[William Shatner] A sacred jewel that dooms
its owners to death.
Mysterious stone heads
that unleash a frightening Celtic curse.
And pieces of the past that are said
to bring misfortune
to those who dare to pocket them.
Is it possible that a hex, a spell
or a condemnation
can possess an object,
wreak havoc on a place,
or bring harm to an unsuspecting person?
Even skeptics of the supernatural
will pause to consider the possibility
that suffering, misfortune
and even death
might be caused by a curse.
But is this power to punish
the result of summoning dark forces
or simply believing in
what could be considered superstition?
Well, that is what we'll try and find out.
♪ ♪
[Shatner reads on-screen text]
According to the Holy Bible,
this location was chosen by God
as a place for the ancient Israelites
to perform a ritual
designed to punish those who disobeyed
the commands of the Almighty with a curse.
While it's been a matter of debate,
remarkably, evidence of this practice was discovered in 1980
when archaeologist Adam Zertal uncovered a ritual altar
dating back to 1200 BC.
And recent excavations seem to further corroborate
the biblical story of this place called
the Mountain of the Curse.
[Scott Stripling] I led a team
in December of 2019
to the site of Mount Ebal,
and what I wanted to do was to go back and to process
Adam Zertal's dump piles from the 1980s.
All excavations leave behind dump piles after they process.
Because my previous experiences with old dump piles
had been that the archaeologists
missed most of the small finds that were important.
And so we were able to relocate the dump piles
from Mount Ebal and to sift those,
and in that sifting process
we uncovered this small lead defixio.
And a defixio is a curse tablet,
and this is what made it so interesting,
is because the Bible defines
Mount Ebal as the Mountain of the Curse.
Ancient peoples wrote curses on lead
on the Mount Ebal Tablet.
We could see on the outside that there were what appeared to be
proto-alphabetic symbols on there.
Originally, the writing would have gone all the way across,
but now it's folded into two halves.
The tablet was never intended to be opened.
Once the curse is written and then sealed, it becomes binding.
It's sort of like it's on record now with God
or with the gods.
[Shatner] This small artifact provides insight
into a truly fascinating ancient belief
that the written word could conjure a supernatural curse
and inflict divine punishment.
But how widespread was this practice?
[J.W. Ocker] Defixiones originated in
ancient Greece, ancient Rome, that-that time period,
and they're just thin bits of lead
that a curse has been inscribed on.
We found thousands of these all over Europe.
They are pretty common as far as archaeological artifacts go.
Typically, these defixiones were looking for justice,
or they were looking for revenge.
Or they were just trying to cause a competitor to lose,
whatever that competition was, whether as a rival suitor,
a rival sportsperson, a rival politician.
They were meant to cause those competitors
to fail in their quests.
The people would write a spell or a curse
or the name of somebody that they really despised
with the idea that the gods would then
bring this curse to life.
And these are people who are often
writing about their neighbors.
And even worse than that,
there are figurines with their hands
tied behind their back, with their feet bound,
buried as if they were being laid to rest.
[Shatner] Across the ancient world,
people believed that curses could bring
ruin, illness and even death.
But how did this vengeful act
become a regular practice?
A curse is basically a verbal message,
either written or spoken, that is intended
to invoke supernatural powers
to cause harm to another person.
In terms of where they actually come from,
it's one of those things that I think
curses have always been around.
They were a very practical way
of trying to deal with problems that might arise in your life,
that you could invoke supernatural powers
that would act on your behalf.
[Ceri Houlbrook] The term "curse" probably comes from
Latin "cursus," which refers
to Christian curses or prayers.
And there's a huge variety of what curses were intended to do.
In ancient Greece, for instance,
they had curses known as katadesmoi,
and they were binding curses.
So, they could be used for love.
But this wasn't love in the romantic sense.
They were intended to make somebody
almost physically dependent on somebody else.
Unable to sleep, unable to eat,
unable to find pleasure with anybody else.
