10 Creepy Myths Surrounding Popular Songs

Perhaps the creepiest of all music myths, Gloomy Sunday was connected to two separate suicide spikes, and eventually earned it the pseudonym ‘The Hungarian Suicide Song’.

Composed by Hungarian pianist Rezső Seress and first recorded by Pál Kalmár in 1935, the most popular version of the song is about the narrator wanting to kill themselves following the death of a lover. It eventually spread throughout Europe and America thanks to Billie Holliday’s 1941 version, which was banned by the BBC until 2002, on the basis that it could upset wartime morale.

While most of the suicides that occurred in Hungary during the time of the song’s composition have been widely dismissed as a product of poverty and Nazi Germany’s rise to power, Seress himself did commit suicide in 1968, and had allegedly been unhappy with his inability to follow up on the success of Gloomy Sunday.

Though the song may not have had any tangible effect on suicide rates, it serves as an eerie companion piece to the ‘Smile Clubs’, Hungary’s well-meaning albeit terrifying attempt to reduce suicide rates by ‘teaching people how to smile’, and fastening fake grins to their faces with medical tape.