Hey, strangers, just a note at the top.

This episode might be best for our older listeners.

I'm Lauren Norton, and this is one strange thing,

the show where we search the nation's news archives for stories that can't quite be explained.

Strangers, we have covered a few cursed objects, and maybe some concepts on this podcast before.

And it's hard to pick one favorite, but the Post Malone Dibbock-Saga, it might just

be the most interesting.

Then again, there was the Mars Volta album and the Curse of the Ninth Symphony, well, we actually could go on.

Still, the term cursed, it has lost some of its bite in recent years, or maybe at least some of

its specificity. And that is largely due to the existence of cursed images, a genre of memeable internet content.

And we must say from the outset, we are fans of the weird stuff that we find online.

But in this particular instance, you must understand that the concept itself has shifted the use of the term cursed from literal to, well, figurative.

If you're not familiar with the idea, we'll let paper magazine explain the origin,

which seems to have been a 2015 Tumblr blog called Curst Images.

Its anonymous creator told the magazine, quote,

At the time, I had a voyeuristic hobby of searching the archives of Flickr to look at forgotten

flash photography from years in the past. Some of these forgotten photographs just had an eerie

mood about them, like someone had captured a moment from a dream or another life.

I was particularly interested in finding photos of dark and empty rooms,

mannequins and costumes, all of which became common themes among cursed images.

Now, of course, this idea took off and the genre has expanded.

Nowadays, a cursed image can be disturbing in all kinds of new and exciting ways.

...