Cursed: Stories about superstitions

This week we present two stories from people who let science lead them down a rabbit hole of curses.

Part 1: Science journalist Erik Vance decides to get cursed by a witch doctor for science.

Erik Vance is an award-winning science journalist based in Baltimore. Before becoming a writer he was, at turns, a biologist, a rock climbing guide, an environmental consultant, and an environmental educator. He graduated in 2006 from UC Santa Cruz science writing program and became a freelancer as soon as possible. His work focuses on the human element of science — the people who do it, those who benefit from it, and those who do not. He has written for The New York Times, Nature, Scientific American, Harper’s, National Geographic, and a number of other local and national outlets. His first book, Suggestible You, is about how the mind and body continually twist and shape our realities. While researching the book he was poked, prodded, burned, electrocuted, hypnotized and even cursed by a witchdoctor, all in the name of science.

Part 2: After taking a rock from Mauna Loa, volcanologist Jess Phoenix starts to worry that her offering to the volcano goddess Pele was not enough.

Jess Phoenix is Executive Director and co-founder of environmental scientific research organization Blueprint Earth. She is a volcanologist, an extreme explorer, and former candidate for United States Congress. She has been chased by narco-traffickers in Mexico, dodged armed thieves in remote Peru, raced horses across Mongolia, worked on the world’s largest volcano in Hawaii, piloted the Jason2 submersible on an undersea volcano, and explored deep in the Australian Outback. Jess believes science should be accessible to everyone, and that creative possibility is limitless. Jess is a Fellow in The Explorers Club and the Royal Geographical Society, a featured scientist on the Discovery and Science Channels, an invited TEDx speaker, and she has appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, in Wired, Fast Company, on National Public Radio, on CNN, NBC, and has written for the BBC. She is the host of the podcast Catstrophe! (catastropheshow.com) and has a book coming out in Spring 2020 with Timber Press called Miss Adventure: My Life as a Geologist, Explorer, and Professional Risk-Taker.

Episode Transcript

Part 1: Erik Vance

A couple of years ago I was working on this book about how belief affects your body. So I was learning about things like placebos and hypnosis and false memories, and I had this one chapter that was on nocebos. If you guys don't know, nocebos are basically like if placebo is when you expect something good to happen in your body, and it does, a nocebo is when you expect something bad to happen to your body and it does.

So the problem is, though, that we don't really know much about nocebos. They're kind of mysterious. So I was trying to figure out how I could write about these things and it got me thinking about things like superstition and mass hysteria.

I was living in Mexico at the time and I had this amazing idea. I was like if I want to write about nocebos, I should just get myself cursed by a witch doctor, right? Like that's a great idea. I mean, how hard can it be?

So off I went now. The first person I talked to was my photographer, the photographer I worked with, and I said, “You know, I want to get cursed by a witch. Do you want to come by and shoot me getting cursed by a witch doctor?”

And he's like, “Hell, no. I don't want anywhere near that.”

I was like, “Why not?”

I'd just say this guy has literally been shot at, like he's been in war zones. He's taken photos of actual hired killers and he was like, “No. Way, way too dangerous. I don't want to go near you.”

I was like, “I don't get it.”

He's like, “Yeah. I don't want to get any of that bad juju to splash all over me. That'll happen.”

Erik Vance shares his story with the Story Collider audience at the Bier Baron Tavern in Washington DC in February 2019. Photo by Lauren Lipuma.

And I was like, “Is curse splash-back a thing?” I didn't know it was a thing.

And he said, “Yeah, I’m not going to do it.”

Turned out he wasn't the only one. The biggest objection came from my then pregnant wife who thought it was the dumbest idea she'd ever heard, and let me know. I was confused by this because I was saying like, “Well, you don't believe in magic, right?”

And she said, “Well, no, but there's just some things that we just don't know.”

I can see by similar looks of your faces that you agree with her, but I did know. Like I don't believe that there are forces that can make a piano fall on your head just because someone says some words. What I do believe is that your own fear and expectation can affect your health. It can negatively make these things real inside you.

And that's what I wanted to happen. Maybe get a little sick, maybe a cold. I don't know. Something.

So off I go. Despite everyone's worries I go off to get cursed. I bring with me my newly hired assistant who was going be my translator who I just hired the day before.

I said, “Okay. So you're hired. That's the good news. And our first assignment is to go harness the evil powers of nature and bring them upon myself because that's journalism, I think.”

