11 Famous Historical Families With Eerie Curses You Can't Deny

Throughout history, there have been stories of curses within certain cultures, such as ancient Egyptian curses, where tragedy and death run rampant. There have even been tales of cursed families that experience an eerie, looming darkness for generations. Strange events and coincidences have been documented within family trees that suggest a greater evil at work. It appears that with fame and money comes the risk of being cursed. 

You can't help but wonder about families who have suffered weird deaths throughout generations, especially when it comes to mysterious political deaths - is there something more sinister at work? There's something that plagues these families, causing an abhorrent amount of suicide, mental illnesses, and death. Come take a look at some cursed families throughout history and discover their bone-chilling misfortunes. 

The House of Habsburg seriously suffered. Historically, the family has been on the wrong end of not one, but two curses.

One curse actually originated with a gift in the 11th century. A man named Count von Altenbourg built a sanctuary for ravens called Vulture Mountain. About 100 years later, some Habsburg family members made some renovations to the tower that the ravens were not too fond of. The ravens began attacking members of the Habsburg family and so the family killed the birds.

From then on, ravens were always spotted at the tragedies that befell the Habsburg family members, such as Marie Antoinette, Duchess d'Alencon, Archduchess Charlotte, and her husband Maximillian. 

The second curse was placed on the Habsburg family by Countess Karolyi in 1848 when Francis Joseph of Austria was violently quelling the Hungarian rebellion. The Countess' son was part of a group of Hungarian rebels that was captured and held hostage. The rebels promised that the prisoners' lives would be spared at the cost of their freedom. However, the prisoners were executed despite this promise.

The Countess then placed a curse on Francis Joseph that came to fruition in time. His wife and son were murdered, his nephew was assassinated, and the empire was consumed by conflict. 

The Grimaldi family was one of the most powerful names in Genoa. They eventually became the foundation and royal family for Monaco by the end of the 12th century. The Grimaldis were supposedly cursed by a witch in the 13th century. The curse came after Lord Rainier I raped a young woman who later learned the ways of witchcraft. She used her knowledge of the dark arts to make sure that a Grimaldi would never find happiness in marriage.

This curse may have manifested into something far more sinister, considering Princess Grace died in a 1982 car accident. Her daughter, who sustained injuries in the accident, lived on to have a failed marriage and other failed relationships. Stephanie’s older sister, Caroline, also had her fair share of failed marriages and relationships.

Gorakhnath was a yogi in the 11th century who supposedly had supernatural powers. He was said to have been the protector of Gorkha, which is where King Gyanendra's forefathers came from.

Legend has it that the first king of a unified Nepal, Prithvi Narayan Shah, once came into contact with the yogi in the forest and offered him some food. The yogi accepted the food, chewed it up, and then spit it out. Gorakhnath told the king to eat it, but the king refused. The food ended up dropping to the ground and, because of this disrespectful action, the yogi concluded that the kingdom would cease to exist after ten generations.

In 2001, Prince Dipendra of the royal family killed his parents and shot seven other people before attempting suicide. Dipendra was crowned king by default while in a coma, but soon died. Dipendra was the tenth generation of royalty and his death marked an eerie manifestation of Gorakhnath's curse. 

The Kennedy family was wrought with heartaches and mysterious deaths for many generations. In the late '40s, Joseph Kennedy Jr. and Kathleen Kennedy Cavendish both died in plane crashes. Rosemary Kennedy, born in 1941, died in 2005 after years of psychiatric struggles. She received a lobotomy as an attempt to cure her developmental disabilities.

John F. Kennedy was supposed to turn the family’s luck around and things were looking up when he was elected president. However, his presidency ended in tragedy when he was assassinated in 1963. Five years following JFK’s assassination, his younger brother, Robert Kennedy, was murdered in Los Angeles by a lone gunman named Sirhan Sirhan.

Two of Robert Kennedy’s children would die in tragic incidents, one in the '80s of cocaine overdose and one in the '90s in a skiing accident. The curse continued through 1999, when JFK’s son, JFK Jr., died in a plane crash. Onboard with JFK Jr. was his wife and his wife’s sister, who also perished.

In 1957, J. Paul Getty had a 10-digit bank account after finding oil in the Neutral Zone between Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. Later, he saw the suicide of his oldest son and the overdose of his daughter-in-law. Getty's grandson was kidnapped and had one of his ears chopped off by Italian gangsters. In 1981, the grandson had a stroke which left him as a paraplegic who was partially blind with a speech impediment. The curse showed itself again in 2015 when Andrew Getty died of a mysterious death. 

