1. The Madden Curse
As a pro football player, not only are you making ridiculous amounts of money for playing, but you also have a chance at scoring some serious endorsement money. However, you might want to reconsider if offered a deal as the new face of the Madden video game, considering the track record of your predecessors:
2000-Barry Sanders, Detroit Lions—Sanders didn’t play a single down during the 1999-2000 season (or ever again), retiring after a ten year career.
2000-Dorsey Levens, Green Bay Packers—Later copies of the game to featured Levens, who was bothered by a bad knee in the following season, leading to reduction to a reserve player (aka benchwarmer). He was fired in 2001.
2001- Eddie George, Tennessee Titans—Blew a pass that led to the other team’s touchdown in the Divisional Playoffs. In the following season, his rushing average sank to an all time low, and incurred persistent injuries.
2002- Daunte Culpepper, Minnesota Vikings—Culpepper’s 2001 season was less than impressive, leading to a 4-7 record before Culpepper got a knee injury and was benched the last five games of the year.
2003- Marshall Faulk, St. Louis Rams—Incurred an injured ankle; Rams missed playoffs despite having been in 2/3 Super Bowls in the preceding three years.
2004- Michael Vick, Atlanta Falcons—fractured right fibula in a pre-season game
2005- Ray Lewis, Baltimore Ravens—In 2004, achieved no interceptions (for the only time in his NFL career), sat out final game with an injury. In 2005, torn right hamstring.
2006—Donovan McNabb, Philadelphia Eagles—Made a big show of not being afraid of the curse in a press release. In the first game of the year, suffered a sports hernia, which eventually led to a surgery that took him out for seven games.
2007- Shaun Alexander, Seattle Seahawks—Broke left foot, missed six games.
2008- Vince Young, Tennessee Titans—Hurt right quadriceps in fifth game of season. First time Young had ever sat out of a game because of an injury.
2. The Hope Diamond
Allegedly (but unlikely) plucked from the eye of an Indian idol, this 45.52 carat gray-blue diamond seriously seems to mess with its owners. Although a lot of the hype surrounding the “cursed” diamond was made up by jewelers who wanted to sell it, it has been (very loosely) connected to many unfortunate events. Victims include Louis XIV, who died of gangrene and had all his legitimate children die in childhood, and French finance minister Nicolas Fouquet, thought by some to be the real Man in the Iron Mask. The beheading of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette are often attributed to the diamond, as is the brutal murder of Marie Louis, Princess de Lamballe, who was hit with a hammer, decapitated, stripped, raped, and disemboweled before her head was carried on a pike to be displayed in front of Marie Antoinette’s prison cell. Sultan Abdul Hamid apparently gave the diamond to a mistress, whom he stabbed to death within a year. Wilhelm Fals, a jeweler who worked on the diamond, was killed by his son Hendrik, who stole the diamond and committed suicide. A Russian prince Kanitowski lent it to a French actress, Lorens Ladue, whom he later murdered before his own violent death by revolutionaries. Evalyn McLean bought the diamond, and consequently became addicted to morphine, mislaid her very considerable fortune, lost her son to a car crash and her daughter to a drug overdose, and was left by her husband who eventually died in an insane asylum. The diamond was finally donated, via US mail in a brown paper sack, to the Smithsonian. The mailman, James Todd, had his leg crushed in an accident, suffered head injuries in a later accident, and then had his house burned down.
3. Uluru Ayers Rock
This large, sandstone formation in northern Australia is sacred to the Aboriginal tribes of Pitjautjatjara and Yankinytjatjara. Legends abound on how this rock came into formation, including having been made by two boys playing in mud after a rainstorm, snake beings waging war and carving formations into rocks, and a place where the earth cropped up in grief after a war. It is a beautiful place, and thus a huge draw to Australian tourists, who enjoy hiking up it (for whatever reason). Apparently not content with a mug or a t-shirt, these tourists began stealing their own personalized souvenirs from the rocks. Then, in 2008, reports began circulating of an influx of returned rocks in the mail. The park claims to receive, on average, one package a day containing rocks (one was over 70 pounds), with approximately a quarter of these reporting bad luck associated with the rock. Complaints include family illnesses, death, stomach problems , car accidents, and miscarriages; as one British tourist stated, “Things were good in my life before I took some of the Ayers Rock home with me, but since then my wife has had a stroke, and things have worked out terrible with my children. We’ve had nothing but bad luck.” All such letters are collected by the park in their “Sorry Book” as a warning to future victims of the rock.
4; King Tuts Curse
The ancient Egyptians really took what happened to their dead bodies seriously, as shown by the elaborate attempts to preserve their dead bodies, and the big huge triangular things sitting in the middle of the Sahara desert. Not satisfied with lasting thousands of years, the pharaohs painstakingly assured that no one would mess with their tombs for long by instilling curses on them (i.e. “Cursed be those who disturb the rest of a Pharaoh. They that shall break the seal of this tomb shall meet death by a disease that no doctor can diagnose”—yikes). The opening of Tutankhamen’s tomb in 1922 supposedly unleashed one such curse on the archaeologists working on the dig.
James Henry Breasted reported that after the first opening, he returned home to find a cobra (symbol of Egyptian royalty) in his birdcage, eating his canary. On April 5, 1923, Lord Carnarvon, a member of the expedition, died from blood poisoning and infection due to a mosquito bite knicked with a razor. On May 6, 1922, George J. Gould died of a mysterious fever. Sir Bruce Ingram, given a paperweight of a mummified hand wearing a bracelet with a curse printed on it, reported his house burning down after receipt of the gift. In May 1926, the leader of the expedition, Howard Carter, reported his first sighting of the same type of jackals as Anubis, god of the dead, in his 35 year exploration of Egypt.
5. Tecumseh's Curse
William Henry Harrison (and America) was kind of a jerk when it came to dealing with Native Americans. At the battle of Tippecanoe in 1811, his troops killed the powerful, charismatic Native American leader, Tecumseh. This seemingly innocuous (yeah, it sucks, but it happened for like, a hundred years before that) happening led to one of the creepiest curses in American history, leading to a death sentence for any president inaugurated in a year ending with a zero:
1840—William Henry Harrison is elected on the slogan “Tippecanoe and Tyler Too!” as a war hero. He died after serving only one month as the president from a cold.
1860—Abraham Lincoln survived the five year long Civil War, only to be shot by Lee Harvey Oswald five days after General Robert E. Lee surrendered, on April 14, 1865.
1880—James Garfield was shot by Charles Guiteau, a disgruntled job applicant on July 2, 1881, and died September 19, 1881.
1900—William McKinley was elected for his second term in 1900, and was shot by Leon F. Czolgosz on September 6, 1901.
1920—Warren G. Harding, after a scandal filled presidency, died on August 2, 1923 of a stroke, while on his “Voyage of Understanding”.
1940—Franklin Delano Roosevelt, elected for his third presidential term in 18940, died April 12, 1945 of a cerebral hemorrhage.
1960—John F. Kennedy, the youngest man to ever be elected president, was gunned down on November 22, 1963 by Lee Harvey Oswald (or whatever).
1980—Ronald Reagan, the oldest man and first movie star to ever be elected, survived an attempted assassination on March 30, 1981. He is considered to have broken Tecumseh’s curse—but over 100 years is not so bad, as far as really dependable curses go.
Author: Alexandra Wayson Copyrighted © paranormalhaze.com
Awesome post!!!! (Even though the first one had me LOLing, I have to admit.)
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