She thought for a moment and said, “Yeah, okay. What the hell.”

So off we went. We went to a place called Mercado Sonora, which is a famous witch doctor market. It's like a lot of Mexican markets, if you've ever been to one. There's little stalls and people selling things, except what they're selling are things like burned-out doll heads and live rabbits and coyote skins and ceremonial swords. Basically everything that your average witch doctor would need. And it's this amazing place.

We started talking to people and we learned two things about curses. The first one is that the curse industry is pretty much driven by romance. Yes. It's what you think. The people who ask for curses (a) put them on people who are dating the people they want to be with or, (b) they put them on the people that they were recently with. That seems to be what drives the curse industry, most of it. That's the first thing we learned.

The second thing we learned is that the only way that a curse can be completed is if you tell someone that they are cursed. That's an important point. So we started talking to various people and we figured out that there were two sort of dark lords of the market. Now, you'd think that the curse scene would be kind of underground.

Maybe there'd be like back rooms or some guy with a jacket or something like that going. Actually, there's nothing illegal about putting a curse on people. It's totally fine so people should be out front like, “Yeah, I'll curse your cousin. What do you need?”

It's really good. You want to go and kill someone. I can do it like a hex. No problem, which is really surprising.

So we talked to these two people. We went to two dark lords. First guy is this like really happy sort of hippie guy. He was really sort of the new-age, laid-back version of a dark lord. He had like a Hawaiian shirt buttoned down to here and like kind of a necklace of skulls that were

really more cute than anything else. And a big pot belly.

And he was like, “Yeah, are you going to pay me?”

I was like, “Yeah, of course. Whatever.”

So because I like to comparison shop I went to another one and she was literally one of the most frightening people I've ever seen. First of all, she was dressed completely all in purple which, apparently, wards off evil spirits. And she tended to talk in sort of these long diatribes of sentences where she didn't really take a breath. She would just sort of sound would come out. And my new translator would, the first five minutes, answer a question. The first five minutes is just her speaking and my translator like listening, listening, listening and focusing.

Then I finally say, “What is she saying?”

And she said, “Okay, in order to make an Ouija board properly, you have to peel the face off of a convict and spread it over the board,” and that's about all she said.

I was like, “Oh, this is great!” She's in some very dark place. This woman is in a very dark space. This is exactly what I want.

So we started learning all these interesting things from her. For instance, if you do want to kill someone with a hex, you have to get twelve other witches and put them in a circle and have them take off their shoes and put them in the dirt in the forest. Or you can use their photos, if you want, if you don't have them.

And then you can channel the powers of ancient evil and focus on with whoever you want but you need to make sure you're wearing one of those Mexican wrestling masks while you're doing it, because she said it's just safer, protection. I didn't ask any more details than that.

So by the time we get to the end of this conversation, I've got these two choices. I've got the happy hippie, sort of laid-back warlock and the crazy, scary, assassin witch. I realized in that moment that there's a limit to my sense of myself as a scientific person. You know, like a man of science. I went with the happy hippie because he wasn't scary.

So he started the curse and the first couple days nothing really happened. I remember I had like a coughing fit that turned into a sneeze. Then immediately I was like, “The curse.”

My electric toothbrush stopped working and I was like, “The curse.”

But then nothing else happened. I started getting a little bored so I started trying to push it a little bit. Like one night, I got drunk, walked home alone just to see what would happen. I started riding my bike around and cutting people off to see what would happen. And nothing was happening. I was kind of let down.

So I go back to have the curse lifted and the guy is not there anymore. He's there but he's gone for the weekend, so I was like cursed for another weekend.

All right. Let's see if I can push this a little bit more. So on Saturday, I go rock climbing and, actually, traditional lead climbing, so it's like a little bit of a dangerous version of rock climbing. I noticed that my partner would stand back when I started climbing so that he didn't get the splash-back on him when I’d like plummet to the ground.

And he was like, “No, it should be fine,” but again nothing happened.

So I was kind of disappointed until, late that night, my wife started having stomach pains. They got more and more until early the next morning they got so bad the doctor said, “You know, you need to go to the emergency room now.”

So we got in a car and we started driving to the hospital. Of course, my wife is worried about the baby and what's going on and my only thought is, “It's the curse.”

We get to the hospital and they immediately take us in the back room. We skipped the line and everything. They don't find a heartbeat.

