Beyond Coincidence (21 page)

R
EQUIEM FROM A
B
LACKBIRD

Roy Smith's brother died in 1993. He had always had a keen interest in birds and in the time before his death he used to attract a particular blackbird into his back garden to feed from his hand. The day of his burial was marked by heavy, almost torrential rain. It was dramatically moving anyway, but there was a sweeter poignancy in store.

“We were all standing around the grave under umbrellas as the vicar read the dedication,” says Smith, “when we were suddenly all aware of the sweetest birdsong. On the roof of a nearby gardener's building was a blackbird singing its heart out with a continuous, melodious song, drenched in the downpour. We were all mesmerized.”

It was so rare to see a bird out in such weather, particularly singing as this one was singing, that the vicar declared he no longer believed in coincidence. “For me,” said Smith, “It was the hand of God bringing comfort to us all in our grief.”

T
IME
, G
ENTLEMEN

Pope Paul VI's alarm clock went off at 9:40 p.m. on August 6, 1978, but the pope didn't wake up. In fact he died at that precise moment. Even stranger, the alarm was actually set for six the following morning.

A similar event is said to have happened when King Louis XIV of France died at 7:45 a.m. on September 1, 1715, though in this case an ornate clock belonging to him is supposed to have stopped. Considering Louis XIV probably owned ten thousand ornate clocks, maybe this wasn't so remarkable.

C
UNNING
S
TUNT

The Danish tenor Lauritz Melchior was famous for his heroic Wagnerian roles with the New York City Metropolitan Opera, but the most romantic scene of his life took place when he was a student living in a small pension in Munich. He was sitting in the garden learning a part for an opera. As he sang the words, “Come to me, my love, on the wings of light,” a female parachutist landed at his feet. It was the Bavarian actress Maria Hacker, who was performing a stunt for a movie thriller. They were married in 1925. “I thought that she came to me from heaven,” said Melchior.

7

JINXES AND CURSES

Psychologist Professor Christopher French heads the Anomalistic Psychology Research Unit at Goldsmiths College in London. Its objective is to explore the facts behind claims of parapsychological phenomena—from ESP to alien abduction.

Professor French is skeptical that such claims have any foundation in scientific reality. He extends that skepticism to the realm of jinxes and curses—often cited as the cause of protracted runs of bad luck.

Of the Superman curse, outlined earlier in this book, he dismisses the catalog of misfortune that has befallen many people associated with the story of the Man of Steel as pure coincidence. The original creators of the Superman story sold the rights for a pittance, and many of the stars of the television and film adaptations have suffered tragic accidents and illnesses—Christopher Reeve most prominent among them. But Professor French points out that a great many people have done very well out of the whole Man of Steel business. “I'd be very happy to be given the rights of the Superman story,” he says. “I'll take my chances with the curse.”

He's equally dismissive of the jinx that is said to plague those who desecrate the tombs of the pharaohs.

It is reported, for example, that in the 1890s Professor S. Resden opened an Egyptian tomb that bore the inscription: “Whosover desecrates the tomb of Prince Sennar will be overtaken by the sands and destroyed.” Resden knew he was doomed, it was said. He left Egypt by ship and died on board, a victim of suffocation, from no discernible cause. Small amounts of sand were said to have been found clutched in his hands.

Professor French believes most such stories of mysterious premature deaths are nonsense. But those less skeptical than him remain open minded about what might lie behind such coincidences. So what supernatural force, curse, jinx, or darned bad luck could account for the following tales of disasters, death, and multiple lightning strikes?

T
HE
S
PORTS
I
LLUSTRATED
C
OVER
C
URSE

Appearing on the front cover of
Sports Illustrated
ought to have been a blessing, but for hundreds of sports stars it became a curse.

The list of season-ending injuries, fatal car crashes, family tragedies, divorces, batting slumps, and losing streaks suffered by individuals and teams featured on the cover is long and puzzling.

