Ten Cursed Objects and the Truth Behind Their Legends

The most famous cursed object in America sits behind glass at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History. The Hope Diamond is a deep blue stone of 45.52 carats, and its legend says it ruins whoever owns it.

The real history is dramatic enough without help. In 1668 the French gem merchant Jean-Baptiste Tavernier sold a large blue diamond to Louis XIV, who had it recut into the French Blue. Thieves took it during the looting of the French crown jewels in 1792. A blue diamond turned up in the London collection of Henry Philip Hope by 1839, and the Hope name stuck. Pierre Cartier sold it to the Washington heiress Evalyn Walsh McLean for $180,000 in 1912. Her family later suffered real heartbreak, including the early deaths of two of her children, and that made her the curse's best-known example.

The trouble is that the curse story arrives suspiciously late. Historians suspect Cartier played up the dark legend to make the stone irresistible to a buyer who loved a good story. The tale that Tavernier pried it from an idol's eye and was torn apart by dogs is false; he sold the stone to the king and died peacefully in Russia. Harry Winston bought the diamond in 1949 and mailed it to the Smithsonian by registered mail in 1958 for $2.44 in postage. The mail carrier had a bad year afterward, but the museum has had nothing but crowds.

Thirsk Museum displays an old oak chair hung from the ceiling, out of reach, so that nobody can sit in it. According to local legend, anyone who does will die.

The story starts with Thomas Busby, who was hanged near Thirsk in 1702 for murdering his father-in-law, Daniel Auty, after a quarrel tied to their coin-counterfeiting business. Legend says Busby cursed his favorite chair, either on the way to the gallows or when he was arrested in it. The chair stayed at a pub that took his name, the Busby Stoop Inn. In later retellings, Canadian airmen from nearby RAF Skipton-on-Swale sat in it during World War II and never came back from their missions, and a string of fatal accidents in the 1970s was added to the tally. In 1978 the landlord gave the chair to the museum.

The fatal flaw is the chair's age. A furniture historian who examined it found machine-turned spindles, a feature of factory work, while chairs of Busby's era were turned by hand on a pole lathe. That points to a date around 1840, more than a century after the hanging. As for the airmen, bomber crews in that war faced terrible odds whether or not they visited a pub, and no one has produced a list of chair-sitters to compare against.

Every list of cursed objects seems to include the Basano Vase, and its story is irresistible. A silver vase was given to a bride near Naples in the 1400s, the legend goes, and she died on her wedding night clutching it. Relatives who inherited it also died, so the family hid it away. In 1988 it was supposedly dug up with a note warning that it brought death, sold at auction, and then killed a pharmacist, a young surgeon and an archaeologist in quick succession. In the final scene, a terrified owner throws it out a window, and it vanishes into police custody or a secret lead-lined grave.

Here is what is missing: everything you would need to check it. The bride has no name. Neither does any owner, buyer or victim. There is no auction house, no sale record, no newspaper report from 1988, no police file, and no agreed-upon town. A writer who tried to trace the story found that online versions cite an unnamed magazine article that cannot be located, and that the single photo passed around as the vase does not match the descriptions.

The plot also follows horror-movie rules a little too neatly, right down to the skeptical surgeon who dies anyway. A story this specific about a modern auction and three named professions, with no names attached, is the signature of a tale that was written rather than witnessed.

The Koh-i-Noor, Persian for mountain of light, is one of the most famous diamonds on Earth, and it comes with a gendered curse: men who own or wear it meet disaster, while women can wear it safely. Since it arrived in Britain, only female members of the royal family have worn it. It sits today in the crown made for Queen Elizabeth, later the Queen Mother, for the 1937 coronation, on display at the Tower of London.

The diamond's real history is a long chain of conquest. Historians William Dalrymple and Anita Anand found that the first solid named reference to it dates only to the 1740s, and that many colorful origin stories were added later. It passed through Mughal, Persian, Afghan and Sikh hands before the British took it under the 1849 Treaty of Lahore, from a 10-year-old maharaja, Duleep Singh. It was presented to Queen Victoria in 1850 and recut in 1852 from about 186 old carats down to 105.6 carats.

