The Real-Life Cursed Diamond That Belongs in a Horror Movie

You grow up thinking that gems are incredibly special and rare. That they’re only owned by kings and nobility, and that at least a couple dozen probably have magical powers. Then, you grow up and learn that they’re not much more than cool rocks with sky-high prices buoyed by sentimentality. That embedding a ruby in a staff does nothing more than make one part of the staff shiny and red.

But there is one real-life jewel that, per legend, does have some supernatural sway — and not the good kind. The Black Orlov is a massive black diamond that’s rumored to have started its life on display embedded in a statue of the Hindu god Brahma (the source of its other name, the “Eye of Brahma”). It was extricated without permission by a holy man who I've seen named as both a monk and Jesuit priest. An action that as stealing something precious from a religious structure so often seems to, resulted in great misfortune for the future owners.

The holy man in question was murdered, but that doesn’t seem spooky, given that he was hauling around a massive diamond. Where it gets unsettling, if the stories are to be believed, are a couple of degrees and generations of separation later, when the diamond re-emerged on the market. The seller was a man named J.W. Paris, and you’d think unloading a massive stone for what had to be a notable amount of cash would put him in a good mood. Instead, he threw himself off a building. 

Despite an increasingly unpleasant history, the stone kept changing hands. It would end up a decade and a half later owned by a couple of Russian princesses: Nadia Vyegin-Orlov and Leonila Galitsine-Bariatinsky. Both women would also end up dead within a month of each other, both in the same method of one-time skydive used by J.W. Paris.

Now, is this all just a good story embellished to balloon a diamond’s auction price? Possibly, but it’s clear that the superstition behind it isn’t being completely ignored. It bothered a later owner enough that he cracked open the diamond in an attempt to remove the curse, cutting it into three smaller, hopefully unhaunted stones. 

Everything I’ve read recommends not breaking open cursed things, but no one’s taken a long walk off of a short roof with the diamond in tow recently, so maybe it worked out after all.