical in shape to the thing Bill Bartlett had seen.

The next night, at about midnight on April 22-23, Will Taintor, 18, was driving his girlfriend, fifteen-year-old Abby Brabham, to her home in Sherborn. They were going west on Springdale Ave. in Dover when Abby saw something crouched on the left hand side of the road at the edge of a bridge. She said, "As I looked at it it kind of looked a minute like an ape. And then I looked at the head and the head was very big and it was a very weird head… It had bright green eyes and the eyes just glowed like, they were just looking exactly at me." It appeared that the monster’s eyes were reflecting the car’s headlights. It had a tan, hairless body. The head was watermelon-shaped and looked featureless except for the round, green eyes. All Taintor saw was a brief glimpse of a tan figure crouched in the road. No movement was seen. The witnesses compared the creature's size to that of a goat. After they had driven past the thing, Taintor said, "Did you just see something?" and Abby said "Yeah. Lock the doors, let’s get out of here, hurry up." That was the last time the "Demon of Dover" (as it came to be known) was seen- at least for a while.


Part 2: The Aftermath

There is some confusion about when the witnesses first heard each other's separate accounts. In an interview on May 21, 1977, Will Taintor told investigators that he and Bill Bartlett were going camping on Friday, April 22 (the day of Taintor and Brabham’s sighting) when they picked up John Baxter hitchhiking. Taintor said, "We were all just talking and Bill happened to mention, 'Oh, did you hear what I saw?' And John goes, 'Well, what, because I saw something last night.'" And they both talked about what they had seen. Taintor said that he believed Bill because "I know he wouldn’t lie to me and it didn’t seem like a joke. He seemed really serious about it."

John Baxter gave a different story to investigators in his interview, also May 21. Baxter said that he hadn’t heard about any other sightings until the following Tuesday. He stated, "I was not aware of Bill’s drawing until... after when I told some people, I was talking to them, I think it was in school when we compared them... 'cause I was telling the story to a couple of kids and someone came up and looked at my picture which I was holding out and they said, 'That looks like the one Bartlett saw. He said he saw something like that', and I said naw, it couldn’t be."

Bill Bartlett was interviewed on June 11, 1977. Strangely, he presented a third, completely different version of events! Bartlett had a hard time remembering when he had first seen Baxter’s drawing. He said that he had seen John Baxter on Friday, possibly at the center of town, and Baxter had shown him his drawing. Then, Saturday night, there was a party, and Bartlett had his drawing with him, but he couldn’t remember if Baxter had been there or if they compared drawings. So the witness interviews leave some confusion as to when the witnesses first compared stories. [Note: Nyman's report does not address this apparent contradiction, but he includes Taintor's story about the meeting in the car on a timeline of the sightings, so it is apparent that he believes that story. To try to clear this up, I contacted Loren Coleman, one of the other three investigators. He told me that he believed that the witnesses had not compared stories until the following week in school. CP]

When Bartlett realized that other people had seen the thing, he had a friend make a stack of photocopies of his drawing. One of those copies wound up at the Dover Country Store, where Loren Coleman saw it, then spoke to the witnesses. Apparently this local publicity prompted police to speak to the four witnesses, because a May 15, 1977 article in the South Middlesex Sunday News about the sighting had glowing character evaluations of all the witnesses by an unnamed police officer. Other newspaper articles followed, and the Dover Demon received loads of publicity far and wide. The Boston Herald-American of May 16 ran an Associated Press story that mentioned that police had searched the area of the sightings but found nothing. The same day, the Boston Globe’s article mentioned that a watercolor painting of the monster was actually displayed in the police station! However, the May 16 South Middlesex Daily News quoted a police spokesperson as saying the reports were "pretty much of a joke," and the May 19 Dover-Sherborn Suburban Press quoted Officer Jim Brown as saying, "we have no reports at all and all we know is what we’ve read in the papers." Nyman did report that Police Chief Carl Sheridan was a long time friend of the Bartlett family, and he gave Bartlett a high recommendation.

