The Book of the Bizarre: Freaky Facts and Strange Stories (69 page)

On October 6, 1997, the London
Daily Mirror
reported the football club in Middleborough had requested the services of psychic Uri Geller to reverse a Gypsy curse. The football club's grounds had been built on a traditional Gypsy camp, and the retaliation was simple: a ritual curse. The club reportedly suffered from continuous bad luck. It is unknown if the reversal worked.

THE CURSE OF JAMES DEAN'S PORSCHE

Disaster may be ahead for anyone connected with James Dean's “death car.” In 1955, Dean smashed his red Porsche into another car and was killed. The wreckage was bought by George Barris, a friend of Dean's (and the man who customized cars like the Munster's coffinmobile for Hollywood). Barris immediately noticed weird things happening with the car.

First, while being unloaded from the truck that delivered it to Barris, the car slipped and broke a mechanic's legs. Barris then put the car's engine into a race car. The race car crashed in a race, killing the driver. A second car from the same race was equipped with the Porsche's drive shaft; it overturned and injured its driver.

Meanwhile, the shell of the Porsche was being used in a highway-safety display in San Francisco. It fell off its pedestal and broke a teenager's hip. Later, a truck carrying the display to another demonstration was involved in an accident. “The truck driver,” says one account, “was thrown out of the cab of the truck and killed when the Porsche shell rolled off the back of the truck and crushed him.”

In 1960, the Porsche finally vanished—while on a train en route to Los Angeles.

THE PRESIDENTIAL DEATH CYCLE

Between 1840 and 1960, every U.S. president elected in a year ending in zero either died in office of natural causes or was assassinated. By contrast, since 1840, of the twenty-nine presidents who were
not
elected in years ending with a zero, only one has died in office and not one has been assassinated.

The first president to die in office was William Henry Harrison, elected in 1840. Other victims were Abraham Lincoln, elected in 1860 and fatally shot in 1865; James Garfield, elected in 1880 and assassinated in 1881; William McKinley, reelected in 1900 and fatally shot in 1901; Franklin D. Roosevelt, elected for the third time in 1940 and died in 1945; and John F. Kennedy, elected in 1960 and assassinated in 1963.

Ronald Reagan, elected in 1980, was nearly the eighth victim; he was shot and badly wounded by John Hinckley in 1983. Astrologers insist that Reagan was exempted from the “curse” because 1980 included an astrological aberration: Jupiter and Saturn met in an air sign, Libra. They say whether or not the curse is actually over remains to be seen. The next potential victim will be the president elected in 2020.

THE CURSE OF THE INCAN MUMMY

Three Andean mummies were discovered by an archaeologist/mountaineer in October 1995. They had been undisturbed in snow at the top of 20,000-foot Mount Ampato, in southern Peru, for at least 500 years. Then an earthquake exposed them. One of the mummies was the remains of a young woman, referred to by local shamans as Juanita. She had apparently been sacrificed to Incan gods.

By disturbing the remains, the authorities are said to have brought bad luck to the Peruvian region. Within a year of the discovery, a Peruvian commercial jet crashed and killed 123 people near the discovery site. Then thirtyfive people were electrocuted when a high-tension cable fell on a crowd celebrating the founding of the city of Arequipa (which also is near the discovery site).

Local shamans said these deadly disasters were the acts of the angered ice princess. To break the curse, the shamans gathered in the city of Arequipa in August 1996 and chanted: “Juanita, calm your ire. Do not continue to damn innocent people who have done nothing to you.” Apparently, it worked—no deadly accidents have been reported in the region since 1996.

THE CURSE OF TOSCA

Productions of Giacomo Puccini's opera
Tosca
have been plagued with problems at least as far back as the 1920s, when, during a production at the Metropolitan Opera, the prop knife with which the heroine Tosca murders the villain Scarpia at the end of act II failed to retract. Singer Antonio Scotti was stabbed. In 1965, at Covent Gardens, Maria Callas's hair caught fire while she was singing the title role. The flames had to be put out by a quick-thinking Tito Gobbi, who was playing Scarpia. Then, in a production in Rome that same year, Gianni Raimondi's face was scorched during the firingsquad scene in act III. In 1993, Elisabeth Knighton Printy, in the scene in which Tosca commits suicide by leaping from a building, jumped off the wrong side of the stage in St. Paul, Minnesota, and plunged more than thirty feet to the ground, breaking both her legs.

The last reported incident was in 1995, when Fabio Armitliatu, starring in a Roman production, was hit in the leg by debris from blanks fired in the act III execution scene. He was taken off the stage on a stretcher. Two weeks later, he returned to the stage and fell and broke his other leg in two places while standing in the wings at the end of the first act.

THE
SPORTS ILLUSTRATED
JINX