Jewelry to die for. I'm Jason Horton. I'm Rebecca Leib. And this is Ghost Town.

Deep in the vault of the Natural History Museum in London, alongside other precious stones kept

safe under lock and key. Stones like a Martian meteorite and a Medusa emerald

is what is known as the cursed Amethyst or the Delhi Purple Sapphire. A stone so sinister,

its curse has lasted almost 200 years. Here's how it went down. A Bengal cavalryman named

Colonel W. Ferris first bought the Sapphire which was mislabeled. It's actually an Amethyst.

To England after it was stolen out of the Temple of Indra and Kanpur during the Indian Mutiny of

1857. Almost as soon as Ferris returned, he lost just about everything he owned and his health

immediately deteriorated. The same bad fortune happened to his son who inherited the stone,

so his son gave it to a friend who subsequently committed suicide. In a depressing twist,

the friend who had just committed suicide willed the stone back to Ferris' son. In 1890, Edward

Heron Allen received the stone from someone not sure if Ferris's son like dropped it in a sewer

grade or pondered or what. Heron Allen was an ambitious, curious person. He was the author of

books on violin making, palmistry, and translations of Arabic literature. You know, types of subjects

a rich Victorian white dude might enjoy. He also had some shit happen in his life that made him want

to get rid of this stone. He gave the stone to a friend who was a singer who suddenly found,

quote, her voice was dead and gone. And she never sang again. Desperate to be rid of the jewel,

Heron Allen tossed it into a London canal. But three months later, someone found the stone and

gave it to a dealer who returned it back to Heron Allen. He could not get rid of it. So,

efficiently fucked up about the whole thing. Heron Allen declared the amethyst, quote,

cursed and stained with blood. And he had it secreted away in a bank vault within seven locked

boxes, again, very Victorian of him, with instructions not to remove it until three years after his death.

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