I read a creepy pasta suggesting that the boys were living in purgatory, or something to that effect.

That's the rumor: the kids all dress like they're from different decades, and all look to be diseased or injured, because they're all ghosts of dead children.

Not as good as the theory behind "Courage the Cowardly Dog": CtCD is how the world looks to your dog. That's not just the mailman coming down the drive, that's a Lovecraftian horror warping reality itself as it approaches, and your owners are infuriatingly oblivious to the threat.

He was never given a certain ethnicity. I'll bet he's something like a Romanian.

His ethnicity is "wacky foreigner". They'd probably give him a Kansai dialect.

I like how Ed sounds exactly like Ed if he was Japanese.