10 Creepy Wrestling Curses

Curses aren't real.

Consider (much of) this list a spot of spooky ephemera with which to distract from the very real horrors of everyday life.

Incidentally, top tip: watching films in which the protagonist(s) endure an horrendous ordeal isn't, from experience, too shabby a way to wile away lockdown. As Ric Flair famously said, you don't want to see somebody doing better than you, which limits your escapist entertainment somewhat. At a minimum, fictional characters are usually allowed to go outside.

Shutter Island while as predictable as a WWE main roster non-title match functions nicely in this regard; yes, you can't go to the pub and "the man" keeps telling you to wear a lame cuck mask that reduces transmission and prevents death and might bring sports back earlier and sh*t, but at least you're not losing your sanity surrounded by the criminally insane in the pissing rain.

It's summer. The criminally insane surrounding you now are under the sun.

In some haunting, tragic cases, however, there's a potent if not entirely real sense that, when the stars align eerily in the pro wrestling world, and they do - this is an industry in which pissing blood from one's face is termed "fortunate juice" - they do so under a bad moon...

A ghastly and statistically irreconcilable wave of death, to put into perspective how awful the Von Erich story is, consider this bone-chilling quote from Kevin Von Erich:

"I used to have five brothers. Now I'm not even a brother."

The first of the clan to die was Jack Adkisson, Jr., who at the age of six suffered an electric shock and drowned in a puddle outside of the family home. Years later, in 1984, with three of the children riding high as athletic, tough guy heartthrobs in the white-hot WCCW, David passed in Japan, a tragedy mired in whispers of panicked drug flushings but pronounced formally as enteritis.

The death plunged the family into an inexorable sequence of tragedy that critics of the patriarch Fritz - ethically, even registering the story becomes uneasy, since how the hell do you criticise a father who lost five sons? - claimed he was complicit in. Mike, Chris and Kerry all died by suicide in later years. If a brain-damaged Mike had no business returning to the ring after his life-altering bout of toxic shock syndrome - he did so under what was at least the implicit pressure to continue the family legacy - Chris had no business even entering it. He was asthmatic, and his bones were so brittle that he could barely bump without breaking them. He killed himself because he could never realise the ideal of what being a Von Erich was to him.

Kerry, in a state of overwhelming grief and imminent trouble with the law, was the last of the clan to die in 1993.

Random tragedy tacitly encouraged and multiplied.