There are very, very potent curses
that are meant to
upset and destroy and affect people,
sometimes even to kill them.
People used to mix up things
like little bits of soil from cemeteries--
it's called grave dust--
or even the nails from coffins,
and they'd grind them down into a kind
of maleficent potion and then cast spells on them.
And people really thought that these things worked.
They thought that if you curse somebody in that way,
all those terrible things might really happen to somebody.
[Shatner] The archaeological record proves
that curses were a common tool
to pass on suffering in the ancient world.
But incredibly, the practice of inscribing curses on lead
may be much older than we imagined,
based on further analysis
of the remarkable tablet found on Mount Ebal.
[Stripling] Here, we uncovered a curse tablet
from Mount Ebal,
where the Bible says that they pronounced
the curses of the covenant.
And that's why it became
such a big story.
The tablet was fragile.
If you tried to open it,
then it would begin to come apart.
But the main script, I felt,
was going to be on the inside.
Ultimately, I ended up in Prague, Czechoslovakia,
and they have high-tech tomographic scanners
that actually gets through the lead,
and then you can begin to see what it is that you want to see.
And when I began to see the first scans,
the letters were indeed this proto-alphabetic script
which dated all the way back to the late Bronze Age.
Around 1400 BC, or maybe 1350, somewhere
in that horizon.
And so, from there,
we began to see the inscription unfold.
The core of the curse is
"Cursed are you by the god Yahweh."
Then I was in awe and in shock
because Yahweh was the Israelite god.
[Roy Fisher] What they allege to have discovered
is rather shocking.
This ancient tablet
that they date
to about 3,200 years ago
is not a legal text.
It's not a poem.
It's a curse.
If their scholarly reconstruction is correct,
this would be the oldest Hebrew inscription
that we possess.
And for that inscription to be a curse
is also rather shocking.
[Shatner] While the claim remains controversial,
it's remarkable to think that the earliest
Hebrew writing ever discovered
could be a curse.
But did these words once possess
real supernatural power?
Well, even today, the belief in curses
is alive and well.
[French] A recent poll showed that
around about 30% of American adults
believe in the power of curses in modern times.
And in fact, much higher rates were found
in other parts of the world.
So, clearly, this is not just
something that ancient peoples believed in.
There are still very, very many people around the world
who still believe in the power of curses.
[Shatner reads on-screen text]
[Shatner] World-renowned luxury auction house Christie's
accepts bids on high-carat gemstones and jewelry.
Among the lots is one ornate necklace
featuring an immense black diamond
with a truly sinister reputation.
It's known as both the Black Orlov
and the Eye of Brahma.
This diamond has been incredibly valuable
throughout its known history
for different reasons. There's the size.
The Eye of Brahma,
or the Black Orlov, is a 67.4-carat
enormous cushion-cut black diamond,
which is big.
And it's in a necklace surrounded by a garland
of laurel leaves made of diamonds
on a long necklace of white diamonds.
It's a gorgeous piece of jewelry,
and it was sold to a private collector
for I think somewhere around $350,000.
Because if your diamond is cursed,
it's worth a lot more money.
[Shatner] According to legend, this remarkable stone
was nearly three times its current size,
weighing 195 carats.
It was housed in an ancient temple
in Pondicherry, India,
and set with reverence into a sacred statue of Brahma,
the Hindu god of creation.
The Eye of Brahma started life
as part of a statue of Brahma.
And, uh, it is said, according to legend,
that a Hindu monk stole the eye,
and, for this, was cursed.
Not only was he cursed, allegedly, he was murdered
shortly after committing his crime.
But subsequent owners of the gem
also met terrible fates.
[Raden] In 1932, the diamond was bought by
a famous diamond collector
and gem dealer named J.W. Paris.
A few days later, he wrote two suicide notes,
went to the top of a very tall skyscraper in New York
and threw himself off.
Where it turns up next is in Russia,
with a princess named Nadia Vygin-Orlov.
