Songs that Were Able to Kill People

A legacy of tragedy began in 1970 when Peter Ham and Tom Evans, both members of the Welsh band Badfinger, merged two songs about their respective relationship woes into a single heart-wrenching ballad called "Without You." At the time, Badfinger was poised to become the next great rock band, having been mentored by The Beatles and signed to Apple Records. But then everything fell apart. Apple Records crumbled after The Beatles disbanded, leaving Badfinger adrift. Desperate, they signed themselves over to the management of American fraudster Stan Polley. The band soon fell victim to Polley's criminal mismanagement, which left them practically penniless despite writing several hit songs. In the midst of this chaos, singer-songwriter Harry Nilsson heard "Without You" at a friend's house.

Nilsson loved the song so much that he recorded his own chart-topping version — although, pushed by his producer to sing at the upper limits of his vocal range on an arrangement he despised, he quickly grew to hate it. Nonetheless, it became an international hit for him in 1971. Ham and Evans, meanwhile, saw little success from their creation and remained mired in financial and legal struggles. As a result, both died by suicide at young ages. The song's curse seemingly struck again when singer Mariah Carey covered "Without You" in 1994. Just days before her chart-topping version debuted, Harry Nilsson died of a heart attack. As the British rock band, The Who learned, some song curses are quite selective with their victims. In a 2015 interview with Howard Stern, who singer Roger Daltrey claimed that their trouble began when drummer Keith Moon couldn't get the beat right on a song called "Music Must Change." Moon's unconventional style wasn't meshing with the song's standard time signature.

At the time, he was also struggling with severe addiction issues. As a result, the band ended up hiring a session musician to record drums for the song, which was released on 1978's Who Are You. Then, on September 7th — just a month after the album's release — Moon died of an accidental overdose. Following his tragic death, the remaining members of the band played "Music Must Change" only a handful of times before placing it into early retirement. While certainly a grim reminder of the darkness surrounding Moon's final days, the song's curse goes even deeper. When The Who finally decided to resurrect "Music Must Change" for a 2002 tour, bassist John Entwistle died just one day before the band was scheduled to hit the road.

This was enough for Daltrey to lay the song to rest forever. Oddly enough, Ol' Blue Eyes' 1969 anthem "My Way" is considered a song of ill-repute in the Philippines. In fact, the song incites such rage there that it inspired a slew of murders known as the "My Way Killings" at a number of karaoke bars, which are highly popular in the Philippines. The anger mostly centers around how particularly awful the song sounds sung out of tune — which, if you're familiar with karaoke, is kind of a common phenomenon.

In one notable incident in 2007, a man named Romy Baligula was belting out "My Way" at a San Mateo karaoke bar when security guard Robilito Ortega hollered at him that he was badly off-key. When Baligula carried on singing, Ortega whipped out a gun and shot him dead. At least five other similar killings have taken place, with many lesser "My Way" infractions ending in violent fistfights. As for why this song specifically rubs people the wrong way, some have pointed to its cocky lyrics.

Butch Albarracin, owner of a singing school in the Philippines, told The New York Times: "'I did it my way,' it's so arrogant. The lyrics evoke feelings of pride and arrogance in the singer, as if you're somebody when you're really nobody." Others claim that the general machismo and aggression prevalent in Filipino culture is to blame, and argue that "My Way" just happens to be a popular choice for karaoke singers. Or, at least, it was: The accursed song is now banned in many of the country's karaoke bars. Best known for their hits "Surf City" and "The Little Old Lady from Pasadena," California surf rock duo Jan & Dean were a big deal in the 1960s. But one of their most popular songs, 1964's "Dead Man's Curve," ended up being eerily prophetic. In the song, the duo sings of racing in a Chevrolet Corvette Stingray on a winding section of a Los Angeles Road called Dead Man's Curve, somewhere near Sunset Boulevard and Vine Street. As you might expect, it doesn't end well.

The song's last verse describes a terrible crash that leaves the narrator dead. Two years later, life imitated art: On April 12th, 1966, Jan Berry crashed his own Stingray while driving too fast on Sunset Boulevard — just six miles away from the song's setting. Unlike his protagonist, however, Berry survived his car crash, although he suffered lifelong severe brain damage, partial paralysis, and speech impairments. The accident also derailed Berry's career at the peak of his popularity. Born into a Black family in 1900s Mississippi, legendary blues musician Robert Johnson lived a hard life. He found solace in music, however.

Escaping the life of a plantation worker, he eked out a living as a musician and married his sweetheart. But his wife's religious family never approved of his chosen trade. In fact, when she died in childbirth, they attributed the tragedy to his affiliation with "the devil's music." Johnson then devoted himself wholeheartedly to the blues, returning to the scene with seemingly supernatural musical abilities. "He said he was going to make some records."

According to music journalist Paul Trynka in his book Portrait of the Blues, Johnson told fellow blues musician Son House that he had met a dark man at a crossroads who had tuned his guitar for him — a common euphemism for selling one's soul to the devil. Johnson faced hardships throughout his life, all the way up to his untimely and painful death by poisoning, and many attribute his life of misfortune to a powerful curse brought on by his devilish pact.

