Scary Stories: Cursed

A registered nurse in New Orleans watched a doctor and a coworker die within weeks of each other after a woman cursed them in the emergency room. The doctor, young and healthy, died in his sleep from a cerebral hemorrhage. The nurse named Andre, who had translated the voodoo practitioner's curse, fell asleep at the wheel and plowed into oncoming traffic later that same day. The nurse who witnessed both deaths quit his job and moved back to the Midwest. He still doesn't know if it was coincidence. "I guess I never will," he says.

The Emergency Room Curse

The first story establishes the episode's central claim: that voodoo curses can follow people across time and space with lethal precision. The nurse describes a Friday night shift when an elderly man was wheeled into the ER with a rotting wound on his buttocks, high fever, and fluid on his lungs. Two women followed the stretcher "shrieking, wailing, and chanting hysterically." After the man died, the older woman blamed the medical team. Andre, who spoke French Creole, told his coworker that she was a voodoo practitioner who had cursed them all.

The nurse initially laughed it off. But when the doctor died weeks later, then Andre the same day, he couldn't shake the pattern. He went to his priest, who "thought I was nuts, but gave me a blessing." He now works as a nurse in California.