The curse began back in 1954 when, a week after appearing on the cover of
Sports Illustrated,
Major League Baseball player Eddie Mathews suffered a hand injury that forced him to sit out seven games. It wasn't long before sporting professionals, sports journalists, and readers were making more connections between incidents of misfortune and appearances on the front cover of the magazine. Other notable cover coincidences include:

• January 31, 1955—In the week her picture appeared on the front cover, skier Jill Kinmont struck a tree during a practice run and was paralyzed from the neck down.

• May 26, 1958—
Sport Illustrated
's 1958 Indianapolis 500 preview issue featured Pat O'Connor, who was killed in a fifteen-car pileup during the first lap of the race.

• February 13, 1961—Laurence Owen was billed as “America's Most Exciting Girl Skater.” Two days after appearing on the cover, Owen and the rest of the United States figure skating team died in a plane crash.

• December 14, 1970—The University of Texas, 10–0 and enjoying a thirty-game winning streak, fumbled nine times in its next game, sustaining a 24–11 loss to Notre Dame in the Cotton Bowl.

• September 4, 1989—Major League Baseball Commissioner Bart Giamatti died of a heart attack the week after he was quoted on the cover of
Sports Illustrated.

• June 5, 1995—Three days after his cover appearance, San Francisco Giants third baseman Matt Williams, the National League leader in home runs, fouled a pitch off his right foot, breaking it, sidelining him for nearly three months.

Sports Illustrated
conducted its own investigation into the alleged curse and found that in 2,456 editions there had been 913 examples of “jinxes” in the form of a substantial misfortune or decline in performance involving an athlete featured on the cover. That represented a 37.2 percent rate of misfortune for cover stars. The investigation also revealed that the jinx affected some kinds of sportspeople more than others. Golfers, for example, were “jinxed” almost 70 percent of the time. Tennis players suffered misfortune in 50 percent of cases. But boxers seem comparatively immune, suffering bad luck after a mere 16 percent of appearances on the front cover of the magazine.

T
HE
C
URSE OF THE
B
AMBINO

In 1918 the Boston Red Sox became the most successful baseball team of all time when they won their fifth World Series. One of the stars of the team was a young pitcher by the name of George Herman Ruth—also know as Babe Ruth, or The Bambino.

But two years later, on January 3, 1920, Red Sox owner Harry Frazee made what appears to have been a catastrophic mistake. He sold Ruth to the New York Yankees for $125,000 in cash and a $300,000 loan, so he could finance a play called
No, No, Nanette.

The Yankees, who had never won a World Championship before acquiring Ruth, went on to win twenty-six, becoming one of the greatest success stories in the history of sport. Meanwhile, the Boston Red Sox appeared in only four World Series after 1918, losing each one in game seven. Many consider Boston's poor performances after the departure of Babe Ruth to be attributable to “The Curse of the Bambino.”

The story has a happy ending. In 2004, after eighty-six years in the wilderness, the Boston Red Sox finally became World Series Champions again, beating the St. Louis Cardinals. The god of baseball, it seems, had finally lifted the curse.

T
HE
M
UMMY'S
C
URSE

The Fifth Earl of Carnarvon and archaeologist Howard Carter discovered the tomb of the boy Pharaoh Tutankhamun on November 26, 1923, after years of searching.

Lord Carnarvon did not have long to enjoy his fame. In fact he didn't live long enough to even set eyes on the fabulous treasures hidden within the tomb. Just four months after finding the hidden entrance, he died from blood poisoning caused by an infected mosquito bite. He was fifty-three.

It is said that at the time of his death, lights went out all over Cairo. The local power company could not explain it. Some reports also claim that at precisely the same moment, Lord Carnarvon's dog, back in England, suddenly howled and dropped down dead.

Carnarvon's death came just a couple of weeks after a public warning by novelist Marie Corelli that there would be dire consequences for anyone who entered the sealed tomb. Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes and a believer in the occult, announced that Carnarvon's death could have been the result of a “Pharaoh's curse.”

One newspaper even printed a curse supposed to have been written in hieroglyphs at the entrance of the tomb, the translation being:

They who enter this sacred tomb shall swift be visited by wings of death.

