What happens when you make a movie about the Antichrist and then everyone involved starts seeing signs of evil everywhere?

In this episode of Cursed...ish, Daniel and Angela kick off Cursed Cinema with The Omen, the 1976 horror classic about Damien, a very creepy child who may or may not be the literal Antichrist.

The movie leaned hard into demonic imagery from the beginning, with 666-themed release dates, ominous posters, satanic marketing, and a campaign practically begging audiences to believe something sinister was happening behind the scenes.

Then the stories started piling up: Gregory Peck’s plane was struck by lightning. So was screenwriter David Seltzer’s. Members of the production narrowly missed deadly plane crashes, survived nearby IRA bombings, and dealt with dangerous animal incidents on set. And then came the tragedy that helped cement the legend. Special effects artist John Richardson, who helped create the film’s famous decapitation scene, later survived a car crash that killed fellow effects artist Liz Moore in an eerily similar way. The accident happened on Friday the 13th, and later retellings added even more suspicious details involving 66.6 and a nearby town called Ommen.

Along the way, we talk The Omen curse, Gregory Peck, Richard Donner, Damien, 666, biblical numerology, lightning strikes, near-death coincidences, cursed movie sets, horror marketing, and the very blurry line between supernatural warning signs and a studio realizing that “the devil doesn’t want us to make this movie” is excellent publicity.

Was The Omen actually cursed, or did one very smart marketing campaign teach everyone to start connecting dots that were never really connected?

Maybe cursed. Maybe not. Actually, this one might just be not cursed.

https://www.whatsleepsbeneath.com/archive/the-omen-still-relevant-at-fifty?

https://catalog.afi.com/Catalog/moviedetails/55833

https://www.britishnewspaperarchive.com/search-newspapers/results?&enddate=1979-12-31&keywords=%23kills+%23lion+%23tiger&startdate=1970-01-01

https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/commons/1975/nov/21/dunsfold-aerodrome-accident

https://www.worldbirdstrike.com/images/Resources/IBSC_Documents_Presentations/Warsaw/IBSC26_WPSA1.pdf

https://catalog.afi.com/Film/55833-THE-OMEN

https://www.tcm.com/articles/021416/the-omen-1976

https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/lightning-strikes-decapitations-curse-original-110000012.html

Questions, comments, or your own accursed tales to share? Send us a hex at uhoh@cursedish.com.

The hosts of Cursed...ish are not responsible for any misfortunes that may befall you while listening to this podcast. By listening to Cursed...ish, you assume all risk of bad luck, ill omens, and unexplained catastrophes.

*Terms and conditions may be upheld by unknown forces.

Before Halloween was spooky season, there was Samhain.

In this episode of Cursed...ish, Angela and Daniel dig into the ancient Celtic festival of Samhain, the pagan celebration marking the end of the harvest, the beginning of winter, and a time when the veil between the living and the dead was believed to be at its thinnest.

And the deeper we go, the more familiar everything starts to look. Massive bonfires light up the darkness. People disguise themselves from wandering spirits. Food is left out to appease supernatural visitors. Glowing gourds with carved faces ward off evil. People go door to door asking for treats, and those who refuse might find themselves on the receiving end of a trick.

Somehow, thousands of years later, we are still doing basically the same thing every October. Along the way, we talk pagan holidays, Druids, sacred fires, the Wheel of the Year, ancient Irish folklore, divination, soul cakes, black cats, fae, ancestor worship, All Hallows’ Eve, and how Christianity helped transform Samhain traditions into the Halloween we know today. Is Halloween secretly one enormous ancient pagan holdover?

Maybe cursed. Maybe not. Maybe we’re all just a bunch of pagans with better candy.

Questions, comments, or your own accursed tales to share? Send us a hex at uhoh@cursedish.com.

The hosts of Cursed...ish are not responsible for any misfortunes that may befall you while listening to this podcast. By listening to Cursed...ish, you assume all risk of bad luck, ill omens, and unexplained catastrophes.

*Terms and conditions may be upheld by unknown forces.