The so-called "Crossroads Curse" allegedly lives on, bringing tragedy to anyone who covers Johnson's 1936 song "Cross Road Blues." Both Robert Plant and Eric Clapton lost young sons after covering it, members of Lynyrd Skynyrd and the Allman Brothers died in accidents after performing it, and Kurt Cobain was considering recording it before dying by suicide. The curse even seemed to impact John Mayer, who covered the song shortly before falling out of mainstream favor. Song curses aren't just reserved for "the devil's music," of course. In the 19th century, many classical musicians believed in the dreaded "Curse of the Ninth," in which composers were fated to die after completing their ninth symphonies. And it wasn't a baseless fear.

Ludwig van Beethoven, Franz Schubert, Ralph Vaughan Williams, and Antonín Dvořák all died after their ninths. Following the death of Beethoven, one ultra-superstitious composer, Gustav Mahler, attempted to defeat the curse. As he wrote his ninth piece of music, Mahler found a semantic loophole by simply not calling it a symphony. Unfortunately, the curse wasn't fooled. While composing his 10th symphony in 1911, Mahler was stricken with pneumonia and died before it could be finished. Composer Arnold Schoenberg later waxed poetic about the curse in his book, Style and Idea. He wrote: "It seems that the Ninth is a limit. He who wants to go beyond it must pass away. It seems as if something might be imparted to us in the Tenth which we ought not yet to know, for which we are not yet ready."

Of course, many composers, including Mozart, escaped the curse unscathed. But trepidation around the Curse of the Ninth has survived into the modern age. Shortly after debuting his own in 2012, composer Philip Glass told The Los Angeles Times: "Everyone is afraid to do a Ninth Symphony." As a precaution, Glass composed his ninth and 10th symphonies together — and it seems his trick worked better than Mahler's. Rezső Seress' somber 1932 piano ballad was originally titled "The World Has Ended." Inspired by a bad breakup, it was already a pretty glum song. But it was the version with lyrics by poet László Jávor, which describe a man who becomes suicidal after his lover's death, that caught on.

It eventually became known as "The Hungarian Suicide Song." The song was translated into English and later famously covered by Billie Holiday as "Gloomy Sunday" in 1941. But its popularity came with a troubling problem: A shocking number of people who heard it ended up taking their own lives. Hundreds of suicides were bizarrely linked to the song, with one girl even found clutching the sheet music. In response, many networks banned it. Tragedy also befell the song's creators. Holiday herself died at age 44 in 1959, and, years later in 1968, the song's original composer, Seress, died by suicide.

Speaking about his creation with Time Magazine in 1936, Seress had lamented: "This fatal fame hurts me. I cried all of the disappointments of my heart into this song, and it seems that others with feelings like mine have found their own hurt in it." While all of this is certainly disturbing, a 2007 article published in Omega notes that the increase in 1930s suicides likely had more to do with the ongoing Great Depression than the song itself.

Russian composer Alexander Scriabin was known for his innovative and progressive style. In 1911, however, he wrote a piece of piano music so intense he actually scared himself. Scriabin described his sixth sonata with such unflattering words as "nightmarish," "unclean," and "mischievous." In fact, he was so afraid of his own creation that he never played it in public and, when he played it for friends, he appeared visibly frightened. Scriabin's biographer, Faubion Bowers, logically attributed the song's darkness to its haunting minor thirds and unsettling fourth and fifth harmonies. Still, in addition to describing the song as "satanic," Bowers had this to say about it: "It is dark and evil aspect embrace horror, terror, and the omnipresent Unknown. Its mood directly inherits the inchoate, incomprehensible, unformed chaos of the dark beginning — the Void."

On April 27th, 1915, after composing four more pieces, Scriabin died of septicemia caused by a mysterious sore on his lip at the height of his career. He was just 43 years old. Some words just weren't meant to be sung. Take the curious case of Pakistani singer Amanat Ali Khan's biggest song, for example. The lyrics of "Insha Ji Utho" were originally a poem written by Pakistani author Ibne Insha in the 1970s. In it, Insha tells the story of a disenchanted man who decides on a whim to leave his city — and his lover — for good.

Inspired by the poem's dark take on urban life, Khan received Insha's permission to put it to music and make it into a ghazal, a type of classical song based on Arabic poetry. After he sang it on television in 1974, it became a huge hit. But, just months after its success, Khan died suddenly of appendicitis at age 52. Four years later, on the exact date of the song's release, Insha, the poet who penned its words, died of cancer. One day before his own death, Insha attributed Khan's passing to the song. He wrote to a friend. "How many more lives will this cursed poem take?" At least one more as it turns out. Khan's son, Asad, also died at age 52, not long after singing his father's famous song at a 2006 concert. It was one of the last songs he would ever sing. If you or anyone you know is having suicidal thoughts, please call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline​ by dialing 988 or by calling 1-800-273-Talk (8255)​.