It’s a popular spook spot for thrill seekers and paranormal investigators, a rite of passage for students, and, according to some locals, an icon of the city. What it is more than anything can be found in the last two lines of the epitaph on the stone tree trunk beside the Black Angel:
Do not weep for me, dear mother.
I am at peace in my cool grave.
The Black Angel is definitely a cool grave.
Most of this book is a lesson in defense: how to avoid cursed objects (e.g., don’t exhume bodies, stop buying expensive gems, and stay away from old dolls). But what if you want to take the offensive? What if you want to curse an object? How would you go about doing that?
Turns out, there are a ton of ways. Every culture and religion and group on the planet seems to have their own method of cursing objects. It’s apparently a very human thing to do.
Ancient Greeks and Romans inscribed flat pieces of lead and stone with curses. Thousands of these curse tablets have been dug up all over Europe. Early Christians in Ireland and Scotland had bullaun, or cursing stones, which had depressions in them. To use, the curser would place a smaller stone in the depression and turn it over while wishing misfortune on another. Vikings carved curses into poles called nithing poles, stuck horse heads atop them, and planted them in the ground facing the intended victim’s home. In Japan, curses can be cast using wooden plaques called ema, which are inscribed with ill wishes and hung at special sites called enkiri (tie-cutting shrines). In India, lemons and chilies are used both as protection and as a curse. Stringing them together and hanging them up in a display that’s called nimbu mirchi can ward off evil, but throwing one of these objects on a busy roadway can cause evil to befall a passerby. And people on every continent — from Africa to Europe to Asia to America — curse effigies and dolls.
Some say you can curse any object by merely holding it and thinking negative thoughts directed at an individual. Which tells me that, in the end, the objects and methods don’t really matter. It’s the thought that counts.
The Gravestone of Carl Pruitt
PLACE OF ORIGIN:
PULASKI COUNTY, KENTUCKY
YEAR OF INSTALLATION:
1938
CURRENT LOCATION:
UNKNOWN
DEATH TOLL:
FIVE
The southeastern edge of Pulaski County, Kentucky, is leprous with strip mines. These swaths of denuded earth can be landscape eyesores, environmentally dodgy, much needed sources of jobs, and rich pockets of economically important resources, depending on where you fall in the argument. But one of these myriad strip mines is a little different from the others. It generates a different kind of argument. It may, or may not, have saved humanity from a cursed object.
A lot of cursed objects are supposed to be deadly, but the gravestone of Carl Pruitt is absolutely bloodthirsty. According to the lore, it has caused the deaths of five different people, each of them strangled by chains.
The story goes like this: The year is 1938. Carl Pruitt returns home, his fingers full of splinters and his lungs full of sawdust from his job as a carpenter. He’s early, and he’s looking forward to seeing his wife. Which he does — naked and in bed with another man. Pruitt flies into a rage and attacks his wife, while the naked man takes an awkward post-coital flight out the nearest window.
Pruitt grabs a nearby length of chain and wraps it around his wife’s throat, strangling her until she’s dead. Immediately, the grief and the shame and the irrevocability of the act sink in, so he grabs a gun and shoots himself in the face. It’s a terrible, although not outlandish, story. But what happens next takes it over the top.
Pruitt’s body was buried in a nearby cemetery. Legend says that over time, a section of the headstone that marked his grave discolored, developing a chain-shaped stain across its face. Locals became fixated on the story of the murder-suicide and the stained stone. And it’s the headstone that distinguishes this story from your average graveyard haunting.
Sometime after the gravestone was planted, a group of boys biked to the site. One boy, James Collins, pelted it with rocks. The projectiles chipped and cracked the block of granite. When they got bored, the gang took off toward home. But James Collins immediately lost control of his bicycle and hit a tree. When the boys checked to see if he was okay, they found him dead — but not from a head wound. In the collision, his bike chain had somehow wrapped itself around his neck and strangled him. The next day, the pockmarks from Collins’s stone projectiles were gone. The gravestone was marred only by the chain stain.
Weeks later, Collins’s mother flew into a rage of grief and took off to the cemetery with a pickax in her hands. She demolished Pruitt’s stone and then went home to do the laundry. As she was hanging sheets on the line to dry — a line that for some reason was actually a chain — it wrapped itself around her neck and strangled her. When locals went to see the damage that had been her doing (and undoing), they found Carl Pruitt’s gravestone in one piece and as shiny as new (plus a chain-shaped stain).
The story of the supernatural stone spread, and eventually someone else decided to test the curse. A farmer driving by the cemetery in a horse-drawn cart shot at the headstone with a gun. His horses took off running, pitching the farmer forward and over the front of the cart, where he died with the trace chain of the harness wrapped around his throat. Carl Pruitt’s gravestone was undamaged.
At one point a pair of police officers went to investigate what was becoming a big story in those parts. One of the men made fun of the stone and the story. Upon leaving the cemetery, they were chased by a light that panicked the doubting officer, who was driving the squad car. He swerved between two posts and crashed. The officer in the passenger seat was thrown clear and lived. The driver was found dead, strangled by a chain that connected the two posts.
The final death bandied about around campfires in southeastern Kentucky involved a man who became so fed up with the cursed object that he took a hammer and chisel to it. His blows rang out through the night until they ended with a loud scream. Locals found him dead, with the chain from the graveyard gate wrapped around his neck. The hammer and chisel were both there, but no chisel marks could be found on Carl Pruitt’s grave.
That was one chain-strangling too many. Locals started selling their cemetery plots and exhuming their loved ones to move their bodies out of the graveyard and away from its cursed stone. Eventually, the cemetery was reduced to a single plot, topped by one chain-stained gravestone. And that gravestone might have kept on killing had the land not been sold to a mining company and the entire area turned into a strip mine in 1958. It’s assumed that the stone ended up with the rest of the rubble from the mine, buried and waiting for some future archeologist to find it and unchain the curse all over again.