Allegedly, she took it with her
when she fled the Bolshevik Revolution.
And then, once she was safe and sound,
threw herself off a building.
And no one knows why she did it.
The diamond was sold to another Russian princess,
and shortly thereafter-- if you can believe it--
she went to the top of a very tall skyscraper
and threw herself off.
And that's a part of the curse that's so creepy.
[Shatner] Is there truly a deadly curse
placed upon this black diamond?
While much of its legend remains impossible to verify,
many believe that stories surrounding cursed gemstones
such as the Eye of Brahma are nothing more
than marvelous myths.
There are practical reasons
for claiming that a gem is cursed.
If you say that a gem is cursed,
it increases the mystique of the stone.
It increases the publicity around it.
It increases the sale value of the gem.
So, there are certainly reasons
to claim that your stone is cursed,
particularly if you want to increase the sale value.
There were other extraordinary gemstones
that were believed to bring bad luck with them.
Um, one of these was the Hope Diamond...
...this beautiful blue diamond
that at one point belonged to the French royal family,
who were then all guillotined.
So, it feels as though tragedy and drama and death
follows these gems around.
But of course, the reality is that
only somebody super powerful, super wealthy,
super rich, super influential,
could ever own something as precious.
And if you inhabit that sphere
of human life, then you are likely
to bring trouble to your own door.
[Tony McMahon] There have been various cursed gems in history.
The Koh-i-Noor diamond
actually originated in India,
and it was owned by various rulers in the East
who suffered terrible misfortune.
But then found its way into the hands
of the royal family in Britain.
Now, the royal family
have been very careful
in how they've handled the Koh-i-Noor.
It's not worn by the king or the queen.
It's worn by the queen consort.
So not the ruler, and that's how the royal family
have tried to circumvent the curse.
[Shatner] So, what is really going on here?
Are the misfortunes suffered by owners of rare gems
purely coincidental?
Or can precious jewels become imbued
with dark forces beyond our understanding?
One interesting factor with respect to the idea
of a cursed gemstone
is the idea that crystals of all kinds
can, in some way,
contain and release subtle energies.
With respect to a cursed gemstone,
the idea is that there's a kind of dark energy inside them.
It's still a very, very popular belief
all around the world, in lots of different places.
[Ocker] Is it a psychological phenomenon?
It's the opposite of the power of positive thinking, right?
Now we're talking about the power of negative thinking,
which is just as effective.
They call this the nocebo effect.
Nocebo effects are the idea that if you believe
that misfortune is gonna come to you,
if you believe you are cursed, in essence,
you can actually make yourself cursed,
either through only focusing on the bad things happening to you
or actually causing bad things to happen to you.
[Shatner] Whether people are manifesting their own misfortune
or becoming attached to cursed energies
is a matter of continued debate.
But as for the Eye of Brahma,
some believe its string of bad luck
was broken in the mid-20th century
when a New York gem dealer
acquired the original 195-carat stone
and cut it into pieces.
[French] In the 1950s,
Charles F. Winson did actually cut the stone up into three.
And it was said that
that seemed to destroy the curse,
that all this kind of misfortune
stopped happening to people after that.
Whether or not this was the actual main reason
for his action, I can't say.
But the idea that by cutting up the stone,
it had, in some way, released that dark energy
so that it was no longer going to have an effect
is something that some people do take seriously.
It's reassuring to think that a hex
might be undone by simply destroying the Eye of Brahma.
But there are curses that some believe never go away,
like the terrible misfortune of those who dare to find
a lost treasure of gold.
[Shatner reads on-screen text]
[Shatner] This remote, 840-square-mile wilderness
high in the Eastern Andes is infamous
for sudden storms,
overgrown, unmarked trails
and dangerous wildlife like pumas
and venomous snakes.
But it is said that its greatest danger
lies in its legendary past.
[Hyland] About 20 years ago, I wanted
to see what the Llanganates Mountains were like,
and so I went to them
and they were an extraordinary place.
