Cursed....Jewels....

Cursed Star of India

The largest gem quality blue sapphire.

The greyish blue gem is almost flawless and is unusual in that it has stars on both sides of the stone.

It's name came from it's star pattern.

Mined under mysterious circumstances in Sri Lanka, India 300 yrs before gem collection paris exposition in 1900.

It's golf ball sized.

Bad luck comes to anyone who puts there hands on it.

Oct 29, 1964, three men broke into the American Museum of Natural History in New York City.

and stole it.

The thieves unlocked a bathroom window during museum open hours, climbed in that night, and found that the sapphire was the only gem in the collection protected by an alarm.

The battery for that alarm and the cameras were dead.

None of the Jewels were insured.

Later they were caught.

In January 1965, authorities were led to a bus locker in Miami where the uninsured Star of India and some of the other stolen stones were recovered.

Black Prince's Ruby

Referred to as the great impostor.

It's the large stone in the center of England's imperial state crown.

It is not a Ruby, it is a stone called the red spinal.

The Black Prince Edward of Woodstock stole it in the 14th century from Abū Sa'īd, the Moorish Prince of Granada.

After, Edward contracted a mysterious illness and died.

Richard the III took it, and put it in his helmet when he went to the Battle of Bosworth, where he died.

Since it's cursed, it rarely makes a public appearance.

The Blue Diamond Affair

A series of unsolved crimes and embittered diplomatic relations triggered by the 1989 theft of gems belonging to the House of Saud by a Thai employee. Kriangkrai had access to the prince Faisal bin Fahd's bedroom and hid the stolen jewelry in a vacuum cleaner bag at the palace. 

It included a valuable blue diamond and other gems.

Kriangkrai managed to ship to his home in Thailand.

Lieutenant-General Chalor's team flew to Saudi Arabia to return the stolen items. 

However, the Saudi Arabian authorities discovered that the blue diamond was missing and that about half of the gems returned were fake.

A Saudi Arabian businessman close to the Saudi royal family, traveled to Bangkok to investigate on his own. 

He went missing on 12 February 1990 and is presumed to have been murdered.

Several days prior to his disappearance, three officials from the Saudi Embassy had been shot dead in Bangkok.

All the murders remain unsolved.

Lieutenant-General Chalor was later charged and convicted of ordering the 1995 murder of the wife and son of a gem dealer allegedly involved in the affair, and he was sentenced to death. 

The Regent Diamond

Owned by the French state and on display in the Louvre.

It is widely considered the most beautiful and the purest diamond in the world. 

In 1698, a slave found uncut diamond in the Kollur Mine (in the Guntur district of Andhra Pradesh, India).

He hid it inside a large wound in his leg.

He made a deal with an English sea captain.

The captain stole the diamond from the slave, killed him by drowning him.

Before he died he cursed the diamond.

He then sold it to an Indian merchant.

Sometime after it belonged to Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette and they were both beheaded.

Napoleon Bonaparte used it for the pommel of his sword and he was exiled.

After that it belonged to Louis XVIII, he was exiled as well.

The Shah Diamond

What it lacks in looks and in value,

it more than makes up for in it's bloody history and darkness.

Found at the Golconda mines in what is now Andhra Pradesh, Central India, probably in 1450, and it is currently held in the Moscow Kremlin.

In 1829, the Russian diplomat and writer Alexandr Griboyedov was murdered in the capital of Persia, Tehran. 

The Russian government demanded severe punishment of those responsible.

In fear, the court of Fath 'Alī Shāh sent the Shāh's grandson Khusro Mirzā to Saint Petersburg, where he gave the diamond to the Russian Tsar Nicholas I as a present.

It was then kept among the Russian Crown Jewels in the Diamond Room at the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg, until the Russian Revolution and the overthrow of the Romanov Dynasty on 2 March 1917.

Sancy Diamond

Brings misfortune and greed.

Once reputed to have belonged to the Mughals of antiquity.

