INTERVIEW: Be careful handling these ‘Cursed Objects’
Image courtesy of Quirk Books / Provided by official site.
Author J. W. Ocker has built a career out of detailing the various things that go bump in the night. His Poe-Land book looked at the hallowed haunts of Edgar Allan Poe, while A Season With the Witch described the magic and mayhem of Salem, Massachusetts, the international capital for all things witch.
His latest book, out now from Quirk Books, is called Cursed Objects: Strange but True Stories of the World’s Most Infamous Items, and readers should beware that these stories come with a disclaimer. In fact, even handling these bound pages may induce some frights and consequent misery. Buyer beware.
“First, I had to define what a cursed object was,” Ocker said in a recent phone interview. “What is an object? Which sounds dumb, I know, but I still had to walk through it because there’s a lot of paranormal stuff out there. … So I ruled out cursed places, cursed people and just stuck to objects. I just love this idea of anything you can take home from the flea market can be cursed, so I tried to stick to stuff like that.”
Beyond simply defining an object as an actual object, the author also looked at that word “cursed” and realized he needed to make a distinction between that term and another term: “haunted.” For Ocker, his working definition was that an object became cursed if it committed harm to multiple people. Also, that harm needed to be conducted supernaturally (otherwise, guns would be considered cursed objects, and that’s a whole different book).
“So [the object] had to do it some supernatural or unknown, mysterious kind of way, and once I had that down, it was a lot easier to divide what a haunted object was from a cursed object,” he said. “A haunted object usually didn’t do any harm. They were usually very spooky, very creepy, lots of cool stories around them, but rarely do we see a haunted thing or a ghost committing harm in real life.”
The next task for Ocker was to actually locate these objects, which took a long time. Cursed Objects has been in development for approximately a year and a half, and a good chunk of that time found the author researching and traveling to find these gems, dolls and historic artifacts.
“So I searched around, making sure someone hadn’t written a solid, really thorough book around famous cursed objects, and for some reason, nobody had,” Ocker said. “I learned the reason why they hadn’t is because there’s not a lot out there, so I think we arrived at 50. All of them have long historical stories but also that paranormal story wrapped around them as well. It was a lot more complicated than I thought. Obviously, a cursed object is a cursed object. We all kind of know what that is, but in order to make a book of them, I needed to get more detailed than that.”
Ocker found that many of the objects he describes in the book can be found in museum collections. In addition to being “cursed,” they are also objects of great cultural value, such as mummy casings and diamonds. The author went even further and said that every major institution in the world probably has a cursed object or two in their collection.
“I map out the eight most cursed gems in the world, so seven of those eight are in major museums,” he said. “The Louvre, the Smithsonian, the New York Natural History Museum, the British Museum, the Tower of London all have famous cursed objects in them, and only one of those eight was in private hands, the Black Orlov, I believe. So I got to visit a lot in museums.”
One section of Cursed Objects also covers the business of trading in these objects and how many of them can be found, of all places, on eBay. In fact, Ocker purchased one on the virtual marketplace just so he could write about it. There are also chapters about the dreaded Annabelle doll, which is the subject of an ongoing movie series, and a Hungarian suicide song. Other chapters have tantalizing mysteries built into their title: The Conjured Chest, The Mummified Head of the Düsseldorf Vampire (not cursed, according to Ocker), John Zaffis Museum of the Paranormal and The Hexham Heads.
Although this book, which is a perfect tome for Halloween, might make the reader guess that Ocker is a true believer himself, he’s actually not. The author is a proud skeptic when it comes to all things paranormal.
“I am a skeptic,” Ocker conceded. “I’m not a skeptic, capital S. What I mean by that is I’m not trying to disprove anything. I don’t believe in the paranormal mostly because I just never experienced it. I haven’t had one real paranormal experience. Because of my career of writing weird stuff, I’ve been all the places you’re supposed to for that. I’ve stayed the night in abandoned asylums and abandoned prisons … So I’ve been to all the spooky places. I just never had an experience. That said, I really, really love the paranormal. There’s something about the paranormal stories that really draws me in.”
He added: “I really believe if tomorrow I had an experience that convinced me that the paranormal was real, my life wouldn’t change. I’m already really interested in the stories. I’m already going out to find places. I’m already going out to find objects and artifacts, so me believing or not believing doesn’t change my life. I’d still be chasing after the paranormal, although I will say as a result of doing the book Cursed Objects, I did have irrational trepidation. Whatever the truth is, it doesn’t matter what I believe at the end of the day, so even if I didn’t believe in cursed objects and they were real, I was actually putting myself in a place of harm. A lot of the victims weren’t even owners. They were just researchers and journalists, people that showed an interest in a cursed object, even yourself honestly interviewing me showing an interest in cursed objects.”
Gulp.
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
Cursed Objects by J.W. Ocker is now available from Quirk Books. Click here for more information.