They're not like the rest of the Andes.
They're much rainier.
You have vegetation that lives in constant clouds.
There's something very mysterious and unearthly
about the Llanganates Mountains, and in fact,
there are local Indians who believe
that the mountains themselves are cursed.
[Shatner] Why would this rugged terrain be considered cursed?
While some dismiss the idea as purely superstition,
folklore tells a compelling story where,
for nearly 500 years,
this untamed wilderness is said to be the hiding place
for the treasure of Atahualpa,
the last great king of the Incan Empire.
In 1532, Spanish conquistadors
captured the Inca King Atahualpa.
And in order to try to save his own life,
he told them that he would give them
a huge amount of gold and silver.
And the Spanish agreed that if he provided
all this precious metal,
then they would let him live.
[Hyland] Atahualpa's known
as the Last King of the Incas.
He was believed to have the essence of the divine,
like the other Inca Emperors.
So, for him to be seized and held for ransom
was just unthinkable in the Inca Empire.
We think the local people
gave up over 16,000 pounds of gold
and over 30,000 pounds of silver.
We think that the value of his ransom was probably
up to $5 billion in today's money.
And yet, the Spanish betray him.
Atahualpa pays the ransom,
and he's still killed by the Spanish.
Virtually every Spanish chronicler
tells us the same story.
The largest caravan of gold and silver
never made it to the Spaniards.
This was a caravan that was amassed
by Atahualpa's primary general.
His name was Rumiñahui,
and his caravan supposedly had
about 30,000 pounds of gold
and 20,000 pounds of silver.
So, this is an enormous, enormous amount of wealth.
And when Rumiñahui found out
that Atahualpa was executed, he turned around.
And this would have been in Ecuador.
Many, many people believe
that Rumiñahui hid the treasure
in the Llanganates Mountains.
But unfortunately, Rumiñahui was also killed by the Spanish,
and so no one, we believe,
was able to go back and get the treasure.
So the treasure became cursed because it represents
the bloody betrayal of the Spanish.
At least, that's what many people believe.
[Shatner] Do the Llanganates Mountains
in Ecuador hide an Inca treasure
worth billions of dollars?
And if so, could it be protected by a curse?
Perhaps,
because the Incas believed that their gold and silver
was much more than mere currency.
The Inca had a very different attitude
to gold than the Spanish.
As far as the Spanish were concerned,
they'd just melt down anything they found
made of gold into bars
and ship it back on galleons to Spain.
But for the Inca,
fashioning sacred items,
representations of their gods,
out of gold made these representations
imbued with power.
[Hyland] Gold was considered the sweat of the Sun,
and the silver was considered the tears of the Moon.
It must have left people heartbroken
to despoil their temples and their palaces
of their greatest riches in order to save the life
of their emperor. And so,
the betrayal when the Spanish killed him anyway
must have been incredible.
[Shatner] Did the Incas cast a supernatural curse
on anyone who dared to find
the remaining sacred objects in these mountains?
The rumor was not enough to stop many
from hunting for the legendary stash of gold.
In 1860, an English botanist
named Richard Spruce discovered a mysterious map
while on an expedition in Ecuador,
and allegedly, it held clues
to the secret location of the lost treasure.
[Hyland] Spruce eventually published this map,
and Spruce's publication is really the main basis
for this treasure hunt.
In the 19th century, there was an English sailor
who was named Barth Blake.
Spruce sent copies of the map to Blake.
And according to the story,
Blake brought back 18 pieces of the treasure,
which he was able to take
to the British museum and get authenticated.
And then, he decided to raise money
to have a whole expedition to go back and get the treasure.
But on his return journey,
he mysteriously disappeared
overboard and died.
And a lot of people think that maybe that was the curse.
[French] There are numerous expeditions
down the centuries to try
to recover this lost gold.
Although they all claimed that they had
an idea of where the gold was,
they never actually found the gold.
And typically, they disappeared.
