Simone Dinoia on Unsplash

Sometimes things that are buried should stay buried. The world is crazy enough as it is, so potentially opening a cursed object just wouldn’t really help our situation right now—the last thing we need is a swarm of locusts, y’know?

That said, we do learn a lot about ancient societies by digging up their dirty little secrets, which helps us to paint a fuller picture of where we come from and how we got here. Yes, that picture might not be something we necessarily want to learn, but nevertheless, it helps.

Mummified Monk

From the exterior, you see a gold-painted statue of the Buddha, but the interior holds a much spookier secret. In 2015, Dutch researchers discovered that a 1,000-year-old mummy was seated in a lotus position within the confines of the statue. 

According to the researchers, the monk is believed to be Buddhist master Liuquan, who died around 1,100 CE. It’s said that he participated in something called self-mummification, where monks would spend years starving themselves, slowly reducing their diet to keep body fat and moisture to an all-time low. Once he was ready, he would be buried in the lotus position, eventually running out of air. The idea behind this process was to become a “living Buddha,” a form of reincarnation that was widely revered in Tibetan Buddhism.

Sadly, this spooky piece of history is not currently on public display. 

Basano Vase

anonymous on Wikimedia

This cursed piece of homeware is said to have been a wedding gift for a 15th-century bride in a village close to Napoli, Italy. The vase, weighing around 4 pounds, made of silver, with no intricate markings, was gifted anonymously, and likely for good reason.

It seems as though anyone who touched this vase met with a terrible fate. The bride, as well as several of her family members, perished after coming into contact with the object. The family sealed the vase away, burying it on sacred grounds, until it was discovered again in 1988. Again, this “curse” struck a pharmacist, an archeologist, before it was buried in an unknown location by a local police officer. 

Whether this story is rooted in myth or fact, you may want to stay away if you come across a plain silver vase. 

Roopkund Lake

Also frequently called Mystery Lake or Skeleton Lake, this haunted body of water is located 5,020 meters (16,469.82 feet) high in the Himalayas, more specifically in India’s Uttarakhand state. The lake itself is only 3 meters (9.8 feet) deep, but holds over 300 skeletons within its shallow depths. 

This lake was discovered by a Nanda Devi National Park ranger in 1942, and researchers noted that alongside the bones, wooden artefacts, iron spearheads, leather slippers, and rings were also discovered.

The current theory is that three ancestry groups died at the lake during two different time periods. The first group was likely killed by a violent 9th-century hailstorm, while the second group was also likely due to exposure, although what kind of exposure hasn’t been confirmed yet, sometime in 1800 CE. 

Regardless, this lake has become a popular tourism attraction for Himalayan hikers, but it has raised concerns regarding the preservation of these bones, as many hikers have taken a little something back with them. We shouldn’t have to say it, but we will. Leave those bones alone!