Real-Life X-Files (11 page)

1941: Daughter, Rosemary, is institutionalized due to retardation and the effects of an unsuccessful lobotomy.

1944: Son, Joseph Jr., dies in airplane explosion in World War II.

1948: Daughter, Kathleen, dies in plane crash in France.

1963 (August 9): Grandchild, Patrick, (son of President John F. and Jacqueline Kennedy) dies after premature birth.

1963 (November 22): Son, President John F., is assassinated.

1964: Son, Edward, is injured in plane crash that kills an aide.

1968: Son, Robert F., is assassinated while campaigning for Democratic presidential nomination.

1969: Son, Edward, narrowly escapes death when car plunges off bridge on Chappaquiddick Island, killing passenger.

1973: Grandson, Joe (son of Robert and Ethel), overturns a Jeep, paralyzing a passenger.

1973: Grandson, Edward M. Kennedy Jr., has leg amputated due to cancer.

1984: Grandson, David (son of Robert and Ethel), dies of drug overdose.

1991: Grandson, William Kennedy Smith (son of Jean Ann Kennedy), is charged with rape but acquitted in trial.

1994: Daughter –in –law, Jacqueline, dies of cancer.

1997: Grandson, Michael (son of Robert and Ethel), is killed in “ski football” accident.

And this is only a partial list. Senator Edward Kennedy’s son Patrick sought treatment for drug addiction in 1985, and Michael Kennedy, before his fatal accident, was disgraced due to an alleged affair with a fourteen – year –old baby sitter (Davis 1984; Thomas 1998; Anthony 1999; Salkin 1999; Kelly and Walsh 1999).

Certainly the list is as long as it is filled with tragedy. But is it evidence of a curse? What exactly is meant by the term?

Curses: Foiled Again

Actually a “curse”—also known as a “hex” or “jinx”—is an alleged paranormal assault that can supposedly result in physical or mental injury or illness—even death. Known to New Age mystics as a“psychic attack” (Guiley 1991), it is an ancient concept said to have either human direction (as from a sorcerer) or a supernatural one (such as by angry gods, demonic spirits, or the like). As an example of the first, in the Old Testament when Noah became displeased by his son Ham, he placed a curse on him (Genesis 9:21 –27), and as a supernatural example, Jehovah dealt with an intransigent pharaoh by visiting upon him ten plagues (Exodus 7 –12).

Various occurrences could spark belief in the existence of psychic attacks. For example, although the plagues on pharaoh are not mentioned in any source other than the Bible (Asimov 1968), and some see the account as pure allegory (Graham 1979), such phenomena can occur naturally. (Proliferations of locusts and frogs, for instance, are not unknown, and the water turning to “blood” could be equated with a “red Nile” wherein flood waters are colored by lake deposits [Keller 1995 Acuistapace 1991].)

A phenomenon that can actually simulate a psychic attack is the “hag syndrome.” Typically the “victim” awakens to feel a weight pressing on the chest and to see bizarre imagery (e.g. an “old hag, ” incubus, vampire, or the like). Known from ancient times, and estimated to occur presently in some fifteen percent of the worlds adult population (Guiley 1991), the syndrome is popularly termed a “waking dream” and occurs in the twilight between being asleep and awake (Nickell 1995). Because such an experience may seem quite real to the “victim,” it could appear to prove to that person that he or she was actually accursed.

Apart from such dramatic “evidence,” however, belief in curses is simply a superstition—that is, “a belief that some action not logically related to a course of events influences its outcome” or “any belief, practice, or rite unreasoningly upheld by faith in magic, chance or dogma” (
American Heritage
1981). As with other superstitions (such as the fear of Friday the Thirteenth), once the idea of a curse is planted, it can take root in the imagination so that any harmful occurrence is counted as evidence for the jinx, while beneficial events are ignored. In this way, superstitious or magical thinking tends to start with an answer and work backward to the evidence, in contrast to scientific or rational thinking that allows evidence to lead to an answer.
⁵

Tut et al.

This process of focusing only on negative evidence clearly perpetuates many popular “curses,” including alleged “Jinxed Seas” like the so –called “Devil’s Triangle” of the Atlantic, where ships and planes supposedly vanish without a trace. In fact, however, as Lawrence David Kusche demonstrated in his investigative classic
The Bermuda Triangle Mystery Solved
(1975), the disappearances are actually tragedies involving a combination of bad weather, heavy sea and air traffic, equipment failure, human error, and journalistic exaggeration and misattribution. (Many incidents attributed to the zone in fact occurred elsewhere.)

Another such example is the site near Niagara Falls known as “Devil’s Hole” that is allegedly “cursed with an aura of sheer bad luck.” Indeed, asserts one writer, “Those ghost hunters who wish to explore Devil’s Hole must do so at tremendous personal risk. Only those blessed with extremely good luck or who feel that they have nothing left to lose should even attempt to study this site. The forces at work in this area are so. strong and unpredictable that even experienced ghost hunters with extraordinary climbing, survival, and caving skills are likely to fall victim to the cave’s intense aura” (Blackman 1998). Actually,
Skeptical Inquirer
managing editor Ben Radford and I challenged Devil’s Hole on May 20, 1999 (
see figure 9.1
) and lived to tell about it. (In fact, park official Barry Virgilio told us that despite heavy pedestrian traffic, there was not a high incidence of injury in the area and that accidents were typically due to risky behavior.)

