10 Creepy Myths Surrounding Popular Songs

In Jan and Dean’s 1963 teen tragedy song, ‘Dead Man’s Curve’, the singer describes an impromptu street race gone wrong. While out for a drive in his Corvette Sting Ray, the narrator is challenged to a race “all the way to Dead Man’s Curve” by someone in a passing Jaguar.

The singer accepts, before finding out the rumours about the eponymous ‘curve’ may have been true: “You won’t come back from Dead Man’s Curve.”

The singer loses control of the car, before presumably crashing right around the curve itself. It then becomes apparent that the song was being relayed to an attending doctor the whole time – the driver escaped the accident, but was injured all the same.

There’s nothing out of the ordinary about Dead Man’s Curve, at least not on the surface. But when you consider that one of the song’s performers and composers, Jan Berry, crashed his own Sting Ray into a truck three years later on North Whittier Drive, the supposed location of the song’s curve, the song starts to sound like a Final Destination-esque premonition of sorts.

Berry was in a coma for two months, and suffered brain damage and paralysis as a result of the accident, leading some to speculate that Dead Man’s Curve was a cursed self-fulfilling prophecy.