Cursed...ish

Why does 11:11 feel like it means something? In this episode of Cursed...ish, Daniel and Angela dig into the strange history of the number eleven, 11:11, angel numbers, numerology, and the very human urge to see meaning in repeating numbers. The number 11 has had a serious image makeover. For centuries, religious writers treated it as awkward, sinful, and suspiciously stuck between the supposedly...

What if one dirty look could actually curse you? In this episode of Cursed...ish, Angela and Daniel dig into the Evil Eye, one of humanity’s oldest and most widespread supernatural beliefs: the idea that jealousy, envy, or even an overly admiring glance can bring illness, bad luck, and misfortune. The trail takes us from ancient Egyptian amulets and the Eye of Horus to the blue-and-white nazar, It...

What happens if you turn off the lights, stare into a mirror, and say “Bloody Mary” three times? In this episode of Cursed...ish, Daniel and Angela revisit one of the most enduring childhood urban legends: the Bloody Mary mirror ritual. They compare the rules they learned growing up and ask the surprisingly difficult question at the center of it all: Who exactly is Mary? The search leads from Quee...

Why are black cats supposed to be bad luck? In this listener-requested episode of Cursed...ish, Angela and Daniel dig into the long, strange history of black cat superstition and how one extremely normal, extremely adorable animal became associated with witches, demons, bad omens, and Halloween. The trail leads back to medieval Europe, Pope Gregory IX, the Vox in Rama, and one truly unhinged descr...

What happens when you make a movie about the Antichrist and then everyone involved starts seeing signs of evil everywhere?  In this episode of Cursed...ish, Daniel and Angela kick off Cursed Cinema with The Omen, the 1976 horror classic about Damien, a very creepy child who may or may not be the literal Antichrist.  The movie leaned hard into demonic imagery from the beginning, with 666-themed rel...

Before Halloween was spooky season, there was Samhain.  In this episode of Cursed...ish, Angela and Daniel dig into the ancient Celtic festival of Samhain, the pagan celebration marking the end of the harvest, the beginning of winter, and a time when the veil between the living and the dead was believed to be at its thinnest.  And the deeper we go, the more familiar everything starts to look. Mass...

What happens when you disturb a body that has been frozen in the Alps for more than 5,000 years? In this episode of Cursed...ish, Daniel and Angela dig into the strange life, violent death, and alleged Curse of Ötzi the Iceman, one of the oldest and best-preserved human mummies ever discovered. Found by hikers in the Ötztal Alps in 1991, Ötzi turned out to be a Copper Age man who died more than fi...

Some people seem to live charmed lives. Robert Todd Lincoln did not. In this episode of Cursed...ish , Angela and Daniel dig into the strangely cursed life of Abraham Lincoln’s eldest son, the only one of the Lincoln children to survive into adulthood, and a man who somehow found himself repeatedly brushing up against presidential assassination. Robert endured the deaths of three brothers, the mur...

Some cursed objects are ancient, mysterious, and covered in centuries of folklore. And some are a softball-sized hunk of plutonium that very smart people kept poking at until it tried to kill everyone in the room. In this episode of Cursed...ish , Daniel and Angela dig into the terrifying story of the Demon Core , the radioactive plutonium core created during the Manhattan Project and later involv...

What do you do when the person you're convinced is the one for you is about to marry someone else? If you are Degina, a woman living in ancient Macedon, you carve a curse into lead, roll it up, and place it in a grave so the dead can carry your romantic crisis to the underworld. In this episode of Cursed...ish , Angela and Daniel dig into the Pella Curse Tablet , an ancient Greek binding spel...

Green is the color of nature, luck, life, and fresh starts. But it's also the color of poison, decay, jealousy, sickness, toxic sludge, unlucky race cars, suspicious theater costumes, and one beautifully-deadly pigment some people decided to put absolutely everywhere. In this episode of Cursed...ish , Daniel and Angela embark on a new technicolor cursed journey with Cursed Colors: Green , exp...

Is it the Berenstein Bears or the Berenstain Bears? Did the Monopoly Man have a monocle? Was there ever a cornucopia in the Fruit of the Loom logo? And, most importantly, has reality always been this wrong? In this episode of Cursed...ish , Angela and Daniel take a hard left into the strange, brain-breaking world of the Mandela Effect , the phenomenon where large groups of people collectively reme...