There has been some confusion about whether the witnesses were friends or even knew each other. Nyman’s report makes it clear that Bill Bartlett and John Baxter knew each other only slightly before the sightings. Bill and Will Taintor, on the other hand, were close friends.

Nyman spoke with the witness’ parents and also talked to some students from their high school. Both the parents and students told Nyman that initially they thought it was a joke or hoax, then came around to belief. Some of Bill Bartlett's teachers were also interviewed. A science teacher gave him high recommendations and was convinced of his truthfulness. Two other teachers, however, said that Bill was essentially a bad kid, and one of them said that Bill was just the type of person likely to perpetrate a hoax. He said that Bill and John Baxter frequently hung out in the school’s smoking lounge. This seems dubious, however, as Bartlett had strong negative opinions about smoking. Also, there was a two-year age difference between Bill and John, making mutual activities unlikely. Neither Bill Bartlett, nor John Baxter, nor Will Taintor, were good students, which may account for the negative teacher opinion.

Dover Demon

Dover Demon's Sketch

Dover Demon

http://www.massmonstermash.org/demon.html

The Curse of The Crying Boy Solved?

Crying Boy Painting (Image credit: Fortean Times)

In a chilling story that gripped the nation in 1985, the Yorkshire home of Ron and May Hall was gutted by fire - but their painting of a crying boy remained unscathed.

TWENTY-FIVE years ago, George Michael was a bouffant-haired pop god, David Cameron had just started at university - and Britain was in the grip of the Curse Of The Crying Boy. From all over the country came reports of house fires in which a picture of a tearful child was unscathed.

I remembered reading the story at the time and wanted to investigate whether anyone had ever solved the mystery.

I tracked one of the pictures down. Recession has clearly struck the art world because it was only a tenner.

I then talked to Kelvin MacKenzie - Editor of The Sun in 1985 who urged readers to send in their paintings before organising a bonfire - about what made the story so interesting.

The crucial factor, it seemed, was that it was a Yorkshire fireman, not a regular member of the public, who had noticed the unburnt painting and claimed that this was not the first time they had seen it survive a fire.

By this time I had realised that it wasn't just that the Crying Boy was involved in the fires - there were also rumours that it had STARTED them. How could that happen?

I talked to art expert Tim Marlow. He's not a big fan of the Crying Boy but did recognise the name of the artist, Bragolin, who died in 1981 and created a series of Crying Boy paintings for tourists in post-war Venice.

It didn't fit with the extraordinary tale that has appeared on the internet since the original story 25 years ago.

This version claims that the boy in the painting was an orphan whose parents had died in a fire. He was taken in by the painter despite warnings that he was a firestarter - a child who can burn things without touching them.

The artist's studio caught fire and he was ruined. The boy ran away - and ten years later a car crashed in flames on the outskirts of Barcelona.

The driver died in the crash, the online story goes, but a driving licence found inside showed it was the orphan boy.

This story is, of course, too good to be true. And even if the child himself could start fires, that's not the same as a painting of him starting fires, let alone 50,000 copies.

It didn't, to be honest, seem very likely. But was it true that the picture didn't burn? I went to the Building Research Establishment - a laboratory near Watford where they set things on fire for research purposes.

The result was a little surprising. A flame put immediately in front of the painting did set fire to a corner of the frame but only burnt around the outer edge of the child's profile before petering out.

But it turns out there is a reason why paintings often survive fires relatively undamaged: It is to do with the string on the back burning through first.

The painting falls face-down, giving it protection from smoke and heat.

It's easy to see how the Crying Boy became such a phenomenon. It has all the ingredients of a great spooky story.

An eerie child, a rash of fires, a mysterious artist, a "supernatural" ability to survive flames... and a newspaper with an eye for a good story.

Many people were spooked and wanted to be rid of them but Kelvin MacKenzie thinks there is another reason why the paintings flooded in.

He reckons many came from couples where one person had never liked the picture anyway - and saw a good opportunity to get rid of it.

http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/features/3172354/The-Curse-of-the-Crying-Boy-is-solved-by-Steve-Punt.html