Cursed Objects: Strange but True Stories of the World's Most Infamous Items by J.W. Ocker

Author:J.W. Ocker [Ocker, J.W.]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Tags: Adult, Horror, Illustrated, Supernatural, Nonfiction, History
ISBN: 9781683692379
Publisher: Quirk Books
Published: 2020-08-31T23:00:00+00:00

The story of the cursing stone of carlisle, england, should be a straightforward one. It’s a stone with a curse engraved on its surface. Sounds pretty standard for a cursed object, right? But it’s actually a weird story, one that has both ancient and contemporary chapters, is rooted in history and art and tragedy and superstition, and illustrates, perhaps better than any other entry in this book, how powerful the concept of a cursed object is for us imaginative apes.

The story starts in the latter centuries of Europe’s medieval period. The constant warring between England and Scotland created a border zone that was inhospitable to the English and Scottish farmers who call that borderland home. So those farmers beat their plowshares into swords and became reivers (or raiders). These border reivers were born of violence, and they caused even more, donning light armor, picking up lances and bows and shields, mounting horses, and plundering both Scot and Sassenach alike. Things got so bad, there was talk among the English of repairing Hadrian’s Wall, a defensive fortification built about 1,400 years earlier by the Roman Empire.

And though the reivers pissed off a lot of people, no one was angrier than Gavin Dunbar, the Archbishop of Glasgow. In 1525, he penned a 1,069-word curse against the reivers and had it read in churches all over the island. Here’s a snippet:

I denounce, proclaim and declare to all and sundry, that the committing of the said pointless murders and slaughtering of innocents, burnings, cattle rustling, plundering, thefts and despoiling; both openly in the daylight and under silence of night, as well as within Church property and on Church land; together with their partakers, assistants, suppliers, knowing receivers of their persons, the goods burnt and stolen by them, or any part thereof, and the counsellors and defenders of their evil deeds are generally cursed, loathed, detested, denounced and collectively cursed with the great cursing.

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