He Knew How to Write a Good Curse

The curse that William Shakespeare had engraved on his tomb ("Good frend for Jesus sake forebeare,/ To digg the dust encloased heare./ Bleste be y^e man y^t spares thes stones,/ And curst be he y^t moves my bones.") actually worked.

Philip Schwyzer, a senior lecturer at Exeter University, said: "Shakespeare had an unusual obsession with burial and a fear of exhumation. The stern inscription on the slab has been at least partially responsible for the fact that there have been no successful projects to open the grave."

Anxiety about the mistreatment or exhumation of corpses is found in at least 16 of his 37 plays, with this concern often being more pronounced than the fear of death itself. [Link]

[Photo credit: Shakespeare's cursed grave by James Macdonald]

Sounds Like My Last Birthday Party

A few headstones were toppled in a Yonkers, N. Y., cemetery Tuesday night. It was the objects left behind by the vandals—including an animal heart—that made the crime as nonsensical as it was senseless.

The items left among the headstones included more than a dozen unlit black candles, black handkerchiefs and a photograph of an unidentified man wearing a suit and smiling. The animal heart had pins in it.

Nearby, police found a partially buried statue of a rooster, wrapped in a bandanna with a pair of underwear around its neck. [Link]

And I thought that leaving a rooster statue half buried in a cemetery wrapped in a bandanna with a pair of underwear around its neck was a tradition only in my family.

Update: It appears that this was a Palo Mayombe hex ceremony, and that the smiling man in the photograph was the target of a curse. He can rest easy, though: it only works if you use a live rooster.

Damn Those Figs!

Martin Scorsese grew up in Manhattan, but his grandparents lived on Staten Island. In his 1974 documentary Italianamerican, he interviewed his mother about her parents, Martin and Domenica Cappa.

"I remember one time we had a fig tree. (My father) used to love fig trees, but my mother couldn't stand them. In the winter time you had to cover them very, very well, otherwise they froze. One winter when he did climb up -- he was getting old -- my father fell off the ladder and he got hurt, and my mother was so angry. She says to him, 'I hope those fig trees die, I hope they never bloom again!' she said, and then, of course, my mother became ill. And the next winter she passed away and the trees never bloomed anymore. It was like she took them with her, and that was that." [Link]

A reporter from the Staten Island Advance went to the Cappa home to see if the curse still held. "I've tried three times to plant a fig tree here," the current owner said, "I've given up on that. It won't take."

Not Yet a Dead Letter

Viktor Chumakov's mission in life is to save the seventh letter of the Russian alphabet from extinction and, by doing so, preserve the traditional spellings of some 2,500 Russian surnames (including Khrushchyov and Gorbachyov).

The letter "ё" (pronounced "yo") first appeared in 1795, but fell on hard times when printers began dropping the dots to save a few kopeks. The letter was also hanging out in the wrong neighborhoods.

Part of the reason for the demise of the letter 'ё' could be because of its unsavory associations with Russian 'mat' -- the colorful language within a language that constitutes Russian swear words. Very few words begin with 'ё' in Russian, and most of the ones that do would make a sailor blush.

But Chumakov says he is not deterred by the letter's reputation -- he has written three books on the history of the 'ё' and a dictionary of words that contain the letter. To date, there are 12,500 ordinary words and 2,500 surnames. And he didn't include a single curse. [Link]

Those two little dots do make a difference. Without them, a Russian bride might be given a "solityor" (tapeworm) instead of a "soliter" (diamond).

Reversing Murphy's Curse

If your surname is Cohan, Chance, Steinfeldt, Tinker, Howard, Sheckard, Evers, Moran, Williams or Murphy, you can help the Chicago Cubs win the World Series. It all started in 1908, just after the Cubs won their last Series.

The night after the big win, Broadway legend George Cohan hosted a celebratory dinner at Rector's Restaurant for the victorious players. Conspicuously absent from the guest list was Cubs President Charles W. Murphy. Murphy was met with considerable criticism for his handling of World Series tickets and poor seat availability for the fans and subsequently was not invited to the dinner.

Harry Caray's Restaurant wants to go back in time and "reverse the curse" by recreating the guest list—and including a Murphy.

The restaurant believes it's time to forgive Mr. Murphy and invite him back to the table. On the night of the 9th Annual Worldwide Toast to Harry Caray, his namesake restaurant will hold a reenactment of the 1908 dinner, only this time Murphy will be there. [Link]

An Illuminating Tombstone

P. Milton Lupton's headstone says that he is "not dead but sleepeth." The question is, does he sleep with a night-light?

For many years, legend has indicated that a certain tombstone along Cedar Creek Grade is somehow possessed by powers that cause it to glow when approached by cars at night.

Theories about the alleged phenomenon in the St. Paul’s Lutheran Church cemetery have ranged from the type of materials the stone contains to some slightly less scientific theories — such as ghosts and curses.

However, a trip to the cemetery on a recent evening produced no evidence of any particular reflective or glowing properties, despite an experiment that aimed several different angles of low- and high-beam car headlights at the gravestone. [Link]

This Curse Is a Blessing

Archaeologists working in Leicester, England, have unearthed a curse dating from the second or third century AD, inscribed on a sheet of lead.

It has been translated by a specialist at Oxford University, and reads: "To the god Maglus, I give the wrongdoer who stole the cloak of Servandus. Silvester, Riomandus (etc.) ... that he destroy him before the ninth day, the person who stole the cloak of Servandus…"

Then follows a list of the names of 18 or 19 suspects. What happened to them is not recorded.

According to Richard Buckley of the University of Leicester Archaeological Services, this "curse tablet" is one of the few artifacts or documents found that identify Leicester residents of the era.

"The curse is a remarkable discovery, and at a stroke, dramatically increases the number of personal names known from Roman Leicester.

"So far, we have the soldier, Marcus Ulpius Novantico, from a military discharge certificate of AD106, 'Verecunda' and Lucius' from a graffito on a piece of pottery and 'Primus' who inscribed his name on a tile he had made." [Link]

Digging Up Il Duce

A cheese factory worker in Italy wants to exhume his grandfather to verify the cause of his death. This wouldn't be international news had Guido Mussolini's grandfather himself been a cheese factory worker and not a notorious Fascist dictator.

A keen amateur historian, Mr Mussolini has been obsessed by his grandfather's fate for years. He has assembled a committee of a dozen historians and lawyers to try to shed some light on it. "I'm not looking for anything, not for revenge, not for money nor anything else," he said. "I just want someone to tell me the forename and surname of the person who killed him in such an ignoble way when they were supposed to hand him over alive to the Americans. Before I die I want to know who I must curse." [Link]

Coincidentally, that's why I started researching my family's history: to find out who I must curse.