Link to Cursed Painting - Open with Caution - https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcSAq5NbAyoMu1Rb8ohN-tb2d5WriWF_EOruRTMKj9QxxQ&s=10 In this episode of Cursed...ish , Daniel and Angela investigate The Hands Resist Him , the allegedly cursed painting by artist Bill Stoneham that became one of the internet’s earliest viral cursed-object legends. The painting itself is unsettling...

Some cursed objects come with centuries of documentation, terrified witnesses, and a long trail of bodies. The Basano Vase mostly comes with vibes. In this episode of Cursed...ish, Angela and Daniel investigate the legend of the Basano Vase, an allegedly cursed silver vase said to have been made in 15th-century Italy as a wedding gift. According to the story, the bride died on her wedding night wh...

The full moon is rising again, Accursed Ones. In Part 2 of Cursed Creatures: Werewolves, Daniel and Angela return to the woods to finish unpacking one of the most enduring monsters in folklore, mythology, horror movies, and our collective fear of what might be lurking under the skin. This time, we follow the werewolf legend beyond ancient myth and medieval trials into the Beast of Gévaudan, the ro...

In Part 1 of our Cursed Creatures deep dive, Cursed...ish heads into the woods under a full moon to ask a deceptively simple question: where did werewolf legends actually come from? Before silver bullets, full moons, and shirtless men chaining themselves to basement pipes, werewolves were already prowling through ancient mythology, folklore, and some deeply cursed corners of human history. Daniel...

Why can no Hogwarts professor survive more than one year teaching Defense Against the Dark Arts? In this very unofficial Harry Potter episode of Cursed...ish, Daniel and Angela return to Hogwarts to investigate one of the wizarding world’s most suspicious job openings: the cursed Defense Against the Dark Arts position. Across seven books, Hogwarts burns through professor after professor, from Quir...

What happens when a cursed ghost ship becomes both victim and warning? In this episode of Cursed...ish, Daniel and Angela set sail into the foggy, storm-tossed legend of the Flying Dutchman, the doomed ship said to be cursed to sail the oceans forever, never reaching port and never finding peace. From eerie sightings by British sailors and royal witnesses to centuries of maritime folklore around t...

New Orleans has no shortage of haunted history, but the Superdome Curse is one of the city’s lesser-known legends hiding in plain sight. In this episode of Cursed...ish, Angela and Daniel head to the Big Easy to explore the eerie story connecting the New Orleans Saints, the Louisiana Superdome, and the old Girod Street Cemetery, a burial ground once overwhelmed by cholera, yellow fever, decay, and...

Winning the lottery is supposed to change your life for the better, but for some jackpot winners, sudden wealth has brought bankruptcy, betrayal, addiction, lawsuits, murder, and the uncomfortable realization that money can solve plenty of problems while creating entirely new ones. In this episode of Cursed...ish, Daniel and Angela investigate the so-called lottery curse. From the British tabloid...

What happens when some of the most brilliant musicians in history all seem to meet the same tragic end? In this episode of Cursed...ish, Angela and Daniel dig into the legend of the 27 Club: the eerie cultural grouping of famous artists who died at just 27 years old. From Rolling Stones founder Brian Jones to Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison, Kurt Cobain, and Amy Winehouse, the so-called “...

For decades, American families gathered in their backyards to throw giant metal spikes through the air and called it wholesome fun. What could possibly go wrong? In this episode of Cursed...ish, Daniel and Angela trace the astonishing history of lawn darts, better known by the popular brand name Jarts. Beginning with a 1957 patent for a projectile that combined an indoor dart with a javelin, lawn...

In 79 AD, Mount Vesuvius erupted and buried Pompeii and Herculaneum beneath ash, pumice, and deadly pyroclastic flows, preserving the final moments of two ancient Roman cities in horrifying detail. But was that the end of Pompeii’s misfortune, or did something cursed remain beneath the ruins? Fresh from visiting Pompeii and Herculaneum, Angela takes Daniel through the catastrophic eruption of Moun...

Yosemite National Park is one of the most beautiful places in America, with towering granite cliffs, roaring waterfalls, Half Dome, El Capitan, and a valley so stunning it helped inspire the entire national park system. But tucked into that landscape is Tenaya Canyon, a dangerous stretch of wilderness sometimes called the “Bermuda Triangle of Yosemite,” where hikers, climbers, park employees, and...

The Hope Diamond is one of the most famous jewels in the world, but is it also one of the most cursed? In this episode of Cursed...ish , we follow the allegedly-cursed Hope Diamond from its origins as the Tavernier Blue to the French royal court, through revolution, scandal, suspiciously dramatic deaths, and eventually into its current home at the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C. Along the way, we...