Figure 9.1. Cursed cave? Skeptical Inquirer managing editor Ben
Radford tempts gloomy Devil’s Hole near Niagara Falls

Other examples of “curses” involving a selective focus include those attributed to King Tut’s tomb and the infamous Hope Diamond. After
the discovery of Tutankhamen’s lost burial chamber in 1922, expedition financial Lord Carnarvon died of blood poisoning from an infected insect bite, and in 1926 his former nurse died in childbirth. The archaeologist who discovered the tomb, Howard Carter, lost two assistants to what newspapers began to call “King Tut’s Curse.” They reported that there was an inscription over the tomb’s entrance that read, “Death shall come to he who touches the tomb.” Over the years, some archaeologists and tourists became ill or even died after they visited the site. Some have suggested that a mysterious bacteria or fungus in the tomb causes people to become ill.

In fact, there was no curse inscription on or in the tomb. In 1980, the site’s former security officer admitted the story of the curse had been circulated in order to frighten away would –be grave robbers. As to the misfortunes, there was no pattern to them, the “victims” dying of a variety of causes. Some may have been ill anyway, and the added effects of travel, climate, and other stressful factors may have contributed to any illness –related deaths. In fact, balancing the list of misfortunes is the fact that ten years after the pharaoh’s tomb was opened, all but one of the five who first entered it were still living. Carter himself lived on until 1939, dying at the age of sixty –six. Lord Carnarvon’s daughter and others associated with the tomb, including the photographer and Egypt’s Chief Inspector of Antiquities, lived normal life spans. And Dr. Douglas Derry—the man who actually dissected the mummy of Tutankhamen—lived to be over eighty years old (Nickell 1989).

But has the Hope Diamond—a.k.a. the “Diamond of Doom”—indeed “left a trail of death, debt and disaster among its owners” (“Diamond” 1976)? The seventeenth –century French trader, Jean Baptist Tavernier, who first acquired and sold the magnificent blue gem to Louis XIV for a King’s ransom, later suffered financial ruin. Louis XVI, who cut the diamond into the shape of a heart, gave it to his queen, Marie Antoinette, before both were taken to the guillotine by French revolutionaries. Stolen by thieves, the gem—or rather a portion of it, cut to its present oval shape—surfaced in London, where it was bought in 1830 by a rich banker named Henry Thomas Hope. The faceted stone then passed through a succession of owners who reportedly suffered such misfortunes as bankruptcy, suicide, even murder. In the obituary for one alleged victim who died in 1947, a United Press story declared, “The Hope diamond has a long reputation as a ’jinxed’ stone whose ownership carried with it a cloud of tragedy” (MacDougall 1983).

Figure 9.2. Jinxed jewel? Once allegedly doom –laden, the Hope
Diamond now reposes serenely in the Smithsonian. (Photos by
Joe Nickell)

As with “King Tut’s curse,” however, evidence for the Hope Diamond “jinx” depends on a selective process. According to Curtis D. MacDougall in his
Superstition and the Press
(1983), “Study of the complete history of the fabulous jewel reveals that at least half of those who owned or used it seemingly were not affected by any curse. How unusual is it for about half the members of any family to experience bad luck?” Moreover, he says, since acquiring the stone in 1958, “[T]he Smithsonian Institution has not suffered from fire, theft or death as a result of its famous possession. Because of the prominence of many of the diamond s owners the press has kept alive the myth of a curse, translating every untoward occurrence to fit the pattern.” (
See figure 9.2.
)

Interestingly, once the selective process changes focus, as happened with the quartz effigy known as the “Crystal Skull,” so do the imagined consequences. Once said to have the power to cause death (Mitchell –
Hedges 1954), a claim utterly lacking support (Nickell 1988), the erstwhile “Skull of Doom” has become a talisman to New Agers, who now “channel” hopeful messages from it and credit it with wonderful psychic “energies,” even placing their own crystals next to it to supposedly “charge” them (Bryant and Galde 1991).

In Camelot

A similar process of selection and hype helps promote “the Kennedy curse.” In 1984,
Newsweek
continued a long journalistic tradition of describing the family as a “star –crossed dynasty” (Beck et al. 1984) and later headlined a report on Michael Kennedy’s accidental death “The Camelot Curse” (Thomas 1998). In reporting on the John F. Kennedy Jr. tragedy, one wire service story proclaimed that “The legendary Kennedy family curse had struck again” (quoted in
Times Record
1999).

Actually, the Kennedys themselves have not been blameless in the matter. For example, in his television to the people of Massachusetts in the wake of the Chappaquiddick tragedy, Ted Kennedy (1969) admitted that among his “irrational” thoughts of the period had been the question of “whether some awful curse did actually hang over all the Kennedys.” And Michael Kennedy had said of RFK’s assassination, “It was as if fate had turned against us. There was now a pattern that could not be ignored” (Kelly and Walsh 1999).

Despite the hype, there has also been much appropriate skepticism. A German daily editorialized: “A plane crash is a dreadful, horrible banality. But when a member of the Kennedy dynasty crashes a plane, the accident becomes a sign of inescapable destiny … and the global infotainment industry has its raw material—the curse of the Kennedys” (quoted in “Curse or Hubris” 1999). Commendably, the Wichita Falls, Texas, Times Record News had this to say:

The notion that a family is cursed harkens back to the Dark Ages or the early days in this country when women were burned at the stake because they were believed to be witches and men were drawn and quartered because they were believed to be inhabited by evil spirits. Yet, even if educated reporters and editors don’t actually believe in the fact that a family or an individual can be cursed, we see that idea promoted to a public that borders on scientific illiteracy already and, as
proven by the popularity of all sorts of magical, mystical cures for ailments, the popularity of horoscopes and psychic readings, that is pretty darn gullible.

The editorial went on to indicate various factors that were actually responsible for the alleged curse and concluded that for the notion to be entertained, “there needs to be proof that’s more reputable than the zero proof offered right now. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof” (“Irresponsible” 1999).