The origin of the so called "Agnelli Curse" is unknown, but the misfortune surrounding the Agnelli family is prominent enough that people have referred to the them as the Kennedys of Italy. Gianni Agnelli, born 1921, became a wildly successful businessman in the automobile industry as the primary shareholder of Fiat, but with his riches came something sinister. 

Gianni's father died in a plane crash when he was a young teen. Ten years later, Gianni himself almost died in an automobile accident, but survived only to see his brother Giorgio die at age 35. Gianni also saw his aunt, Ancieta Nasi, perish while giving birth. His son, Edoardo, who was a drug addict known affectionately as Crazy Eddie, committed suicide in 2000. The automobile genius even witnessed the loss of his nephew, Giovanni. Gianni eventually passed away in 2003. 

Clarence Edmonds Hemingway was born in 1871 and died by his own hand at his home in 1928. This suicide was the first of a series of suicides within the family tree. His son, the prolific writer Ernest Hemingway, also ended his own life by shooting himself in the head with a shotgun at the age of 62. Ernest's younger brother, Leicester, died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound in 1982.

Their sister, Ursula Hemingway Jepson, took her own life in 1966 by overdosing on pills. The granddaughter of Ernest Hemingway, Mariel Hemingway, was born after Ernest's notable suicide. Mariel grew up with alcoholic parents, yet managed to make a name for herself as an actress. She explored her family's grim legacy in two novels and is also plagued by the family's curse of mental illness. 

Mariel's mother, Byra, died of cancer in 1988 and her father, Jack, died in late 2000 after heart surgery. Her older sister, Margaux, battled depression and addiction throughout her life and her drug dependence ultimately led to an overdose on barbiturates in her early 40s. Mariel's younger sister, Muffet, was a schizophrenic and heavy drug user in her teen years. 

Arthur Guinness was born in Kildare, Ireland, in 1725 and he crafted the beer that made him rich in 1759. After he married in 1761, Guinness and his wife had 21 children - 11 of whom died before they reached adulthood. However, this isn’t considered the beginning of the curse because life expectancies were quite low in the 16th century. Whispers of a curse surrounding the Guinnesses began when his family started suffering from unnatural deaths, suicides, and alcoholism.

One of Guinness's grandchildren fell into alcoholism and two more were committed to mental institutions. In the mid 1950s, his descendant Lord Moyne was killed by terrorists and his son's wife, Diana Mitford, left him and their children. In 1966, Patrick Browne ran a red light and died as he struck a van. In 1978, Henrietta Guinness was injured in a car crash with her boyfriend. She then went to Italy in her mid-thirties and jumped off a bridge.

In the '70s, Dennys Guinness was arrested and charged for waving a firearm at someone, but was found dead soon after he returned to his home on bail. That same year, John Guinness was in a car accident and one of his sons was killed while another was injured. Paul Channon’s daughter, Olivia, died from a drug overdose in 1986. Robert Hesketh also died of an overdose in '04, followed by Count Gottfried in '07. 

In 1958, Jack Adkisson joined an organization called Klondike Wrestling and, with the help of Stu Hart, created the alter ego Fritz Von Erich. The Von Erich family curse started just a year later in 1959, when Jack's young son died from electrocution in an accident.

Jack had other sons who went on to become successful wrestlers. David was the next to experience great loss in the family when his newborn baby girl died within hours of her birth. David himself died of a heart attack in 1984. Mike sustained a shoulder injury in 1985 and contracted toxic shock syndrome just days after his shoulder surgery. He suffered brain damage as a result and sunk into poor mental health, exacerbated by substance abuse.

In '86, Kerry was in a motorcycle accident that would lead to the eventual amputation of his foot. Mike committed suicide in April of '87. The youngest son, Chris, dealt with many health issues that ultimately became too much for him to bare and he took his own life in 1991. In 1992, Jack and his wife divorced and Kerry shot himself in the heart in '93. In 1997, Jack succumbed to brain and lung cancer. 

The Wadiyar curse was placed on Raja Wadiyar of the Mysore Kingdom by Alamelamma in the early 15th century. Alamelamma was the wife of King Tirumalaraja, who ruled the Vijayanagar Empire before Wadiyar came into power. Alamelamma fled from Wadiyar, taking her jewels to a nearby town called Talakadu. She spoke a three-part curse before jumping to her death in the Kaveri River.

The curse condemned Talakadu to become a barren desert land and for Malangi to become plagued by whirlpools. It also swore that the kings of the Wadiyar family would not have children to take over the throne. While the curse has not played out exactly as Alamelamma detailed before her death, it has come eerily close to complete fruition. Talakadu has become a desert, the river near Malangi commonly sees whirlpools, and the Wadiyar family has only birthed male children in alternate generations.