What happens when you disturb a body that has been frozen in the Alps for more than 5,000 years?

In this episode of Cursed...ish, Daniel and Angela dig into the strange life, violent death, and alleged Curse of Ötzi the Iceman, one of the oldest and best-preserved human mummies ever discovered.

Found by hikers in the Ötztal Alps in 1991, Ötzi turned out to be a Copper Age man who died more than five millennia ago. His clothing, tools, tattoos, last meal, injuries, and even the contents of his stomach have given researchers an extraordinary glimpse into prehistoric life. They also revealed something much darker: Ötzi appears to have died violently, with an arrowhead lodged in his shoulder and evidence of a brutal fight shortly before his death.

Then the people connected to his discovery started dying.

A pathologist killed in a car crash. A mountain guide lost in an avalanche. A journalist dead from a brain tumor. One of the hikers who discovered Ötzi killed in a freak mountain accident, followed shortly afterward by the death of the man who recovered his body. Before long, tabloids were asking whether disturbing the Iceman had unleashed a curse.

Along the way, we talk ancient murder, spontaneous mummies, Copper Age survival, Ötzi’s tattoos, prehistoric medicine, frozen corpses, archaeological ethics, selection bias, and whether putting someone’s 5,300-year-old body on display for hundreds of thousands of strangers might be asking for a little supernatural retaliation.

Maybe Ötzi was cursed. Maybe the pattern is coincidence. Maybe some things are better left buried under the ice.

Maybe cursed. Maybe not.

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/worlds-oldest-murder-mystery-was-430000-years-in-the-making

https://blog.familytreedna.com/otzi-the-iceman-dna/

https://exarc.net/issue-2023-2/at/reconstructing-otzis-shoes

https://www.thevintagenews.com/2017/12/12/otzi-the-iceman-shoes/

https://english.radio.cz/ice-man-weareth-comfy-shoes-8045052

https://www.iceman.it/en/oetzi/the-discovery

https://www.dw.com/en/curse-of-the-iceman-linked-to-scientists-death/a-1765550

https://www.tsemrinpoche.com/tsem-tulku-rinpoche/paranormal/creatures-and-monsters/the-curse-of-otzi-the-iceman.html

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2005/apr/20/science.italy

https://www.taipeitimes.com/News/world/archives/2005/11/05/2003278839

https://www.theguardian.com/education/mortarboard/2007/sep/03/theicemancometh

https://www.the-independent.com/news/world/europe/curse-of-the-oetzi-the-iceman-strikes-again-324955.html

https://www.ripleys.com/stories/the-curse-of-otzi-the-iceman

https://pubs.rsna.org/doi/10.1148/radiol.2263020338

https://lethbridgenewsnow.com/2021/10/08/the-curse-of-otzi-the-iceman/

Questions, comments, or your own accursed tales to share? Send us a hex at uhoh@cursedish.com.

The hosts of Cursed...ish are not responsible for any misfortunes that may befall you while listening to this podcast. By listening to Cursed...ish, you assume all risk of bad luck, ill omens, and unexplained catastrophes.

*Terms and conditions may be upheld by unknown forces.

Some people seem to live charmed lives.

Robert Todd Lincoln did not.

In this episode of Cursed...ish, Angela and Daniel dig into the strangely cursed life of Abraham Lincoln’s eldest son, the only one of the Lincoln children to survive into adulthood, and a man who somehow found himself repeatedly brushing up against presidential assassination.

Robert endured the deaths of three brothers, the murder of his father, and a lifetime spent in the shadow of one of the most famous men in American history. Then things got even stranger. He was nearby when Abraham Lincoln was assassinated, just feet away when President James Garfield was shot, and arrived in Buffalo on the same day President William McKinley was attacked.

Along the way, we talk the Lincoln family, Mary Todd Lincoln, the Civil War, presidential assassinations, grief, historical reputation, political life, terrible coincidence, and what it means to spend your whole life wondering whether misfortune is simply following you around.