So, this has obviously reinforced the idea
that the gold was cursed in the first place.
[Shatner] No one can say for sure
whether the treasure of Atahualpa is hiding
in the mountains of Ecuador,
but perhaps it's best to respect the power
of the Llanganates Mountains and its legendary curse.
When I'm in a village in the Andes,
living with local people,
and when they bring out one of their sacred objects to me
that they believe has power,
I believe what they're telling me.
And I wouldn't want to be someone
who is disrespecting that,
because I don't know what would happen to me if I did that.
If the lost treasure of the last sovereign Incan Emperor
is still hiding in the mountains of Ecuador,
protected for eternity by a deadly curse,
then perhaps it's best to leave it alone.
But there's another type of spell,
one that can drive a man to madness
by simply using
words.
[Shatner reads on-screen text]
[Shatner] This historic settlement dates back
an estimated 4,000 years.
But most famously, it was once
the ancient Roman city of Carrhae.
Here, in 53 BC, Roman general
Marcus Licinius Crassus
readied 40,000 soldiers
to march against the Parthian Empire,
Rome's greatest rival to the east.
But before the battle would begin,
some believe the army's fate was already sealed
by a deadly curse.
The ancient Romans took curses very, very seriously.
There was a Roman tribune called Gaius Ateius Capito.
And he was well known for
really strongly opposing the Parthian war.
This campaign was being headed by Marcus Crassus.
So openly, formally, in public, at the city gates,
as Crassus was rallying his troops
and getting ready to march,
Ateius stood by the city gates
and called on the gods of the underworld,
called on the destruction of Crassus.
So, he was calling a curse
on Crassus to prevent the war from going ahead.
Crassus' soldiers begged Crassus to reconsider.
Such was the power of the belief in the curse.
But Crassus ignored them,
went ahead, marched for Parthia,
and lost at the Battle of Carrhae.
And in the aftermath, Crassus lost his life.
[McMahon] Those few survivors who returned
beleaguered, trudging back
through the gates of Rome in disgrace,
believed that their misfortune
had been caused by this curse levied on them.
So the curse comes true big-time.
[Shatner] The Battle of Carrhae is widely considered
one of the most crushing military losses
in Roman history.
But was a spoken curse
really the cause of this devastating defeat?
[Picknett] It's believed that the curse spoken
has a very special power,
especially if you know the name of somebody
or the name of something.
You're naming the person.
You're focusing on them.
You're getting all the unseen forces behind you
to focus on that person, and it won't be good for them.
[Shatner] Throughout history,
spoken curses have been feared
not simply as insults or threats, but as weapons.
In ancient Egypt, sacred words were believed
to protect the dead.
In medieval Europe,
legends speak of condemned men
cursing kings and popes to their death.
And in Central Australia,
deadly spoken curses were carried out
by a ritual executioner
known as the Kurdaitcha man.
[Houlbrook] So, in Aboriginal cultures of Central Australia,
the Kurdaitcha man was a ritual enforcer of sacred law,
and he would target anybody who transgressed, so anybody
who broke the moral code.
And he would do this by pointing a sharpened bone
at whoever had broken the law
and invoking curses that could cause the death
of whoever it was aimed at.
[Picknett] And the bone pointing
and the verbal cursing has an astonishing effect.
The person will sicken and die,
often really quickly, within days.
And they haven't been touched by a weapon.
All they've had is somebody chanting at them
and pointing a sharpened bone.
[McMahon] The bone pointing curse was given recognition
by both the legal and medical authorities
in the early 20th century in Australia,
and the reason for that was that the curse did appear to work.
People actually died with no logical reason.
[Shatner] Australian newspapers suggest bone pointing
was still in practice in 1935.
And authorities tried to stop these deadly ritual curses
because they truly believed they had the power to kill.
So, what was really going on?
In the early 20th century,
there's an anthropologist, a medical doctor in Australia
called Dr. Herbert Basedow,
and he investigates the bone pointing curse
to try and get to grips with what's going on here.