It belonged to Charles the Bold, Duke of Burgundy.

He was cut apart, froze and ravaged by animals in battle.

It passed to his cousin, King Manuel I of Portugal.

He died from unknown reasons.

Before he died he sold it to sold the diamond to Nicolas de Harlay, seigneur de Sancy.

Henry III of France suffered from premature baldness and tried to conceal this fact by wearing a cap. 

Diamonds were becoming increasingly fashionable at the time, Henry arranged to borrow de Sancy's diamond to decorate his cap.

The messenger carrying the jewel never reached his destination, but de Sancy (by then Superintendent of Finance) was convinced that the man was loyal and had a search conducted until the site of the messenger's robbery and murder was found. 

When the body was disinterred, the jewel was found in the faithful man's stomach.

He had swallowed it to hide it from the attackers.

It is on display at the Apollo gallery. at the Louvre.

Delhi Purple Sapphire

The Delhi Purple Sapphire is actually an Amethyst.

In 1857 a mutiny happened in India.

It was stolen from temple Indra, in Cawnpore (Kanpur) by a Bengal Cavalryman Colonel W. Ferris.

The temple was dedicated to the Hindu god of war and thunderstorms.As soon as he returned to England, Ferris began to suffer a series of financial misfortunes which brought the family to the brink of collapse. 

At first Ferris blamed his own poor judgement but when every member of the family also suffered a series of debilitating illnesses, his thoughts turned to the gem.

His fears were confirmed when he lent the stone to a friend of the family who inexplicably committed suicide with the stone in his hand.

An author, Edward Heron-Allen, became the next owner of the gem in 1890.

Heron-Allen, spoke of an immediate series of misfortunes and bad luck, which led him to believe that the sapphire was "terribly accursed".

He had even gifted the stone twice to friends who were interested in owning it, and in both incidences those friends met with bad luck and returned the stone to him.

He even hurled it into canal it returned to him.

In a bid to neutralize the power of the curse he had it bound with a silver ring fashioned as a double headed snake. 

He also attached two amethyst scarab beetles and inscribed the ring with symbols of the zodiac.

In the years that followed the stone was quiet

The only hint that it was cursed was the apparition of a Hindu Yogi that haunted Heron-Allen. 

The Yogi appeared in the study of the family home searching desperately for the sapphire.

In 1904, after the birth of his first daughter, 14 years in his possession, he sealed the gem inside a box and shipped it to his bankers with set instructions for it to be locked away until after his death.

He later bestowed the sapphire to the Natural History Museum, under the condition that the box was not to be opened until at least 3 years after his death, and that under no circumstances must his daughter ever touch or be in possession of it.

In 1943, after the death of Edward Heron-Allen, the Natural History Museum received the box containing the gem.

Sometime later, long after the box had been opened, a type written note was found.

Heron-Allen ended his note with these final words, 

"Whoever shall then open it, shall first read out this warning, and then do as he pleases with the jewel. 

My advice to him or her is to cast it into the sea".

In 2004 the gem was in the possession of John Whittaker, a member of the Natural History Museum who was tasked with transporting it to the Heron-Allen Society for an event. During the journey, Mr Whittaker and his wife were engulfed in a dramatic thunderstorm, which trapped them in their car. 

Whittaker was tasked with transporting the Sapphire a second time, after which he fell deathly and violently sick with a stomach bug, and then a third time, when just before he was due to take the gem he fell in pain, finally passing a kidney stone.

The Black Orlov Diamond or the Eye of Brahma

It supposedly featured as one of the eyes in a statue of the Hindu god Brahma in Pondicherry, until it was stolen by a Jesuit monk. 

This caused the gem to be cursed.

In 1932, diamond dealer J. W. Paris is said to have taken the diamond to the United States and soon after committed suicide by jumping from a skyscraper in New York City.

Later owners included two Russian princesses called Leonila Galitsine-Bariatinsky and Nadia Vygin-Orlov (after whom the diamond is named).