Was Robert T. Lincoln actually cursed, or was he just born into exactly the wrong family, at exactly the wrong time, with a front-row seat to some of the darkest moments in American history?

Maybe cursed. Maybe not.

Questions, comments, or your own accursed tales to share? Send us a hex at uhoh@cursedish.com.

The hosts of Cursed...ish are not responsible for any misfortunes that may befall you while listening to this podcast. By listening to Cursed...ish, you assume all risk of bad luck, ill omens, and unexplained catastrophes.

*Terms and conditions may be upheld by unknown forces.

Some cursed objects are ancient, mysterious, and covered in centuries of folklore.

And some are a softball-sized hunk of plutonium that very smart people kept poking at until it tried to kill everyone in the room.

In this episode of Cursed...ish, Daniel and Angela dig into the terrifying story of the Demon Core, the radioactive plutonium core created during the Manhattan Project and later involved in two deadly criticality accidents at Los Alamos.

Originally known as Rufus, the Demon Core was meant to be used in a third atomic bomb after Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Instead, after Japan surrendered, scientists kept it for research, which is a polite way of saying they decided to keep testing one of the most dangerous objects on Earth with deeply questionable workplace safety protocols.

We talk Harry Daghlian, Louis Slotin, blue flashes of radiation, “tickling the dragon’s tail,” tungsten carbide bricks, beryllium reflectors, the infamous screwdriver experiment, acute radiation sickness, Los Alamos, Project Y, nuclear hubris, and why maybe, just maybe, nobody should ever be that casual around plutonium.

Was the Demon Core actually cursed, or was it the inevitable result of brilliant people becoming way too comfortable with forces no human being should treat like a desk toy?

Maybe it was science. Maybe it was hubris. Maybe the real curse was building the apocalypse and then thinking, “Let’s see what else this thing can do.”

Maybe cursed. Maybe not.

https://nuclear-news.net/2022/12/12/a-the-demon-core-the-14-pound-plutonium-sphere-that-killed-two-scientists/

https://thedebrief.org/tickling-a-dragons-tail-the-physicist-who-tangled-with-the-demon-core-and-lost/

https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/manhattan-project-scientists-harry-daghlian.htm

https://losalamoshistory.org/the-slotin-accident-inside-the-archives/

https://home.nps.gov/people/manhattan-project-scientists-louis-alexander-slotin.htm

https://losalamoshistory.org/the-slotin-accident-inside-the-archives/

https://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2013/08/16/the-third-cores-revenge/

http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2024/ph241/granowitz2/

Questions, comments, or your own accursed tales to share? Send us a hex at uhoh@cursedish.com.

The hosts of Cursed...ish are not responsible for any misfortunes that may befall you while listening to this podcast. By listening to Cursed...ish, you assume all risk of bad luck, ill omens, and unexplained catastrophes.

*Terms and conditions may be upheld by unknown forces.

What do you do when the person you're convinced is the one for you is about to marry someone else?

If you are Degina, a woman living in ancient Macedon, you carve a curse into lead, roll it up, and place it in a grave so the dead can carry your romantic crisis to the underworld.

In this episode of Cursed...ish, Angela and Daniel dig into the Pella Curse Tablet, an ancient Greek binding spell found in Pella, the former capital of Macedon. The tablet appears to capture one woman’s attempt to stop Dionysophon from marrying Thetima and make sure he ends up with her instead.

Along the way, we talk ancient curse tablets, love spells, binding magic, graveyard delivery systems, Daimones, Doric Greek, translation drama, judicial curses, erotic attraction spells, and why humanity has apparently always been jealous, dramatic, and deeply committed to putting bad decisions in writing.

Was the Pella Curse Tablet real magic, a desperate love curse, or just the ancient Macedonian version of a burn book?

Maybe Dionysophon was cursed. Maybe Thetima was cursed. Maybe Degina was just fully unwell.

Maybe cursed. Maybe not.

Questions, comments, or your own accursed tales to share? Send us a hex at uhoh@cursedish.com.

