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 perfect numbers 10 and 12. Then came the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month, digital clocks, modern numerology, and eventually the idea that seeing 11:11 means it is time to make a...

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, Italy’s cornicello, and protective symbols that have appeared across Jewish, Islamic, Christian, pagan, and Mediterranean traditions for thousands of years.

Along the way, we talk...

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 Queen Mary I of England and the origins of her infamous nickname to Mary Worth, Mary Whales, murdered hitchhikers, supposed witches, and a collection of stories with...

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 description of a supposed satanic cult involving giant toads, mysterious pale men, a walking black cat statue, and a ritual that raises several questions nobody really wanted answered.

From...

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 release dates, ominous posters, satanic marketing, and a campaign practically begging audiences to believe something sinister was happening behind the scenes. 

Then the stories started piling up: Gre...

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. Massive bonfires light up the darkness. People disguise themselves from wandering spirits. Food is left out to appease supernatural visitors. Glowing gourds with carved faces ward of...

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 five millennia ago. His clothing, tools, tattoos, last meal, injuries, and even the contents of his stomach have given researchers an extraordinary glimpse int...

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 murder of his father, and a lifetime spent in the shadow of one of the most famous men in American history. Then things got even stranger. He...

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 involved in two deadly criticality accidents at Los Alamos.

Originally known as Rufus, the Demon Core was meant to be used...

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 spell found in Pella, the former capital of Macedon. The tablet appears to capture one woman’s...

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, exploring why green has been treated as eerie, unlucky, dangerous, and maybe just a little bit cursed throughout history.

From Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Shakespeare’s green-eyed mo...

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 remember something that apparently never happened. From Jif versus Jiffy, Looney Tunes, Curious George’s missing tail, Febreze, Skechers, Pikachu, and the infamous Fruit of...

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 enough: a young boy, a life-size doll girl with black eyes, disembodied hands pressed against a glass door, and the general feeling that maybe you should not be looking at...

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 while clutching the vase, and from there the object supposedly passed from owner to owner, leaving mysterious deaths behind it until someone finally had the good sense to...

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 rougarou of Louisiana folklore, Irish wolf-warriors, Argentina’s lobizón, Romanian vampire-werewolf hybrids, and other strange shapeshifter traditions from around the world. Along the way, we ask how a cr...

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 and Angela trace lycanthropy back to the Old English roots of “werewolf,” the Greek origins of “lycanthrope,” and one of the earliest Western werewolf stories: King Lycaon, the mythological ruler cursed by Zeus to become a wolf aft...

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 Quirrell and his deeply inadvisable Voldemort head-share to Gilderoy Lockhart’s fraudulent little memory-wiping empire, Remus Lupin’s tragic exit, Fake Mad-Eye Moody’s disturbingly committed lesson planning, Dolores Umbridge’s pink-cardigan fascism, Severus Snape finally ge...

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 the Cape of Good Hope, this episode explores why the Flying Dutchman became one of the most famous ghost ship legends in the world.

Along the way, we dig...

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 thousands of human remains.

Was the Superdome really cursed because part of its parking structure was built over a former cemetery? Did the Saints spend decades as the “Aints” becaus...

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 sensation who promised to “spend, spend, spend” to Powerball and lottery winners targeted by relatives, scammers, spouses, and strangers, they examine the true stories that turned instant millionaires into cautionary tales.

But do most lottery winn...

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 “Big Six” of the 27 Club left behind music that changed the world, and deaths that made people wonder whether fame, addiction, tragedy, and coincidence had formed something darker.

Al...

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 darts were marketed as cheerful outdoor entertainment for the entire family. Millions of sets were sold, even as the supposedly harmless backyard game caused devastating head injuries, permanent disabilities, and the...

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 Mount Vesuvius, the remarkably preserved streets and homes of Pompeii, and the eyewitness account of Pliny the Younger. Along the way, they examine exploding skulls, plaster casts, ancient brothels, good-luck penises, and the surprisingly ordinary details of Ro...

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 even John Muir, America’s great wilderness evangelist and the man often called the father of the national parks himself, have been injured, stranded, or killed while exploring this infamous canyon. 

In this episode of Cursed...ish, Da...