And he comes up with the concept of psychogenic death,
which is that, as a result of the curse,
there's a kind of total organ failure,
total collapse of the body,
but for no observable reason.
There's no disease, there's no attack.
The individual who has been cursed
simply gives up the will to live.
[Shatner] Can profound belief in a deadly curse
result in one's death?
While it's still open to debate,
many believe that the mind alone
does have the power to kill.
There are documented cases of people dying having been cursed,
and this probably is related to
the effects of the belief in the Kurdaitcha.
It only works if the person who is cursed
believes in the curse.
Now, in that situation, that is obviously incredibly stressful.
We know from lots of psychological research
that when animals and people
are in situations of great stress,
it can cause them to lose their appetite,
it can cause heart problems, and ultimately,
it appears that it maybe can actually really kill people.
Can words...
really be the instrument of an executioner?
In the case of the Kurdaitcha man,
some believe the answer is yes.
But there's another curse
that plagued residents of a small town
and left many wondering if what they were experiencing
was a trick of the mind
or something truly supernatural.
[Shatner reads on-screen text]
[Shatner] This quiet, pastoral town in the far north of England
originally dates back to 674 AD.
But about 50 years ago,
a pair of eerie, allegedly cursed artifacts
were discovered in this charming community.
They are known as the Hexham Heads.
In 1971, we get a very strange story
where Colin and Leslie Robson
claimed to have found these strange heads
in their garden in the town of Hexham.
And they also claimed that, in the house,
those two little heads unleashed poltergeist-related activity.
And this became a major tabloid newspaper story at the time.
[Fisher] The people living in the house
begin to report nightmares,
vague shapes, shadows,
movements in the house.
This then escalated to more
physical manifestations of
chaos and disturbance.
Unexplained fires.
Objects moving around the house.
Violent mood swings.
As they thought about this
progression of
strange, troubling behavior,
the only thing they could connect it to
was the unearthing of these heads.
[Ocker] The heads were eventually given to a researcher
named Anne Ross,
and while she had the heads in her possession,
she started seeing werewolves.
And then her daughter started seeing werewolves.
Once these weird things started happening at their house,
the media got wind of it,
and so the media showed up and started doing articles.
All because of these two little stone heads.
[Shatner] According to some experts,
the eerie stone figures found in the Robsons' yard
appeared to be what's known as "Guardian Heads"
in Celtic folklore.
They date back as far as 500 BC,
and were often positioned on buildings
and wells or thresholds
as a form of protection.
But if the heads were indeed ancient Celtic objects,
why would the family that unearthed them
be the receivers of a terrible curse?
[Houlbrook] The ancient Celtic religion
revered the human head
as a symbol of divinity and as a seat of the soul.
But there's also the belief
that objects that are associated with people
can also take on the qualities, the attributes of that person.
So if an object was associated with a strong person,
that object takes on that strength.
But also, same with evil.
So if a person is evil, then that object
becomes evil through their association with that person.
[Fisher] Across cultures, to bury something
is to create a boundary and to seal it.
So there's some thought that you could bury heads,
like the Hexham Heads,
as a way of sealing off
the power of that evil presence
from everyday life.
[Shatner] Is it possible that these stone totems
released some kind of evil presence
after they were discovered?
To this day, many are questioning
if the ruckus was merely a hoax
or are the Hexham Heads genuinely cursed objects?
What the Hexham Heads are, to this day, we don't know.
And unfortunately, we may never know, because at some point,
they disappeared. Nobody knows
where the Hexham Heads are today.
But they are interesting because
all that weird phenomenon that happened
didn't happen until they were found.
[Fisher] The question is, when you excavate
or remove things from their proper place,
does this have unintended consequences?
Does this unleash power in the world
in the form of curses, malevolent powers
that would have been best
left locked away and buried?
What happens when we disturb things
from their resting place?
