A Jewel Worth Dying For

Have you ever traveled to another country? Maybe no one spoke the same language as you, Maybe there were some cultural differences you had to get used to. How did you feel? Were you excited? Scared? Maybe you stumbled upon natural beauty like nothing you've ever seen in your own country. If you had the chance to bring some of that beauty home with you, would you and how far would you go to get your hands on it? A jewel thief from the seventeenth century must have asked himself that same question. In the Gaconda region of India, there was once a Hindu temple honoring the goddess Ceda. She's a deity known for her purity and sacrifice. The temple honored Seda with the statue. Its eyes were made of diamonds, and diamonds are sacred in Hinduism. The jewel thief didn't care about angering the gods, though, or maybe his greed got the best of them. Maybe this diamond was just that beautiful. In any case, when the thief sneaked into the temple and stole one of Cida's diamond eyes straight from its socket, nothing happened. Excited with its new treasure, the thief walk right out of the temple, but the moment when he stepped over the threshold, no longer inside the sacred place, he dropped dead. The story of a jewel thief's sudden death was told again and again over the years. It became very popular in the twentieth century and it still talked about today. But the first person to ever tell it was a French gem merchant named Jean Baptiste Tavernier. He wrote about it in his sixteen seventy eight autobiography. His job had taken him all over the world, and on his travels, Jean Baptiste collected diamonds and other precious jewels. He would then sell these back home in France, and at the time, India was the only place in the world where diamonds could be found. But one of these diamonds would travel all over the globe, gaining a reputation for causing misery to everyone who owned it. The world would come to know this cursed gem as the Hope Diamond. In today's episode, I'm going to tell you all about this cursed object from the beginning its origins to today. Why has it gone through so many hands and why do so many people believe that this beautiful blue gem is cursed. My name is Edwin, and here's a horror story. In the mid seventeenth century, Jean Baptiste Taviagner was traveling in the Golcondo region of India. Like I mentioned earlier, Kalkonda started as a military forge in the eleventh century, and by the seventeenth century it was better known for its diamond mind. A lot of famous diamonds have been found there, including the Kohinor, which is also said to be cursed. According to legend, the conor brings limitless power to any man who wears it, but that power will also come with great misfortune. Only gods and women can wear it without suffering. The curves of the Hope diamond isn't like that. Though it affects men, women, children, the victims of the curves seem to only have one thing in common greed. It was, after all, greed that pushed them to want to possess the Hope diamond. But what makes it so special? Diamonds are valuable enough on their own, but blue diamonds are even more rare. They get their color from traces of boron and their molecular structure and boron isn't found where diamonds typically grow. That's how blue diamonds are different. You see, they just grow deep underground, like very deep in there, so deep that they grow right next to the ocean crust. Their boron atoms might be recycled from ancient oceans. And if that's not enough to give the Hope Diamond an air of mystery. It's also the only known blue diamond to glow red under ultra violet light. Most of them glow green. Scientists have concluded that the very few red glowing diamonds actually come from the Hope diamond. They are chunks of the original one hundred and fifteen carrot gem. But the average diamond buyer isn't going to know all that history. Maybe there's something else about this particular diamond, though, something supernatural that makes it irresistible. Jam Baptize was the first and a long line to give in to the Hope Diamond's mystical appeal. Of course, back then it wasn't called the Hope Diamond. Jampaptis actually named the jewel after himself, The Tavernier Blue, then sold it to King Louis the fourteenth along with over one thousand precious gems he bought while in India. Because the Taberney Blue was so rare, no one knows how jam Baptis got a hold of it. It's actually another mystery the rare diamond. The ruler of Golconda in India had the right to keep any diamond over one carrot, so the Tabernaiir Blue probably wouldn't have been accessible through trade. It's possible that jam Baptis could have gotten the diamond through his connections with Indian nobility. He had been crafting these relationships since the sixteen thirties when he first visited the Galconda mines. It's also possible that the diamond showed up on the black market and Jambaptis bodied illegally. The third possibility is that the story about the jewel thief that he wrote about in his autobiography was secretly a confession and he was a thief. Still, though it remains a mystery, all historians know for sure is that jam Baptis sold the Tavernair Blue to King