Dalrymple traces the curse idea to older Indian astrological lore, and in the 19th century it spread through newspapers such as the Delhi Gazette and the Illustrated London News. A stone fought over by warring dynasties will naturally have owners who died violently, because so did many rulers of that era. India, Pakistan, Iran and Afghanistan have all claimed it, and that dispute is the real legacy.

On September 19, 1991, German hikers Helmut and Erika Simon found a body melting out of a glacier high in the Ötztal Alps. It turned out to be a man who died about 5,300 years ago, now known as Ötzi and displayed at the South Tyrol Museum of Archaeology in Bolzano, Italy. Within a few years, the press had decided he was cursed.

The case for the curse is a list of seven deaths. Rainer Henn, a forensic pathologist who handled the body, died in a car crash about a year later. Kurt Fritz, a mountain guide, died in an avalanche. Filmmaker Rainer Hölz died of a brain tumor. Helmut Simon himself died in a fall while hiking in 2004, and Dieter Warnecke, who led the search for him, died of a heart attack shortly after the funeral. Archaeologist Konrad Spindler died of complications from multiple sclerosis, and molecular archaeologist Tom Loy died in 2005, about 12 years after being diagnosed with a rare blood-clotting disorder.

Each death is sad, and together they make a spooky headline. But hundreds of people have been involved in research on Ötzi, and several of the dead spent their lives in a dangerous mountain environment. Spread across 14 years, seven deaths from cancer, heart disease, chronic illness and mountain accidents is not unusual at all. No one has shown a higher death rate among Ötzi's researchers than among anyone else.

Here is a pattern that really happened. From 1840 through 1960, every president elected in a year ending in zero died in office. William Henry Harrison (elected 1840) died of pneumonia a month after his inauguration. Abraham Lincoln (1860), James Garfield (1880), William McKinley (1900) and John F. Kennedy (1960) were assassinated. Warren Harding (1920) and Franklin Roosevelt (elected 1940) died of natural causes.

The legend credits a curse from the Shawnee leader Tecumseh or his brother Tenskwatawa, the Prophet, after Harrison's forces defeated them at the Battle of Tippecanoe in 1811. But there is no record of any such curse from that time. Ripley's Believe It or Not pointed out the pattern in 1931, and the first written account of the curse's supposed origin appeared in a 1980 magazine article.

Then the streak ended. Ronald Reagan, elected in 1980, was shot in 1981 and survived. George W. Bush, elected in 2000, served two full terms, even after a grenade thrown at him in Georgia in 2005 failed to explode. Joe Biden, elected in 2020, completed his term. And one president who did die in office, Zachary Taylor, was elected in 1848 and did not fit the pattern at all. A skeptic's view is simple: look at enough features of enough presidencies and some striking streak is bound to appear.

In November 1922, Howard Carter's team uncovered the nearly intact tomb of Tutankhamun, paid for by the English aristocrat Lord Carnarvon. A few months later, in March 1923, Carnarvon was bitten by a mosquito, and the bite became infected. Blood poisoning and pneumonia followed, and he died in Cairo on April 5, 1923.

The newspapers did the rest. Reports claimed the lights of Cairo went out at the moment of his death (power cuts were routine in the city), and that a warning inscribed at the tomb promised death to intruders. No such inscription existed. The novelist Arthur Conan Doyle lent his fame to the idea that an ancient force was at work, and every later death of anyone remotely connected to the dig was added to the count.

Two careful looks have tested it. In 1934, the American Egyptologist Herbert Winlock tallied the 22 people present when the tomb was opened and found that only six had died, about what ordinary life expectancy predicts. In 2002, the British Medical Journal published a study by Mark Nelson of 44 Westerners in Egypt during the excavation. The 25 people exposed to the tomb lived to an average of 70; the 19 unexposed lived to 75, a difference too small to mean anything statistically. Howard Carter, the man who actually opened the tomb, lived until 1939.