Both women allegedly jumped to their deaths in the 1940s.

The diamond was later bought by Charles F. Winson and cut into three pieces in an attempt to break the curse.

The Black Orlov has been displayed at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City and the Natural History Museum in London.

Koh i Noor Diamond

It is one of largest cut diamonds on the planet.

It is part of the British Crown Jewels.

The diamond was originally owned by the Kakatiya dynasty.

Probably mined in Golconda, India, It's name means mountain of light.

It fell into the hands of Babur, the first emperor of the Mogul empire.

Shah Jahan, the fifth Mughal emperor, had the stone placed into his ornate Peacock Throne.

In 1658, his son and successor, Aurangzeb, confined the ailing emperor to Agra Fort.

It was ceded to Queen Victoria after the British conquest of the Punjab in 1849.

Following the 1739 invasion of Delhi by Nader Shah, the Afsharid Shah of Persia, he took the gem.

Nader Shah was killed and his empire collapsed in 1747, the Koh-i-Noor fell to his grandson, who in 1751 gave it to Ahmad Shah Durrani, founder of the Afghan Empire, in return for his support.

On 1 February 1850, the jewel was sealed in a small iron safe inside a red dispatch box, both sealed with red tape and a wax seal and kept in a chest at Bombay Treasury awaiting a steamer ship from China. 

It was then sent to England for presentation to Queen Victoria in the care of Captain J. Ramsay.

They departed from Bombay on 6 April on board HMS Medea, captained by Captain Lockyer.

The ship had a difficult voyage: an outbreak of cholera on board when the ship was in Mauritius had the locals demanding its departure, and they asked their governor to open fire on the vessel and destroy it if there was no response. 

Shortly afterwards, the vessel was hit by a severe gale that blew for some 12 hours.

On arrival in Britain on 29 June.

The Koh-i-Noor was formally presented to Queen Victoria on 3 July 1850 at Buckingham Palace by the deputy chairman of the East India Company. 

The Hope Diamond

The original form of the Hope Diamond was stolen from an eye of a sculpted statue of the goddess Sita, the wife of Rama.Sold to french traitor.

Acquiried its "Hope" name when it appeared in the catalog of a gem collection owned by a London banking family called Hope in 1839. 

Jacques Colet bought the Hope Diamond from Simon Frankel and committed suicide.

Prince Ivan Kanitovski bought it from Colet but was killed by Russian revolutionists.

Kanitovski loaned it to Mlle Ladue who was murdered by her sweetheart.

Simon Mencharides, who had once sold it to the Turkish sultan, was thrown from a precipice along with his wife and young child.

Sultan Hamid gave it to Abu Sabir to "polish" but later Sabir was imprisoned and tortured.

Stone guardian Kulub Bey was hanged by a mob in Turkey.

A Turkish attendant named Hehver Agha was hanged for having it in his possession.

Tavernier, who brought the stone from India to Paris was torn to pieces by wild dogs in Constantinople.

King Louis gave it to Madame de Montespan whom later he abandoned.

Nicholas Fouquet, an Intendant of France, borrowed it temporarily to wear it but was disgraced and died in prison.

A temporary wearer, Princess de Lamballe, was torn to pieces by a French mob.

Jeweler William Fals who recut the stone died a ruined man.

William Fals' son Hendrik stole the jewel from his father and later committed suicide.

Some years (after Hendrik) it was sold to Francis Deaulieu, who 

It also belonged too..

King Louis XVI who was Guillotined.

Marie Antoinette who was Guillotined.

Lord Francis Hope bankruptcy

May Yohé Musical actress, divorced, remarried several times, died poor.

Edward Beale McLean and Evalyn Walsh McLeanCouple divorced 1932; Edward had mental illness and died aged 51 or 52; Evalyn died aged 60 from pneumonia in 1947.

It is now in the Washington National museum of National History.