Louis the fourteenth in sixteen sixty eight for what he goes to eight million dollars in today's money. On top of that Louis the fourteenth came Jambaptis, a title of nobility and some land. The gem merchant retired and should have lived happily ever after. Except that wasn't the end of Jean Baptiz's tale. In sixteen eighty five, Louis the fourteenth declared that all Protestants were to be exiled from France, and Jehn Baptis was a Protestant, and neither his money nor his title could save him from the royal decree. After his exile, John Baptis almost completely disappears from the history books. Most reports say that he was seen in Moscow in sixteen eighty nine, asking the Russian government for financial support. After all, he wanted to travel to India again. Was he trying to return to the diamond mind that had given him so much success decades earlier. Was he hoping to find another Tavernier blue. We'll never know. Moscow was the last place anyone saw him, dead or alive. Jean Baptist was certainly a victim of circumstance, but he may have been two. You see, there were so many moments when he could have brought on the diamond's wrath diamonds are sacred in Hinduism. If he stole the Taverney Blue, the gods might have exacted their revenge on John Baptize for his disrespect. It turns out that in Hindu tradition, cutting a diamond is bad luck. King Louis the fourteenth had the Tavernier Blue cut down to sixty seven carrots. Maybe he's selling the Taverner Blue to Louis the fourteenth and putting it in the position to be cut was enough for Jean Baptiste to suffer from the diamond's curse. Louis the fourteenth was an exempt from the curse either, his decision to cut the Taverner Blue now called French Blue, might have accidentally unleashed the curse. And that's because what followed was a chain of events that led to the misery of every future owner of the diamond. All Right, so I mentioned that when Louis the fourteenth got it, the Aabegne Blue diamond was cut into a triangle and renamed the French Blue. The diamond was proudly displayed at Versailles, and there it was one of the many symbols of the French crown's wealth. And power. But just like Jean Baptist Tabergner, no amount of wealth could protect Louis the fourteenth from the curse. About a decade after he purchased a French Blue, the king was at the height of his reign and the beginning of his slow, painful descent into ruin. The last three decades of the king's reign were marked by war, death of loved ones, and revolts from his subjects. It started with a choice to exile Jean Baptist and the other non Catholic Frenchman. This was one of his least popular policies. Although he did live to a respectable seventy six years old, still, Louis the fourteenth died full of regret. Some of his last words were how he wished he had been a more peaceful ruler. After he died, the French Blue was passed on to his grandson and successor, King Louis the fifteenth. Now Louis the fifteenth was only five years old when he inherited the throne. He lived until he was sixty four and died just as unpopular and hated as his grandfather. Someone even tried to kill him during his reign and his greatest legacy was leaving the monarchy vulnerable to the revolution that began during the next king's reign. So now it's time for Louis the sixteenth, and he had the worst luck of the three. He was a king during the French Revolution, he and his wife Marie Antoinette, faced a guillotine, one of the most violent and frightening ways to die. But the king and queen weren't the Hope Diamond's only victims. During the revolution. Marie Antoinette apparently loaned the diamond to her best friend, Princess Marie Therese Louise, so that she could wear it at parties, and that was enough for the curse to grab a hol the princess too. Not only was she decapitated like the rest of the royals, No, it was not enough. The revolutionaries impaled her head on a spike and then paraded it around the streets of Paris. After the revolution broke out, the crown jewels, including the Hope Diamond, were taken and displayed by the new French government. Now in public possession, the diamond's curse could have ended there, but in seventeen ninety two, the jewels were stolen. Most of them were eventually recovered, except for the French Blue, and it was missing until the year eighteen twelve, and when the whole diamond resurfaced, it had been cut a second time, from sixty seven carrots to its final forty five carrot form. Rumor has it that a Dutch jeweler named Wilhelm Falls was the one who cut it, and after he took it and cut it, the curse struck. Wilhelm's son, Hendrik, stole the diamond, and the grief of losing such a valuable and gorgeous gem was too much. It actually killed Wilhelm and Hendrick, his son, owed a lot of money to a man named Frances Blow. He stole his diamond from his own dad to pay off that debt. Some say Hendrick murdered his own father for the diamond and then killed himself after paying off Francis he couldn't live with the guilt. Francis Blue then took his new diamond to London jeweler Daniel Elison, but he met misfortune. Francis died of a fever before the sale could go through. He didn't get to enjoy any of the money