The 6 Most Strangely Convincing Real-Life Curses

The world is full of bullshit "curses" that turn out to be retroactive prophecy or outright fabrication.

But there are a few eerie coincidences out there that combine the truly inexplicable with creepy details that make you have to wonder ...

Oetzi, or the Iceman as he is known, was discovered in the Alps between Austria and Italy back in 1991. In the 13 years that followed, seven people associated with his discovery died. In some cases, the deaths seem like your standard, run-of-the-mill demises, but four of them are creepily violent or odd enough to make the other three seem like maybe the 5,300 year old leather hunter may have a bone to pick with the people who unearthed him and then played Operation with his remains.

Oetzi: made of evil. And Beef Jerky.

The first death occurred in 1992 when Rainer Henn, the forensic pathologist who put Oetzi in a body bag with his bare hands, was killed in a car crash on his way to a world conference to discuss the Iceman. Next, Kurt Fritz, the mountain guide who lead Henn to Oetzi, and subsequently uncovered Oetzi's face, died in an avalanche. Guy number three, the man who filmed the recovery of Oetzi, died of a brain tumor.

These gentlemen are presumably boned as well

The list gets creepier: Helmut Simon, who with his wife was the person who actually found the Iceman in the first place, went missing for 8 days in 2004. When his body was found he was laying face down in a stream, where he had landed after falling off a 300 foot cliff. Dieter Warnecke, the head of the rescue team that found Helmut, dropped dead of a heart attack an hour after Helmut's funeral.

Dead guy number six, Konrad Spindler, bit the dust from complications arising from having Multiple Sclerosis six months after he was quoted as saying "I think it's a load of rubbish. It is all a media hype. The next thing you will be saying I will be next."

While he may not believe in curses, Konrad would probably agree that irony is a scientific fact.

The seventh and final death (so far) was in 2005: Tom Loy, a scientist who discovered human blood on Oetzi's clothes and weapons, died of a hereditary blood disease. This would normally be considered nothing more than a natural death if it weren't for the fact that his condition was diagnosed in 1992, the year he started working with the Iceman. By all accounts you may be endangering yourself just by reading this article.

Evidence shows that the Iceman met with a violent end himself, having been shot with an arrow before having his head bashed in. So basically Oetzi was an ancient murder victim left in the mountains to mummify in an unmarked grave. We're pretty sure that if curses are real, that's the kind of shit that causes them.

Of course, if you want a true, large-scale Mummy-type curse, you need a really horrifying backstory. Which brings us to the cursed tomb of Timur.

After assuming the title of Great Khan in 1369, Timur launched a horrific campaign from Persia to Southern Russia that would have made his great grandfather Genghis proud -- right down to the pyramid of 70,000 human skulls he built in north India, presumably because he was tired of carrying them around.

"Just pile them all here. Somebody will get them."

When Timur died in 1405, he was interred in the Gur-e Amir complex of Samarkand, Uzbekistan. A huge green jade slab which had once served as the throne for Kabek Khan was placed over his tomb and covered with Arabic text about how awesome it is to be Mongol, and, just to make sure nobody messed with Timur's bones down the road, the words "When I arise from the grave, the world will tremble", which is eerily reminiscent of Vigo's prophecy in Ghostbusters II.

Sure enough, in 1941, Stalin dispatched Soviet archeologist Mikhail Mikhaylovich Gerasimov to excavate Timur's gravesite, we're guessing to one-up the Nazis' recent archeological breakthroughs at Tanis and Iskenderun.

According to Kaumov, local Uzbek elders were understandably upset about the excavation: "These old men showed me a book saying that the tomb of Timur should not be opened, otherwise a war could be provoked. I was young at the time and not too wise. I did not pay too much attention to this event. On 21 June we removed the skull of Timur. Then, on the 22 June the war with the Germans began."

Skull magic = World War II.

In other words, less than 24 hours after opening the tomb that threatened to "make the world tremble" if disturbed, Stalin's men saw Hitler launch Operation Barbarossa: the largest and most brutal invasion of WWII.

After losing millions of Soviet soldiers and civilians, the Russians finally returned Timur to his tomb with full Islamic burial rights on December 20, 1942. At the same time on the opposite side of the country, Operation Winter Storm, the last German attempt to escape destruction at Stalingrad, failed decisively.

"GIVE ME BACK MY FUCKING SKUUUUUULL!"

To be clear, it is the official position of Cracked.com that curses do not exist. Still, to be safe, stay the hell away from Timur's tomb. Oh, and maybe send some flowers to the archeologist who had the brilliant idea of restoring Timur's remains just in time to prevent the Nazis from winning WWII... whoever he may be.

Although you may not be familiar with the term, the "27 Club" is packed to the gills with a few people you've almost definitely heard of. Recognize these faces?

From left to right, they are Brian Jones, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison and Kurt Cobain. All five are famous not only for being iconic voices of their generation and culture, they are also equally famous for buying the farm in various rock star ways.

Oh, and they were all the same age when it happened: 27.

Jones drowned in a pool, Hendrix famously asphyxiated on his own puke, Joplin od'ed on heroine, Morrison probably went the same way, and Cobain shot himself in the face (OK, so maybe he was cheating a little). But keep in mind, those are only the 5 most famous cases.

"Eh, I still think it was a good investment."

In fact, there are 41 members of the so-called 27 club, dating all the way back to Alexandre Levy, who died in January of 1892. Then Louis Chauvin, a ragtime musician, died in 1908 of Neurosyphillitic sclerosis, showing that even back in the day, musicians had unprotected sex with anything that couldn't outrun them.

And then there's Robert Johnson, the man credited as inventing the blues, who died at 27 in 1938. There's an old legend that Johnson sold his soul to the Devil to be able to make great music, so presumably the Devil figured 27 was a good age to collect.

The most recent person on the list, a popular Zambian musician named Lily Tembo, died in September of 2009. So if you are a musician in your twenties, you may want to go back to that job pulling hair out of the pool drains at the YMCA for a few years before you try for that big break. There is somewhat of a silver lining to all of this in the sense that none of these stars lived long enough to become caricatures of themselves in their autumn years.