A complete fiction as it turned out, though one inscription found within the tomb did say:

It is I who hinder the sand from choking the secret chamber. I am for the protection of the deceased.

However, an imaginative reporter added:

… and I will kill all those who cross this threshold into the sacred precincts of the Royal King who lives forever.

Journalists determined to fuel the story of the Mummy's Curse reported other deaths attributed to the desecration of the pharaoh's tomb.

Five months after the death of Lord Carnarvon, his younger brother died suddenly. Another “casualty” was the pet canary of the tomb's discoverer, Howard Carter. The bird was apparently swallowed by a cobra on the day the tomb was opened. It was pointed out that the cobra was a traditional symbol of the pharaoh's power.

According to one list, of the twenty-six individuals present at the official opening of the tomb, six had died within a decade. However, many of the key individuals associated with the discovery and work on the tomb lived to a ripe old age.

As discoverer of the tomb, Howard Carter might have been considered a prime target for the curse. He had spent nearly a decade working inside it. But Carter didn't die until March 1939, just short of his sixty-fifth birthday and nearly seventeen years after first entering the tomb.

Even when some of the treasures of Tutankhamun went on tour overseas in the 1970s, some people still believed the curse might be at work. In September 1979, security guard George LaBrash had a stroke while watching over the mask of Tutankhamun at a San Francisco museum. He sued the city authorities for disability pay, claiming that the stroke was a job-related injury caused by a curse placed on anyone associated with the desecration of the tomb. The judge dismissed the claim.

T
HE
C
URSE OF
P
APA
D
OC

Was retired U.S. Marine Corps colonel Robert Debs Heinl the victim of a voodoo curse?

From 1958 to 1963 Heinl served on Haiti as chief of the U.S. naval mission, while his wife, Nancy, studied the voodoo religion. Later, back in the United States, they began writing
Written in Blood—The Story of the Haitian People,
a history of the island. The book was widely expected to be openly critical of the ruling dynasty of François “Papa Doc” Duvalier. Some time later, after the death of Papa Doc, the Heinls learned from a newspaper published by Haitian exiles that a curse had been placed on the book by Papa Doc's widow, Simone.

Initial amusement turned to concern when a series of mishaps began to befall the book. First, the manuscript was lost on the way to the publishers. The Heinls prepared another copy and sent it off for binding and stitching, but the machine promptly broke down. A
Washington Post
reporter sent to interview the authors was struck down with acute appendicitis. Then Colonel Heinl fell through a stage when he was delivering a speech, injuring a leg. While walking near his home he was attacked and severely bitten by a dog.

On May 5, 1979, the Heinls were on holiday on St. Barthelemy Island near Haiti when the colonel dropped dead from a heart attack. His widow Nancy is reported as saying, “There is a belief that the closer you get to Haiti the more powerful the magic becomes.”

O
N THE
R
OCKS

A very powerful curse seems to hang over the Hawaiian volcano Mauna Loa.

Visitors to the beautiful island are warned by locals that the removal of volcanic rocks is likely to anger the goddess of the volcano, Pele, who is said to appear to warn of imminent eruptions. But it seems that some people simply won't be told.

During the summer of 1977 airline vice president Ralph Loffert of Buffalo, New York, his wife, and four children visited the volcano. Ignoring advice, they decided to take home a number of rocks as souvenirs.

Shortly after they returned home, Mauna Loa erupted. Within a few months one of the Loffert boys, Todd, developed appendicitis, had knee surgery, and broke his wrist. Another son, Mark, sprained an ankle and broke his arm; another son, Dan, caught an eye infection and had to wear glasses; and the daughter, Rebecca, lost two front teeth in a fall. In July 1978 the Lofferts sent the stones to a friend in Hawaii who was asked to return them to the volcano. But the disasters continued. Mark hurt his knee, Rebecca broke three more teeth, Dan fractured a bone in his hand and Todd dislocated an elbow and fractured his wrist again. Mark then confessed that he still had three stones. They were returned and the run of bad luck ended.