he would have made and if this wasn't enough for the curse, Daniel also died. He killed himself, just like Hendrick. The diamond apparently wasn't done. He claimed four more victims. Over just a couple of decades after Daniel Ellison's death, the whereabouts of the diamond known. He might have found its way back to the hands of royalty. A portrait of King George the Fourth of England, painted in eighteen twenty two shows him wearing a bright blue diamond, the very same French diamond that brought so much misfortune to those who owned it before him. No one assure how it got to him, but some say it was through Caroline of Brunswick. Either way, some believe the curs got him too. When Georgia fourth died in eighteen thirty, he was in a lot of debt. The diamond, along with other jewels, were sold in an attempt to cover his debts. The diamond's next confirmed owner was a London banker named Henry Philip Hope, who gave the jewel the name it still has to this day, the Hope Diamond. It is unclear when Henry Philip bought the diamond, not long after it came into his hands the banking company went bankrupt. It only became public knowledge that he owned it in eighteen thirty nine. After his death. He died unmarried and without kids, so the Hope Diamond was passed onto one of his three nephews, Henry Thomas. He died at the early age of fifty four as the second hope to own the cursed object. The third hope to own it seemed to be the most unlucky. Lord Francis Hope inherited the family diamond in eighteen eighty four after his grandmother, the wife of Henry Thomas, had died. A decade later, he made American actress Mae Yohi. They fell in love and were married. The couple enjoyed a luxurious lifestyle, even though they were really not that rich. They were dundling their funds and growing dead to keep up with their lifestyle, and through all this financial struggle, Lord Francis managed to hang onto the Hope Diamond, but the curs caught up to him. In nineteen hundred, Francis and May went on a world tour and during the trip they met a US Army captain and May actually left Francis for him. A year later, Lord Francis Hope was out of options financially speaking. He was running out of money and he owed too much of it to too many people. He wanted to sell the diamond to pay all of it off, but his siblings didn't want him to, and finally, in nineteen oh one, he sold the Hope Diamond, but getting rid of it was not enough to end the misfortune. The year after that, Francis declared bankruptcy. He lost his foot in a hunting accident and officially divorced his wife. He ended up remarrying and living into his seventies, but he died poor, and so did his ex wife may. The Hope Diamond was allegedly bought and sold several times between nineteen oh one and nineteen oh nine, traveling the world and leaving tragedy in its wake. One of the diamond's owners during this stretch of time was a French banker who was said to go insane and then died by suicide. The owner after him was a Russian prince named Ivan Canitowski, who then gave the diamond to his lover, Mademoiselle Lawrence Laudieux, to wear on stage she was shot and died in the middle of the performance. The prince himself was stabbed to death by Russian revolutionaries the day after his girlfriend died. A Greek joel broker also owned the diamond. He sold it to a Persian diamond merchant. The very night he sold the diamond, though, the Greek accidentally drove off a cliff, killing himself, his wife, and their child. The Persian then sold the diamond to a representative of Dulhemy the Second, the Sultan of the Ottoman Empire. The sultan then gave the diamond to his favorite concubine, who was then stamped to death in a failed robbery. He was overthrown not long after this too. Then, the diamonds official polisher was wrongly accused of being an accomplice in stealing the jewel. Both he and the thief were tortured and executed. Abdolhemed was the Hope Diamond's last victim in this eight year period, and in nineteen oh eight, a revolutionary movement called the Young Turks led an uprising. Abdolhomed reluctantly accepted their demand to restore the constitution that he suspended thirty years earlier. The following year, he was forced to resign, and then he lived under house arrest until his death in nineteen eighteen. The Exultant didn't die in poverty like many of the Hope Diamonds other victims, but he did die as a disgraced leader, another common thread between all of the victims of the curse. The Hope Diamond's next notable owner was French jeweler Pierre Cartier. As a grandson of the Cartier Jewelry brand's founder, Pierre probably felt a lot of pressure to live up to his grandfather's legacy, and maybe that's why in nineteen ten he took a risk by purchasing the Hope Diamond for over two million dollars in today's money. If he could find the right buyer, then the Hope Diamond could be Pierre's greatest investment. Yet that is as if the curse didn't find him first. Pierre had a specific buyer in mind, American heiress Evelyn Walsh McLean. Evelyn was no stranger to luxury. Her father made his fortune through owning and operating a profitable Colorado gold mine around the turn of the century. The Walsh family