20 Famous Curses That Were Invented After The Fact

British archaeologist Howard Carter, who discovered Tutankhamun’s tomb in November 1922, sold the rights for exclusive reporting to one London newspaper. When his patron, Lord Carnarvon, died the following year from blood poisoning after being bitten by a mosquito, the press that had been locked out got revenge. Using a warning letter written by a novelist as inspiration, they created the phrase “Death shall come on swift wings to him who disturbs the peace of the king” and claimed it was an actual inscription. It wasn’t.

In December 1919, team owner Harry Frazee sold Babe Ruth, the star slugger of Boston known affectionately as the Bambino, to the New York Yankees. According to legend, Frazee needed money to finance a Broadway show, but that show didn’t open until six years later. He actually needed the cash to help pay the mortgage on Fenway Park. None of the fans or newspapers in Boston referred to it as a curse. Decades later, Boston Globe columnist Dan Shaughnessy coined the phrase “Curse of the Bambino” in a book published in 1990.

The Hope Diamond, a 45.52-carat blue gem, is reportedly cursed after having been ripped from the eye of a Hindu goddess statue in India. Paris jeweler Pierre Cartier made up the story about the stolen idol and the deaths of royalty in 1910 because he couldn’t sell the stone, and it paid off when American heiress Evalyn Walsh McLean bought it in 1911. The diamond’s first legal owner, gem merchant Jean-Baptiste Tavernier, was allegedly killed by wild dogs, yet he actually survived into his 80s and passed away from natural causes.

In 1945, Billy Sianis, owner of Chicago’s Billy Goat Tavern, brought his pet goat, Murphy, to a World Series game. Cubs owner Philip Wrigley ordered the goat removed due to its odor. Enraged, Sianis dispatched a telegram reading, “You are going to lose this World Series.” The Cubs did lose, but he did not declare an infinite curse. Instead, sportswriters stretched that one telegram into a permanent franchise curse over the decades that followed, until the Cubs finally won again in 2016.

Lord Dalhousie, the British Governor-General of India, compelled Duleep Singh, the 10-year-old Maharaja of the Sikh Empire, to hand over the Koh-i-Noor under the Treaty of Lahore (1849). In the years after the stone arrived in England in 1850, the British fabricated an ancient Hindu scripture saying that the stone could not be worn except by God or a woman. Historians have confirmed that no such document has ever been discovered. Queen Victoria kept and wore the stone for the rest of her reign, which lasted another 51 years, with no ill effects.

To this day, some actors refuse to utter the name Macbeth within the confines of a theater. It’s known as “the Scottish Play” out of superstition that it was cursed when the boy actor playing Lady Macbeth at its 1606 opening night died in an accident attributed to black magic. He was supposed to be called Hal Berridge. But Berridge was also made up by a British writer called Max Beerbohm in a spoof for The Saturday Review in 1898. His imaginary demise became the go-to story actors used to explain all kinds of mishaps on stage throughout the 20th century.

Joseph P. Kennedy Sr. served as US Ambassador to Great Britain in the late 1930s, years before the assassination of his sons John F. Kennedy and Robert F. Kennedy in 1963 and 1968, respectively. Tabloid writers in the 1970s claimed that Kennedy had insulted a rabbi in London, who retaliated by cursing the sons to die young. There is no documentation in the records of the British government or in Kennedy’s biographies that such a meeting took place. The legend was invented to profit from public fascination with the two tragic deaths.

The Crying Boy was the title of a mass-produced print made of a weeping orphan painted in the 1950s by Italian artist Bruno Amadio, known as Giovanni Bragolin. It sold successfully throughout Europe for 30 years. Then in 1985, British tabloid The Sun, edited by Kelvin MacKenzie, alleged that the print somehow survived house fires that burned down the rest of the home and dubbed it “cursed.” The paper burned 2,500 copies in a bonfire. Years later, government scientists discovered that it was printed on fireproof hardboard covered with heavy, fire-resistant varnish.

The Myrtles Plantation in St. Francisville, Louisiana, was constructed in 1796. It is now famous for the tale of Chloe, an enslaved woman who allegedly poisoned a birthday cake and killed the family of Judge Clarke Woodruff in the 1820s. There is no record in the plantation’s census, court, or probate records for an enslaved woman with this name. Judge Woodruff’s wife died of yellow fever, and his daughters lived to adulthood. In the middle of the 20th century, the owners of the plantation created Chloe as a way to bring in tourists for ghost tours.

King Casimir IV Jagiellon, a 15th-century monarch of Poland and Lithuania, was interred in his tomb at Krakow’s Wawel Cathedral using resin to preserve his corpse from the summer heat. In 1973, researchers opened the grave to restore it, and several of them died in the months that followed. Eventually, 15 individuals linked to the excavation succumbed to strokes, heart attacks, or cancer, and news outlets dubbed it a royal curse. Microbiologist Boleslaw Smyk discovered the culprit: a cancer-inducing fungus that had been locked in the hermetically sealed tomb for hundreds of years. It wasn’t a curse after all.