[McMahon] The thing about the Hexham Heads
is that this is the kind of curse story
that has mass appeal
because it could happen to any of us.
We don't have to be in an ancient temple
or a pyramid or some kind of historical site.
We can just be at home and find a cursed item
that's been left there by people in the past.
♪ ♪
[Shatner reads on-screen text]
[Shatner] Almost 2,000 years ago,
this Roman city fell victim
to one of the most traumatic natural disasters in history...
...when the eruption of nearby Mount Vesuvius
blasted the area with toxic gases...
...and entombed the citizens in a thick blanket of ash,
leaving all eerily frozen
at the moment of their deaths.
[French] Vesuvius erupted in 79 AD,
and it appears that it probably took less than
20 minutes for all the inhabitants
of Pompeii to be wiped out.
It wasn't the lava that wiped them out,
it was the dust and gas cloud
that was a consequence of the eruption
that basically suffocated them.
But what the volcanic debris did do,
it preserved a lot of the people
and the objects that were around,
so that we can still go and see them today.
[Shatner] Each year, millions of
tourists from around the world arrive in Pompeii to get
an up-close look at this archaeological time capsule.
While it's a marvel to walk in the ruins of ancient Pompeii,
some visitors take more than memories
home with them when they depart.
Pompeii is one of the most vivid examples
of sudden chaos and destruction
in human history.
Yet, for decades,
visitors who come to the park
secretly take mementos home with them.
Bits of fresco,
rock, small things that they can grab,
they haul off.
Here's where the story gets even more fascinating.
Interestingly enough,
something that we see happening
on a regular basis
is people mailing the things that they have stolen
back to Pompeii.
[Houlbrook] Pompeii receives many, many parcels in the post
of objects that people genuinely believe are cursed.
"We're sorry for taking them.
Please take them back so that the curse is broken."
One Latin American tourist sent just a stone back,
saying that his family had known
"nothing but trauma after trauma"--
that's a quote-- "since taking that stone from Pompeii.
So here, have it back."
There are hundreds and hundreds of examples of this.
[Shatner] Is there any real harm hidden
in a small piece of the ruins of Pompeii?
If it's true that these otherwise ordinary artifacts
have the power to curse those that take them,
the question is why?
[Houlbrook] Pompeii itself
isn't just an archaeological site.
It is, essentially, a mass grave
that witnessed a terrible, violent tragedy
where so many people,
thousands of people, lost their lives suddenly,
and then didn't experience the real kind of burial rituals
that were supposed to be enacted at that time.
[Ocker] Ancient Romans believed that disturbing the dead
would cause these spirits, called "Manes,"
to inflict bad fortune
on whoever did that disturbing.
So, what could be happening here
is that people who take things from Pompeii
are literally disturbing the dead
and inviting that, you know, bad fortune into their life.
[French] Certainly, people might feel some guilt
for what they've done
when they'd kind of reflected on it later.
If you believe that your life is cursed,
you tend to focus only on the bad stuff.
[Shatner] So, what do we think?
Are ancient curses real,
or are they simply misfortunes
suffered by those who believe in them?
[Ocker] Do ancient curses really have power,
and that power just continues throughout history, or
are they kept alive through our stories about the artifacts?
And those ideas, those narratives,
are what gives them power in modern day?
[Houlbrook] There is a desire to understand
when things feel chaotic, when we can't know a reason
for why we're suffering.
We want to be able to rationalize.
And if we can rationalize it,
perhaps we can control it.
So, I think as long as there are humans
who want to understand why things are happening to them,
there will be belief in curses.
Can an object or a place
be imbued with dark energy
that causes harm or afflictions?
Or are we psychologically swayed
to believe in evil invocations
based on fear and superstitions?
The fact that hexes have haunted the human imagination
for thousands of years is a testament
to their enduring power.
And while stories of cursed jewels,
damned lost treasures and deadly legends
continue to captivate us,
the question of what is truly supernatural,
or merely our minds playing tricks on us,
may forever remain unexplained.
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