While it might be easy to laugh off curses as simple superstition, there are some historical curses that are so creepy that you can’t help but feel afraid.
The tomb had something inside it
The idea of opening a royal tomb sure does sound exciting, and it usually is. But things went quite pear-shaped for the team working at Wawel Cathedral in Kraków, Poland. In 1973, researchers opened the tomb of King Casimir IV Jagiellon. That was when the curse started.
Several members of the team died, although their deaths did take place over several years. But it was enough for people to claim there was a ‘Jagiellonian curse.’ Turns out, there was some truth to that, as scientists later found a fungus called Aspergillus flavus inside the tomb. This kind of fungus can produce dangerous toxins, so technically, opening the tomb may have actually caused these deaths.
Pompeii keeps getting packages
Stealing something from Pompeii might cause you to experience buyer’s remorse, and lots of it. Visitors to the ancient site have stolen items like chunks of plaster and pottery, then ended up returning them in the mail. But not because they didn’t like them.
No, it’s because they believed the items were cursed, and stealing them caused their lives to go badly afterward. One Canadian woman returned stolen artifacts in 2020 after having them for fifteen years. She wrote a letter accompanying the returned items and blamed them for years of misfortune and illness.
The blue stone had terrible timing
It doesn’t matter whether or not the curse of the Hope Diamond is real because there’s definitely something strange going on with it. It has an odd history, for one, and it involved various French kings owning it. Then, in 1911, American heiress Evalyn Walsh McLean bought the 45.52-carat blue diamond. That’s when the curse passed to her.
Her nine-year-old son Vinson was killed by a car in 1919, while her daughter Evalyn died from a drug overdose in 1946. She was only 25. Her husband, Ned, went on to face serious financial and personal problems. You might not believe in the curse, but the tragedies were definitely real.
The night Carnarvon died
History was made in 1922 when Howard Carter opened the tomb of King Tutankhamun, an Egyptian pharaoh, exactly 3,245 years after he died. The expedition was funded by a man named Lord Carnarvon. Strangely enough, Carnarvon died on April 5, 1923, just a few months after the tomb was opened.
He died due to an infected mosquito bite that caused pneumonia and other illnesses. That alone is strange enough, but it only gets weirder when you remember that his dog died that same night. The canine was back at Highclere Castle in England. That sure is a weird coincidence.
The warning from the pyre
Jacques de Molay was the last grand master of the Knights Templar, a powerful warrior group, and had some pretty horrible final days. That’s before you even get to the curse. King Philip IV of France ordered that de Molay be burned to death in Paris in March 1314. But Molay was not someone to go quietly, and he had a few last words to say.
He apparently cursed Philip and Pope Clement V while being burned. Specifically, he told them that they’d answer before God very shortly. It seems that the curse worked because Clement died in April and Philip followed in November.
A week was all it took
Not all curses are ancient, however. Just look at the one that apparently affected actor James Dean. On September 23, 1955, he met with Alec Guinness in Hollywood, and Dean showed off his new Porsche 550 Spyder. It was a car that already had a legend for being cursed. Guinness said that seeing the car made him feel uneasy.
So uneasy, in fact, that he warned Dean not to get inside it, and went as far as saying that Dean would be dead within a week. Dean laughed the whole thing off. But that’s exactly what happened seven days later. Dean’s Porsche collided with another car near Cholame, California, killing him.
The chair stays off the floor
The Thirsk Museum in Thirsk, England, has quite a specific rule about one of its exhibits. Nobody can sit in it. The exhibit in question is a seat linked to a local man named Thomas Busby, who was executed in 1702 for murdering his father-in-law. Legend has it that Busby cursed the chair before he died.
Later on, stories emerged that seemed to prove the curse was real, as people who’d sat in the chair suffered fatal accidents. It got so bad that the Thirsk Museum decided it couldn’t leave it out for visitors to sit in. So, in 1978, it nailed the chair to a wall. The curse hasn’t claimed any victim since.
The tiara came through the wreck
Time for another cursed piece of jewelry. This time, it’s the Strawberry Leaf Tiara, an item that previously belonged to German royalty and was apparently cursed. In 1937, Hereditary Grand Duke Georg Donatus of Hesse was flying to London with his pregnant wife Cecilie, their two young sons, Grand Duchess Eleonore, and others. The tiara was on board.
The aircraft crashed during the journey near Ostend, Belgium, and killed everyone aboard, although that’s not the strangest part. The tiara survived the whole thing. Yes, it survived the wreck and fire intact.
The eldest sons kept dying
Back in the 1600s, a Franciscan friar allegedly cursed King John IV of Portugal. The friar was supposedly unhappy with the King and declared that none of the firstborn sons in the Braganza royal line would live long enough to inherit the crown.
You might just brush that off as simple words. But then, John’s eldest son, Teodósio, died before King John IV, and the firstborn sons of Pedro II, John V, Maria I, John VI, and Pedro II of Brazil also died later on. Not every generation fit the cycle, but enough of them did that it seems kind of strange.
Before an invasion
Soviet researchers opened the tomb of Timur, a Turco-Mongol ruler, in June 1941. Maybe they shouldn’t have. There was allegedly a warning outside the tomb that said disturbing Timur would bring an invader ‘even more terrible than he had been’.
Days later, on June 22, that’s what happened. Nazi Germany launched Operation Barbarossa against the Soviet Union, and while the invasion had been planned, it sure is a weird coincidence.
Sources: Please see here for a complete listing of all sources that were consulted in the preparation of this article.
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