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 dig into the science behind the diamond’s impossible blue color, the legend that it was stolen from a Hindu idol, the French Blue’s connection to L...

A warning for delicate ears: this episode contains explicit language. We hope you’ll pardon us; when the topic is cursed words, some of those words do insist on showing up and being heard.

On the 13th episode of Cursed…ish, Daniel and Angela investigate curses of a more etymological persuasion: curse words. Why do certain sounds become dangerous, filthy, or forbidden? Why did ancient speakers stop saying the original word for the beast they feared the most out of a suspicion that uttering its name might summon one forth? How did...

Why do theater people refuse to say Macbeth inside a theater? This week on Cursed...ish, we step into the blood-soaked, witchy world of Shakespeare’s most allegedly-cursed play: Macbeth, also known by the superstitious as “The Scottish Play.”

Angela takes Daniel through the strange history behind the curse of Macbeth, from one king's weird, misplaced obsession with witchcraft and Shakespeare’s suspiciously well-researched trio of iconic witches, to the chilling discovery that real incantations may have been written into the very play itself. Did Shakespeare accidentally, or maybe not so accident...

Is the Poltergeist curse real, or is it just one of Hollywood’s darkest tabloid legends? In this episode of Cursed...ish, we dig into the alleged Poltergeist movie curse, from Steven Spielberg and Tobe Hooper’s creation of the 1982 horror classic to the tragic deaths of Dominique Dunne and Heather O’Rourke, the eerie stories surrounding Poltergeist 2 and Poltergeist 3, and the infamous rumor that real human skeletons were used on set. Along the way, we trace how the “curse” narrative spread thr...

In this episode of Cursed...ish, Angela and Daniel dig into the Curse of Cassandra, the Greek myth of a woman who could literally predict disaster and still got treated like she was being dramatic. From Apollo’s extremely petty curse of a punishment to the Trojan Horse, the fall of Troy, and the brutal aftermath of war, they trace how Cassandra became mythology’s patron saint of I told you so. Along the way, they unpack the tragedy, misogyny, and cultural staying power of her story, plus why the Cassandra arch...

In Part II of Cursed...ish’s King Tutankhamun coverage, Daniel and Angela pick up where the tomb story turns ancient history to archaeology and legend. From Napoleon’s role in fueling Europe’s obsession with ancient Egypt to the Rosetta Stone, Howard Carter’s excavation, Lord Carnarvon’s mysterious death, and the media frenzy that helped create the so-called Pharaoh’s Curse, they trace how a buried king became one of history’s most famous supernatural stories. Along the way, they dig into protective funerary rituals, tabloid embellishments, supposed curse victims, mold and poison theories, and the uncomforta...

Before Tutankhamun became the most famous mummy in the world, he was a teenage pharaoh buried in secrecy beneath the sands of ancient Egypt. In Part 1 of this story, the Cursed...ish hosts trace the origins of the Curse of King Tut by exploring the world that created him: the religious beliefs of ancient Egypt, mummification, tomb protection, funerary rituals, and the supernatural fear of disturbing the dead. Along the way, we dig into the meaning of curses in ancient Egyptian culture, the ancient Egyptian afterlife, the weighing of the heart, protective spells, burial practices, and the...

In this episode of Cursed...ish, Angela Mattes and Daniel Stevens investigate one of America’s most infamous allegedly-hexed families: the Kennedys. From the death of Joseph Kennedy Jr. in World War II to the tragedies of Rosemary Kennedy, the assassinations of John F. Kennedy and Robert F. Kennedy, the scandal of Chappaquiddick, and the plane crash that killed JFK Jr., the Kennedy family story is packed with a staggering pattern of death, disaster, scandal, and political fallout. As the hosts trace the rise of America’s clos...

In this episode of Cursed...ish, Angela Mattes and Daniel Stevens head into one of the darkest corners of the Harry Potter universe: the Unforgivable Curses. From Avada Kedavra to the Cruciatus Curse and the Imperius Curse, they unpack how the wizarding world casually hands children the power to torture, control minds, and kill instantly, then somehow treats that as normal school-adjacent information. Along the way, they dig into the horrifying implications of Hogwarts, Defense Against the Dark Arts, Mad-Eye Moody/Barty...