Cursed song drives people to suicide

Sometimes it takes just once: a person listens to this meloncholy song and commits suicide hours or days later.

The notorious song, Gloomy Sunday, has gone down on record as the suicide song, and for good reason.

Gloomy Sunday drives people mad.

The death march began back in 1933 Hungary when two friends, Rezso Seress and Ladislas Javor, wrote the tune and lyrics. Although devastatingly sad, no one payed much attention to the song until authorities noticed an upsurge of suicides occurring across Hungary. Soon investigators stumbled across something incredible: listening to Gloomy Sunday prompted people to commit suicide.

The newspapers beat the story into a frenzy and soon thereafter the government of Hungry banned the playing of the song nationwide.

During the media furor over the escalating suicides–blamed on the song he’d written–Seress allegedly admitted he wrote it to memorialize his former girlfriend who had–yes–committed suicide.

Later, in another horrifying twist that added to the dark legend of the eerie song, the composer Seress attempted his own suicide by leaping from the window of a hotel in Budapest. Although he survived the fall, he later managed to strangle himself to death with a length of copper wire in the hospital where he’d been taken to recover from his first suicide attempt.

The New York Times ran an obituary on the deceased Seress and pointedly mentioned Gloomy Sunday and its lethal history: “The composer, Rezso Seress, whose dirge-like song hit, Gloomy Sunday was blamed for touching off a wave of suicides during the nineteen-thirties, has ended his own life as a suicide it was learned today.”
 
As can be expected, the infamous song and the cascading rash of suicides caught the attention of other countries in Europe. Across the Atlantic, American recording studios also became intrigued over the lurid press about the Hungarian song.

Several versions were recorded in the U.S., the most popular version sung by Billie Holiday. Famous singer and actor Paul Robeson had originally introduced the English version during 1935. When suicides began breaking out In New York because of the song, radio stations and nightclubs prohibited its performance.

Dozens of suicides began breaking out across America linked to Gloomy Sunday, as the Holiday version received heavy airplay. People bought recordings of the song and were later found dead.

Soon, some daily newspapers called the dirge-like tune the Hungarian suicide song.

Papers reported that hundreds of Americans were killing themselves because of the song that enticed them–in a mesmerized stupor–to hang, poison, or shoot themselves. Others, papers claimed, listened to the song just once and then jumped screaming from the roofs of tall buildings, driven to end it all on the unyielding pavement far below.

A few states (and local communities) banned the song from being played, though the song was never officially banned across America as some claim.

But Gloomy Sunday (the 1941 Billie Holiday version) was banned by the BBC because many Londoners that heard the heart-wrenching tune tried to commit suicide. Some, unfortunately, were successful.

Here are the lyrics for the Hungarian suicide song, Gloomy Sunday. It’s probably safe to read them as some psychologists have theorized that it was the music that accompanied the lyrics that created a dark energy in the mind that drove some hapless souls to destroy themselves like fluttering moths drawn towards a dancing flame of doom:

Sunday is gloomy, my hours are slumberless
Dearest the shadows I live with are numberless
Little white flowers will never awaken you
Not where the black coach of sorrow has taken you
Angels have no thought of ever returning you
Would they be angry if I thought of joining you?

Gloomy Sunday

Original Helium article

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