While it cannot be denied that everyone who has ever owned the Hope Diamond has died — the Hope Diamond can sometimes seem less the direct cause of trouble than a side effect of it. After all, you have to be extremely rich to own it, to the point of taking that wealth and investing it in an ostentatious bauble. That’s a level of wealth that comes with its own problems, whether those problems are born of politics or profligacy. In fact, Evalyn Walsh described her own troubles since buying the blue diamond in her 1936 memoir, Father Struck It Rich, as “the natural consequence of unearned wealth in undisciplined hands.” This was probably a dig at her husband.
It isn’t surprising that any gemstone rare enough or large enough to merit its own name also merits its own curse. Maybe it’s a subconscious moralizing against greed or perhaps fantasy retribution against the über-rich. Maybe, by ascribing so many stories to it and retelling those stories, those of us who could never afford such a jewel gain a communal ownership of it.
By that logic, by writing this entry I own the Hope Diamond. Hopefully I can retire off that.
Ötzi the Iceman
PLACE OF ORIGIN:
ÖTZTAL ALPS, ITALY
YEAR OF DISCOVERY:
1991
AGE:
5,300 YEARS
CAUSE OF DEATH:
MURDER
CURRENT LOCATION:
SOUTH TYROL MUSEUM OF ARCHAEOLOGY, BOLZANO, ITALY
Death Toll:
Seven
Ötzi the Iceman was a fairy tale of a find: a 5,300-year-old corpse so well preserved that his discoverers could see his tattoos and judge his fashion sense. His relatives, had they not disintegrated into atoms millennia ago, could have easily and conclusively ID’d his body.
In fact, when they found Ötzi, frozen like the Encino Man in the ice of the Ötztal Alps on the border of Austria and Italy, they thought he was an unlucky climber of much more recent vintage. They had no clue they were seeing man, history, and time itself frozen into the snowy flanks of the mountain.
Ötzi was discovered at an elevation of 10,530 feet on September 19, 1991, by a pair of German tourists hiking through the area. After chipping him out, scientists, archeologists, and anthropologists marveled at the discovery…and are still marveling and discovering things about him today.
Since being pulled out of the ice and into modern society, Ötzi has had his genome sequenced, his relatives traced, his stomach contents analyzed, his diseases diagnosed (Lyme disease, parasitic gut worms, gallstones, otherwise fine), his age gauged (a respectable forty-five), his body scanned by every imaging modality known to Siemens, and the cold case of his cause of death solved: murder, based on the arrow lodged in his shoulder from behind and the trauma to his skull. Ötzi also came as a complete set. He was excavated with all of his accessories preserved. His hat and clothes and shoes survived, as did his arrows and axe and dagger and backpack and all the other items that a Copper Age man needed back in the day.
Today, the Iceman looks like a skeleton wrapped in golden-brown leather the quality of expensive shoes. His ankles are crossed, and his arms extend to the right at angles that make him look like he was flash-frozen while doing the floss dance.
And he might just be cursed. Because as lucky a find as he was for anthropology and archeology and about a dozen other -ologies, he proved to be unlucky for many of the people involved with his discovery and study.
The bad luck started in 2004, when one of the German tourists who found him, Helmut Simon, died at age sixty-seven during a blizzard while hiking near where he had first seen the brown lump of historic corpse protruding from the ice. It was almost as if the mountain needed a replacement for Ötzi. An hour after Simon’s funeral, Dieter Warnecke, who had been hale enough to lead the rescue team that searched for Simon, died of a heart attack. He was forty-five years old, about the same age the Iceman was when he perished. The next year, an archeologist by the name of Konrad Spindler, who was one of the first experts to analyze Ötzi, died of complications from multiple sclerosis at age fifty-five. His disease was diagnosed not long after his analysis of the Iceman. After that was Rainer Henn, who was a forensic examiner of Ötzi. He died in a car crash at age sixty-four, supposedly while on his way to give a lecture about the naturally formed mummy. Then it was Kurt Fritz, a mountaineer who played a role in Ötzi’s original recovery. He died in an avalanche at age fifty-two. Rainer Holz was next on Ötzi’s hit list. He was a filmmaker who documented the retrieval of Otzi from the ice. Age at death: forty-seven. Cause: brain tumor.
The last victim — at least thus far — was Tom Loy. He was a molecular biologist who famously identified four different types of blood on the Iceman’s clothes and tools, which changed the story of Ötzi’s death from one of a lonely hunting accident to that of a fatal skirmish. Loy died at age sixty-three in October 2005 of complications from a blood condition that, according to some sources, was diagnosed soon after his first examination of the Iceman. At the time of his death, Loy was writing a book about Ötzi. Seven deaths in a year: that’s a pretty intense body count.
Cursed or not, both Austria and Italy — which shared the mountain Ötzi was found on — wanted the corpse for themselves and fought over him for a while after his discovery. Eventually, it was ascertained that he was found on the Italian side of the mountain. So now you can to head to Italy to test the curse for yourself. Ötzi has been the star of the South Tyrol Museum of Archaeology in Bolzano since 1998.
And I do mean star. The museum dedicates a remarkable three floors to this singular glacier mummy. It even has a lifelike, Hollywood-special-effects-quality reconstruction of Ötzi made of silicone, resin, and human hair, showing what he might have looked like in his less-dead days thousands of years ago.
As for Ötzi himself, he’s kept in a cold room and viewable through a window while he continues to outlast everyone else on the planet.
Māori Taonga
PLACE OF ORIGIN:
NEW ZEALAND
TRANSLATION:
“TREASURED ITEMS OF THE M–AORI PEOPLE”
EXAMPLES:
HEIRLOOM ARTIFACTS INCLUDING WEAPONS AND
MASKS, BURIAL GROUNDS, AND NATURAL RESOURCES
CURRENT LOCATION:
THROUGHOUT NEW ZEALAND AND IN THE MUSEUM OF NEW ZEALAND TE PAPA TONGAREWA, WELLINGTON, NEW ZEALAND