I've come to understand that the power of a curse is in the agency. It's in our desire to have control over the chaotic world that we live in. To say that, whether it's good or bad, that our actions dictate the things that happen to us.

And standing, sort of facing the potential of a lost child, you’d say, “My God, what have I done? What have I done?” That is the power of a curse.

Finally, they find the heartbeat and it turns out the whole thing was some bad tacos from the day before. So we go upstairs just to do a sonogram, just to be sure. And that was the day that I actually learned that my child would be a boy. It was also that Sunday was my very first Father's Day. It was Father's Day that day.

I'm sitting there and I'm sort of laughing with the hospital techs and we're making penis jokes and I remember just thinking, “Am I cursed today or was I blessed?”

And the only difference between those two things is the way that you see it, is the agency that you bring to it.

I walked away from that and, having learned my lesson, I went back in two days and definitely got that curse lifted. And I walked away with two sort of lessons from it. The first was the more powerful the things that happen to us are the way that we see the things that happen to us. The stories we tell ourselves are really more important than the things themselves. That, in fact, we are not a collection of our experiences. We are a collection of the way we see our experiences.

And the second thing is if you're going to play with black magic, wear a wrestling mask. Just protection. Thank you.

Part 2: Jess Phoenix

I leaned hard into the fence, my hand flung out, my eyes straining into the darkness trying to follow the path of the Puka-shell necklace as it floated down into the gaping abyss below.

My friends and colleagues at the Hawaiian Volcano Observatory had told me that if I wanted to take a rock off the island I needed to make an offering to Pele, the volcano goddess who made her home at the bottom of Kilauea Volcano, so there I was.

It was September 2008 and my four months of conducting research on active volcanoes was coming to an end. I had mapped active lava flows. I had taken helicopters over volcanic vents. I had collected gas samples for analysis, installed a camera at the edge of a roiling lava lake. And I trekked down the side of Mauna Loa, the world's largest volcano, and I sampled flowing lava with a rock hammer. It is so hot up close that you can literally feel your eyes dehydrating. 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit will do that.

So, like many visitors to the Hawaiian Islands, I wanted a souvenir. Now, I found the perfect one. It was a cantaloupe-sized piece of basalt rock, black and less than 200 years old. This basalt had crystals of olivine, which is a green mineral that, in this case, had weathered to iridescence. That's unusual and that made it rock-collection worthy.

I displayed my would-be keepsake to my boss Frank at the Hawaiian Volcano Observatory. Now, Frank raised his eyebrows and said, “Better make a good offering.”

Frank is part native Hawaiian and he's a brilliant scientist. I am not native Hawaiian and, at the time, I was very much an aspiring scientist. I was also a broke grad student living on $30 a week, so offerings to Pele are often alcohol. Gin or rum are her favorites, but also dances, prayers, chants, traditional food or leis are also acceptable.

I reasoned that a cheap, discarded, Puka shell necklace that some previous volunteer researcher had left in the house would be enough. As far as I know, there are no scientific records of Pele.

However, in Hawaiian she has another name. Ka wahine ‘ai honua, the woman who devours the earth.

Jess Phoenix shares her story with the Story Collider audience at Lyric Hyperion in Los Angeles in February 2019. Photo by Mari Provencher.

So my land-based research had drawn to a close. I left the Big Island, went to Honolulu where I was supposed to meet up with a research vessel. I was going to spend the next month at sea assisting Mark, a geochemist from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution with his research on the Lōihi Seamount, the undersea volcano off the coast of the Big Island.

Pretty much as soon as I stepped off the land and onto the ship I ran smack into a steel cabinet and gave myself a concussion.

Then we had a really expensive piece of equipment called an elevator that we drop to the bottom of the ocean and then we bring it back up with samples on it. This is not your normal elevator. This is like a special science elevator. It literally exploded, like that's bad.

And then, on the second-to-last day of the cruise, we actually had the ship's data expert have a heart attack. We were unable to resuscitate him. Everyone on board was part of the effort to clear the decks so that a medical helicopter could land, but it never came.

That night, we were really subdued. Everybody was grappling with the fact that we were just fourteen miles off the coast of Hawaii and yet what seemed like a world away.

I asked my boss Mark if it was normal for someone to die on a research vessel. He told me it was very rare.

