Before we get into the scary stuff, this blog post must start with a disclaimer: Amidon does not sell cursed jewels. Our jewels are 100 percent lucky. We bring you this special Halloween edition for entertainment purposes only.   But not everybody is so fortunate as Amidon shoppers. Throughout history, certain gems have earned rumors of curses. Whether that’s due to bad publicity, jealousy on the jewelry-deprived hordes or truth, we’ll leave you, dear reader, to decide.

The Black Orlov Diamond

  Anybody who saw the “Brady Bunch” episode where Bobby thinks taking a tiki statue from Hawaii will bring him good luck will know better than to mess with other cultures’ religious statues. However, way back before TV was invented, somebody stole the diamond eye from a Brahma statue in Pondicherry, India. The subsequent owners of the Black Orlov diamond jumped to their deaths: one American from a New York skyscraper, and two Russian princesses from buildings in Rome.  

Koh-i-Noor Diamond

  This 186 ¹⁄₁₆ carat diamond seems to be sexist, favoring women over men. The Koh-i-Noor was mined inIndia. In 1850, it came into possession of the British royal family and became part of the crown jewels. While the women wear it without incident, every man who’s worn the Koh-i-Noor has lost his thrown. You can see it displayed in the Tower of London.     Hope Diamond   The Hope diamond may be as unlucky as it is big and beautiful. Rumors abound about this stone, including that it, too, was stolen from a Hindu religious statue. Many owners suffered bad fates, including a variety of murders and suicides and accidents. Marie Antoinette had the stone for a while, before she lost her head.     The Delhi Purple Sapphire    Writer Edward Heron-Allen, who owned the Purple Delhi Sapphire, believed so strongly in the cursedness of this stone that he sealed it up and sent it to the family banker with strict instructions to do nothing with it until three years after his death. He included a note with the gem suggesting whoever opened it should cast it into the sea. The stone is really a quartz, not a sapphire. This stone, too, is rumored to originally have been looted from an Indian temple during a bloody mutiny in 1857. Heron-Allen claimed it brought terrible misfortune to him and his friends.           Lessons Learned   From this blog post, we hope you take away a few main points:

• Don’t raid temples

• Buy curse-free gems from Amidon

• Have a fun and safe Halloween