The Cursed Objects Stories cases readers rated highest and believed most — the jury's all-time picks.
I found the mirror at an estate sale, a tall old thing in a dark carved frame, spotted with age, beautiful in a heavy sad way. It was cheap,…
391 Upvote · 85% of readers believe this story
I bought a ring at a pawn shop, an old gold band with a small dark stone, cheap and lovely and clearly older than anything else in the case.…
389 Upvote · 85% of readers believe this story
My aunt was an odd, sharp, secretive woman, and when she died she left me exactly one thing: a small carved music box, old, foreign, heavy f…
388 Upvote · 84% of readers believe this story
The painting came from a great-aunt's estate, unsigned, unremarkable — a modest oil landscape of a country road leading to a house under a w…
203 Upvote · 87% of readers believe this story
It's a magnificent coat — heavy charcoal wool, old-fashioned cut, the kind of thing they don't make anymore, and it was four coins on the th…
191 Upvote · 75% of readers believe this story
My grandfather's pocket watch stopped at the moment of his death, or so the family always said — 4:04 a.m., the hour he passed, the watch in…
166 Upvote · 91% of readers believe this story
The Bible is the real thing — a great heavy Victorian family Bible, brass clasps, the middle pages given over to the generations: births, ma…
154 Upvote · 77% of readers believe this story
I bought it for two coins from a charity shop because my daughter liked the little ballerina inside, chipped and one-armed as she was. A che…
129 Upvote · 97% of readers believe this story
We bought the rocking chair at the estate sale of a woman who had lived to a hundred and one and died, per the neighbours who ran the sale, …
117 Upvote · 80% of readers believe this story
I restore and collect manual typewriters — there's a small devoted world of us. This one came from a job-lot house clearance, a heavy old ma…
105 Upvote · 88% of readers believe this story
The estate sale was the whole contents of a grand, sad house being emptied after the owner died with no heirs. I bought the mirror for the f…
92 Upvote · 77% of readers believe this story
It was in a jam jar of assorted buttons and haberdashery oddments, the kind of lot you buy for fifty pence because you sew and you never kno…
80 Upvote · 84% of readers believe this story
The doll is genuinely old and genuinely hideous — a porcelain-headed thing in a mildewed christening gown, inherited down my mother's line f…
68 Upvote · 92% of readers believe this story