The Shawnee leader Tecumseh, who organized a confederacy of tribes to halt U.S. encroachment on Indian lands, was defeated by Indiana territorial governor William Henry Harrison in 1811. Eventually, legend held that Tecumseh or his brother had cursed Harrison so that any president chosen in a year ending in zero would die in office. Neither Shawnee records nor newspapers from the 1800s contain any mention of such a curse. In the 1930s, however, five presidents elected in a zero year, Harrison among them, had died in office, and newspaper columnists began constructing the myth backwards.

They say that the 67.5-carat Black Orlov diamond was stolen from the eye of a Hindu statue in India, and that it cursed two Russian princesses who leaped to their deaths in Rome in 1947. The entire story, including the existence of a fictional victim, a certain Princess Nadia Vyegin-Orlov, was created by New York diamond dealer Charles Winson. Searches of Imperial Russian genealogical records have shown that no such princess ever existed. Winson concocted the tragic tale to market the gem to rich Americans.

Thomas Busby was hanged in 1702 at Sandhutton, North Yorkshire, for killing his father-in-law, and on the way to the execution, he reportedly cursed his favorite pub chair, ensuring that anyone who sat in it would meet with a violent demise. Busby’s Stoop Chair was blamed for some car crashes and also for bomber plane losses during World War II. But according to a furniture historian, the chair was built circa 1840, more than a hundred years after Busby died, and the story of the curse was made up by pub landlords to attract custom.

On June 20, 1941, the Soviet anthropologist Mikhail Gerasimov opened the tomb of the 14th-century conqueror Timur, also known as Tamerlane, in Samarkand. On June 22, 1941, Nazi Germany launched its invasion of the Soviet Union, known as Operation Barbarossa. The story goes that there was a warning carved on the tomb that any disturbance would bring about the destruction of the Soviet Union. However, according to Soviet sources, the “curse” didn’t exist until after the war, when Soviet propagandists connected these two incidents.

In early 1900s Vienna, composer Gustav Mahler was suffering from a serious heart condition. He came to believe there was a curse on all composers who completed their ninth symphony, since he knew Ludwig van Beethoven had died in 1827 not long after completing his own Ninth Symphony. Earlier composers had never spoken of any curse. To avoid the curse, he didn’t number his own ninth major work, calling it Das Lied von der Erde instead. And he still died in 1911, while composing an unfinished Tenth. Fellow composer Arnold Schoenberg published an essay that solidified the legend in 1912.

The Polish noblewoman Marina Mniszech became Tsaritsa of Russia by marrying two pretenders to the throne. She witnessed Romanov boyars executing her 3-year-old son in Moscow in 1614. They say that she cursed the scaffold, proclaiming that a Michael would inaugurate and terminate the dynasty. But no 17th-century source refers to this. It was invented by Russian poets 200 years later. It made its way into Western accounts when Tsar Nicholas II abdicated in 1917 in favor of his brother Michael, who declined, and the family was executed the following year.

William Shakespeare’s gravestone in the Holy Trinity Church in Stratford-upon-Avon, where he was buried in 1616, contains a rhyme that curses anyone who moves his bones from the spot. It is popularly believed that he wrote it himself as a way of deterring any grave robbers. However, it was normal practice for parish churches to clear away old graves in their floors to allow space for new burials. Such verses were common on gravestones in Warwickshire. 18th-century biographers turned this generic inscription into Shakespeare’s own curse, and the playwright’s grave has remained intact ever since.

The final Grand Master of the Templars, Jacques de Molay, was burned alive at the stake in Paris in March 1314, after King Philip IV of France had appropriated their assets. They say he cursed Philip and his pope Clement V from the flames, invoking God to send them to meet their maker within a year. A chronicle written during his lifetime makes no mention of any speech, but Pope Clement died of illness that April, and Philip suffered a fatal stroke while hunting in November. Within eight months, both were dead, and subsequent chroniclers created the story of the curse to explain the coincidence.

The royal house of Pelops, a mythical king whose offspring included Agamemnon, the general of the Greeks besieging Troy, was thought to be plagued for generations with blood feuds as a result of a curse. Pelops’s charioteer, Myrtilus, had been killed when Pelops threw him off a cliff. In revenge, Myrtilus cursed the royal family. This curse doesn’t appear in Homer’s Iliad, dating to the 8th century BCE. The writer Aeschylus first told it in 458 BCE, in a trilogy called The Oresteia, which he constructed from disparate sources for an Athenian drama contest.

The Greek hero Jason’s journey through Greek mythology to Colchis in search of the Golden Fleece, the golden wool of a winged ram, was made possible by the aid of the sorceress-princess Medea. At its origin, the Fleece was merely a marker of kingship, with no curse associated with it. This all changed when the poet Apollonius of Rhodes set out to write his epic Argonautica in the 3rd century BCE. Apollonius infused the Golden Fleece with a curse of ambitious aspiration, transforming an otherwise simple quest into a story of tragic downfall.

This content was created with the help of AI.