The Basano Vase
PLACE OF ORIGIN:
ITALY
AGE:
600 YEARS
MATERIAL:
SILVER
CURRENT LOCATION:
UNKNOWN
This cursed silver vase from Italy is less a cursed object and more an out-and-out serial killer. It’s been connected with about a dozen deaths beginning in the fifteenth century and ending sometime in the 1980s. And it has accomplished all that while holding many pretty bouquets of flowers along the way.
That is, if it even existed. Little evidence of the vase can be found, unless you count the dozens upon dozens of breathless blog posts and cursed object listicles. The story of the Basano Vase is remarkable for its singular lack of either verifiable facts or obvious falsehoods, both of which are entwined together throughout the history of any cursed object. If a cursed object has no names attached to it or doesn’t come with believably specific narrative details, then some storyteller along the line is sure to make them up. And, yet, despite its lack of specific detail, the story of the cursed Basano Vase abides, always ready to jump into an Internet article about the most cursed objects in history with only a few paragraphs and a newspaper photo as evidence.
The story takes place in fifteenth-century Italy. It was the night before a wedding, and the bride-to-be had been given the silver vase as a wedding gift. Except that she’s a bride-never-to-be. She was murdered before the ceremony, but by whom the story doesn’t say. Her untimely death is sometimes ascribed to the cursed vase, and sometimes it’s said that she cursed the vase as she died. Either way, the result is a cursed vase. The object stayed in the woman’s family, killing relative after relative until someone realized the source of the misfortune and either hid the vase or had a priest hide it for them.
A vase with the power of death?
However that person hid the vase, they did a good job, because the trail went cold for five centuries before the vase was rediscovered in 1988. According to the lore, a man found it buried in his yard. There may or may not have been a note buried with it warning that death would find whoever owns it. Thinking that a fifteenth-century silver vase is probably pretty valuable, the finder auctioned it, eager to both rake in some cash and get the cursed object out of his house.
They say you never win an auction because the prize is that you lose a huge chunk of money. This maxim proved doubly true for the pharmacist who won the Basano Vase. He died months after the auction. As did the young doctor who bought the vase next. And the archeologist after that. The story recounts one more victim — no occupation listed this time — before a collector finally succumbed to the idea that cursed objects are real and the Basano Vase is one of them. The last owner threw the vase out a window, an admittedly untested method of ridding oneself of a cursed object.
A policeman witnessed the act and fined the collector for littering, while simultaneously attempting to return the vase. The collector took the fine, but not the vase. No museum in the city would take it, either. Word of the deaths associated with the vase had spread through the entire region, and folks had concluded that no flower arrangement is worth that cost. Finally, the vase disappeared, which is exactly how every cursed object story should end: with somebody wisely destroying it or hiding it forever. However, the Basano Vase story includes one more peculiar detail: that the silver vase was secreted inside a lead case, like it’s radioactive instead of cursed.
With little evidence to back up the specifics, the story reads more like a fable than anything else, despite the fact that half of its events occurred during the Reagan administration. The one piece of evidence on the web that tethers the vase’s legend to reality seems to be a single, cropped newspaper photo of a vessel with a rounded bottom and a collared top. It’s almost heart-shaped, in the biological sense. The photo’s caption and a few words from the article survived the image crop and appear to be in Croatian. The caption translates as: “Basano, a vase with the power of death?” The words from the article read something like: “The museum did not want!” The article might be the origin of the legend, based on real reporting, or it could be just another baton handoff of the legend in the Halloween edition of the paper, this time with a generic photo included by way of illustration. Unless a complete copy of the article is found, we’ll never know.
The vase’s name, Basano, is similarly a dead end. The word is a tense of the Italian verb basare, which means “to ground” or “to base.” There is no place in Italy called Basano, and it doesn’t seem to be a proper name. (Bassano, however, is part of the name of a city, Bassano del Grappo, where the Ponte Vecchio is located; it’s also as a surname.)
So who knows? I considered banishing the Basano Vase from this book, as I banished other cursed objects where the word rumored refers to the object instead of the curse. But the vase’s story is unusual in that it’s not easily falsifiable, unlike, say, the story of the Woman of Lemb, another cursed object that often appears on lists with the Basano Vase. The story of that small stone figure includes several hard facts, including the name of the major museum that supposedly has it on display, which are so easily disproven that it quickly becomes apparent that there’s no such thing as the Woman of Lemb.
But there’s not enough information to outright discount the story of the Basano Vase, and I haven’t been able to track it to its original source. Nevertheless, I include it here in case one day you find yourself in Italy and come across a great deal on an old, oddly shaped silver vase with a lead case thrown in for free. Just put it down and go get a gelato instead.
Rudolph Valentino’s Ring
PLACE OF ORIGIN:
SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA
Material:
GOLD CIRCLET WITH A BROWN CAT’S-EYE STONE
Notable Owners:
RUDOLPH VALENTINO, POLA NEGRI, RUSS COLUMBO, JOE CASINO, JACK DUNN
Death Toll:
FIVE
His name was Rodolfo Alfonso Raffaello Pierre Filibert Guglielmi di Valentina d’Antonguolla. Film fans know him as Rudolph Valentino, one of the original stars of silent film in the 1920s. Paranormal fans know him for his cursed ring, which is said to have caused his death at age thirty-one and the subsequent deaths of nearly everyone who slipped a finger into its negative space afterward.
Valentino was born in 1895 in Italy and came to the United States at the age of eighteen to find a job. And, man, did he. Four years after arriving at Ellis Island he moved to the opposite coast to jump-start a movie acting career, back in the days when that was an experimental and somewhat disreputable career path. After a series of bit parts and bad-guy roles, Valentino quickly ascended the end credits to top billing. He was nicknamed “the Latin Lover” and accreted a rabid fan base. Upon his death, about one hundred grief-stricken admirers and curious onlookers clogged the Manhattan street surrounding his funeral. They say his death even caused a few suicides of people who didn’t want to live in a Valentino-less world.