When we returned to Honolulu, I reorganized my luggage for the trip back to LA. I eyed the rock in my bag, but then I thought if Pele was really mad at me she would have done more to me personally, more than just a concussion. So I determine the cruise was just riddled with really bad, really sad luck.

I arrived home after five months away to the marital equivalent of the Hindenburg disaster. Our fights escalated exponentially as I struggled to readjust to life as a grad student and my teaching duties at Cal State Los Angeles. Student Health Services diagnosed me with kidney stones which I was unable to afford to have removed because no health insurance.

I took the rock and I proudly put it in my office where one of the olivine crystals just winked at me. I convinced myself that it was a trick of the ‘70s fluorescent lighting.

After a really horrific fight with my now example, I went to stay with a friend of mine who was an undergrad from the Geology Department and her Cal State Los Angeles soccer teammates, the whole team. I was six to seven years older than all of them so I immediately adopted the role of responsible adult. I became designated driver.

The first time I took them out, we went to Jack in the Box after we left the club. We were jumped in the drive-through lane as part of what I later found out was a gang initiation. My friends were fine, yay booze, I, however, had a concussion, a sprained wrist, missing clumps of hair and a black eye.

I started to look at the rock in my office with a little bit of side eye. Sometimes, I found myself wondering exactly how long was the reach of the woman who devours the earth. But to get rid of those notions, I would wander out into the hallway and grab literally anyone I found to talk about anything vaguely scientific. I'm a scientist.

So January 9, 2009 I had been moved in with the soccer girls and away from my ex for nine whole days. I did go to pick him up to go to our last ditch effort at marital counseling where the counselor pulled me aside and said, “Sweetie, he has all the traits of a malignant narcissist.”

Uh-huh. And then, the same day, all of these things happened. I left my ATM card in a cash machine. I gave first aid to a bicyclist I watched get hit by a car. My car died as I raced to LA County Hospital to try to see my ex who had apparently been hit by a car while on his motorcycle. My car died, like I said, and I managed to lock my car, house and office keys inside of it while it was going away on the tow truck.

And then I did confirm the ex had been splattered across the 5 Freeway and had a broken collarbone and several areas of road rash down to the bone. I do not recommend motorcycle accidents, especially in LA.

Then I ran into my future ex in-laws. Think about that. They were visiting from out of state. I learned from them that literally everything my ex had ever told me had been a lie. And then I realized that I was going to have to move back in with him to take care of him because he had no family in-state. I felt myself sliding back into the nightmare I thought I'd just escaped. I hugged my dog and my cat and I cried.

A few months later after I finished taking care of the injured now-example, I move back in with the soccer girls, finally. When I got there they joked around that maybe I was cursed. A dim bulb brightened somewhere but my science brain rejected the idea. I did, however, put the rock in a very, very high shelf in my office where that olivine eye just couldn't see me anymore. But I still wasn't convinced.

But then I was designated driver for the soccer girls again. I had two of them in my car, drunk passengers. I stopped at a stoplight. Something made me glance up at the rearview mirror. I see headlights barreling towards us with no sign of slowing down. I braced. We hit. My friends were fine. Yay booze, again. Sensing a theme. I had severe whiplash and a completely, absolutely, utterly totaled car.

A few days later, sitting in my office staring at the rock for answers, scientist or not, I had nothing. The woman who devours the earth had just about digested me.

I called Frank. I told him I was sending the rock back.

He said, “I'll take care of it. Send it back.”

To his credit, he did not say ‘I told you so’. Good man.

So I apologized to the rock for taking it from its home. I wished it well and I visualized the cliff over the edge of Kilauea where I hoped some HBO scientists would properly reunite it with Madame Pele.

I tucked it in its little UPS box and sent it off across the ocean. A week later, and Frank confirmed that it had been hurled into Kilauea and an appropriate offering of rum had been made, I laughed because I'm a scientist. I mean, how could this work, right? Six months of people around me being hurt of violence, of accidents, of a totaled car, of imminent divorce yet, somehow, less than a week later, I found the exact truck I wanted to replace my car for half price.

Two weeks after that, two weeks later, just two weeks later, I met Carlos, the guy I've now been married to for nine years. And I still have the truck.

So since then, I've worked on six continents and with people who have vastly different customs than my own. Whenever I teach students, which is frequently, about how to do scientific research, I always pass on Pele's most important lesson. Always, always, always respect local traditions especially if they involve a goddess with a volcanic temper. Thank you.