The hosts of Cursed...ish are not responsible for any misfortunes that may befall you while listening to this podcast. By listening to Cursed...ish, you assume all risk of bad luck, ill omens, and unexplained catastrophes.

*Terms and conditions may be upheld by unknown forces.

Green is the color of nature, luck, life, and fresh starts.

But it's also the color of poison, decay, jealousy, sickness, toxic sludge, unlucky race cars, suspicious theater costumes, and one beautifully-deadly pigment some people decided to put absolutely everywhere.

In this episode of Cursed...ish, Daniel and Angela embark on a new technicolor cursed journey with Cursed Colors: Green, exploring why green has been treated as eerie, unlucky, dangerous, and maybe just a little bit cursed throughout history.

From Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Shakespeare’s green-eyed monster, fae folklore, and theater superstitions to Carl Wilhelm Scheele’s vivid arsenic-based pigment, we follow green from myth and symbolism into the very real poison hiding in Victorian wallpaper, artificial flowers, clothing, books, cosmetics, toys, and more.

Along the way, we talk Scheele’s Green, poisoned wallpaper, Matilda Scheuer, William Morris, Queen Victoria, the Poison Book Project, Oscar Wilde’s green carnation, and why humans keep looking at beautiful dangerous things and asking, “Can we put this everywhere?”

Maybe green is life. Maybe green is death. Maybe green is mold, magic, jealousy, and wallpaper that can quietly gas you in your own home. Maybe cursed. Maybe not.

https://hyperallergic.com/death-by-wallpaper-alluring-arsenic-colors-poisoned-the-victorian-age/

https://www.slam.org/blog/arsenic-in-victorian-wallpaper/

https://www.jalopnik.com/how-the-color-green-became-a-deadly-bad-luck-superstiti-1763008917/

https://vaulteditions.com/blogs/news/poisoned-pages-the-lethal-legacy-of-19th-century-book-design

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3179678/

https://britishfairies.wordpress.com/2021/05/30/poor-little-greenie-faeries-and-little-green-men/

Questions, comments, or your own accursed tales to share? Send us a hex at uhoh@cursedish.com.

The hosts of Cursed...ish are not responsible for any misfortunes that may befall you while listening to this podcast. By listening to Cursed...ish, you assume all risk of bad luck, ill omens, and unexplained catastrophes.

*Terms and conditions may be upheld by unknown forces.

Is it the Berenstein Bears or the Berenstain Bears? Did the Monopoly Man have a monocle? Was there ever a cornucopia in the Fruit of the Loom logo?

And, most importantly, has reality always been this wrong?

In this episode of Cursed...ish, Angela and Daniel take a hard left into the strange, brain-breaking world of the Mandela Effect, the phenomenon where large groups of people collectively remember something that apparently never happened. From Jif versus Jiffy, Looney Tunes, Curious George’s missing tail, Febreze, Skechers, Pikachu, and the infamous Fruit of the Loom cornucopia, we dig into the pop culture memories that make people wonder whether they misremembered, swapped timelines, or accidentally got patched into the wrong universe.

Along the way, we talk about paranormal researcher Fiona Broome, the origin of the term Mandela Effect, false memories, confabulation, shared childhood culture, Reddit rabbit holes, the Large Hadron Collider, CERN conspiracy theories, and why the human brain is so confident even when it is absolutely making things up.

Is the Mandela Effect proof of alternate realities, time travel, parallel timelines, or experiments with the fabric of reality? Or are we all just walking around with deeply unreliable brains and a shocking amount of confidence?

Maybe it is science. Maybe it is memory. Maybe it is CERN. Maybe we were all just cursed into oblivion by a missing underwear cornucopia.

Questions, comments, or your own accursed tales to share? Send us a hex at uhoh@cursedish.com.

The hosts of Cursed...ish are not responsible for any misfortunes that may befall you while listening to this podcast. By listening to Cursed...ish, you assume all risk of bad luck, ill omens, and unexplained catastrophes.

*Terms and conditions may be upheld by unknown forces.