home was more of a mansion had four floors and sixty rooms in the middle of Washington, d C. The top floor of the mansion had a ballroom where the Washes would host parties, often with hundreds of guests. They were friends with foreign nobility like King Leopold of Belgium and his son King Albert, as well as well as American politicians like Vice President Thomas Marshall, who served under Woodrow Wilson. Evelyn herself was close friends with Teddy Roosevelt's daughter Alice. Evelyn and her husband Edward ned McLean inherited the Walsh family home, although they spent most of their time at a second DC mansion. In short, the Walshes were like the American version of nobility, and on top of that, Evelyn called herself a lover of jewelry. Getting her to buy the Hope diamond should have been a piece of cake. But unfortunately for Pierre, Evelyn didn't make the sale easy on him. His first two sale attempts didn't go like he thought. She just didn't want it, but he kept trying. He put it in a necklace to make it more enticing. He even offered to let Evelyn give the gem a test run, he was finally able to seal the deal with Evelyn's husband. Ned paid one hundred and eighty thousand dollars about five million in today's money, and it was for a necklace with tiny silver diamonds framing the blue Hope Diamond. Ned's family was just as wealthy as Evelyn's. The mcleans owned the Washington Post, which had actually run an article about the Curse of the Hope Diamond a few years earlier. He became a cross as on the paper. Why would Ned risk cursing his own wife. Well, it turns out the Hope Diamond's legend worked in Pierre's favor. Evelyn believed that things that brought others bad luck had the opposite effect on her. She didn't think the curse would affect her. Maybe the diamond itself wanted Evelyn as its next victim, because when she brought the necklace home, she claims that it called to her, urging her to put it on. But the diamonds hold on Evelyn did not last. She must have decided that the curse of the Hope Diamond was more than she could handle and she didn't want it any more. But Pierre wasn't going to let her and Ned walk away. He and his brother went so far as to try to soothe the couple for breach of contract, and it wasn't until a full year later that Pierre finally received payment and could wash his hands of the Hope Diamond. Unfortunately, the lawsuit he started to cost Pierre Cartier to lose a lot of money. Still, Pierre didn't see the investment as a loss. He was glad to part ways from the curse. But regardless of it, Evelyn loved to wear the necklace and show it off, just like those who owned it before her. Evelyn's adult life was struck with plenty of tragedy. Her brother died young, she developed an addiction to morphine. Her husband became an alcoholic and cheated on her. He ended up in a mental institution where he ended up dying. Her firstborn son died in a car accident at only nine years old, and then her only daughter died of a drug over twenty five. Still, Evelyn wore the Hope Diamond proudly, even on her deathbed. Her granddaughter inherited the diamond after her passing. Not long after, she died at the same age as her mother twenty five years old. Two years later, in nineteen forty nine, her two living children sold the necklace to American jeweler Harry Winston. He traveled around the world, never believing in the curse. He ended up donating the diamond to the Smithsonian Institute in nineteen fifty eight. The curse, though, would still claim one final victim before the Hope Diamond reached its current resting place in the National Museum of Natural History. Mailman James Todd didn't believe in the curse. To him, the Hope Diamond was nothing more than an expensive package to be delivered. But within a year of making that delivery, James's wife died of a heart attack, his daughter was strangled to death by its own leash, his house caught on fire. He also suffered both a leg injury and a head injury in two different car accidents. It's easy to think of the Hope Diamond's curse has nothing more than greedy people getting the bad karma they deserve. After all, most of the Diamond's victims were wealthy kings, queens, members of the social elite. Of course, there were some exceptions, like Henry Phillip and Harry Thomas, those who owned the diamond for years without falling victim to the curse. What made them different from people like James Todd who barely touched the gem. It seems like the Hope Diamond plays by its own rules. Maybe it knows something about its victims that we don't. If greed is what unites all of those who came in touch with a diamond and the curse that comes with it, then maybe the safest place for the Hope Diamond really is a free public musse where no one can fall victim to it. Again. Let's hope it stays that way. If the Hope Diamond finds itself on the market again, legally or illegally, that you have a means to buy it, I think twice you might just become the curses next victim. We have some local stories coming up thanks to your suggestions, but for now, make sure that your taped follow on your app to make sure you get next week's story. Thank you very much for listening. Keep it scary everyone, Yes soon