Heron-Allen had some parting words of advice in his letter.
His daughter didn’t wait that long, gifting the stone to the Natural History Museum in London just a year after his death, where it remains to this day. He asked that the Delhi purple sapphire not see the light of day again until 33 years after his death. When his daughter was born, Heron-Allen packed the gemstone up in seven boxes, put it in a safety deposit box, and sealed it with a warning letter inside. He couldn’t shake the stone, but I bet he lost a lot of friends. The story goes that she never sang again, and the stone was once again in Heron-Allen’s hands. He gifted it to another friend, an opera singer, who then lost her voice. Heron-Allen tried to get rid of the gemstone by gifting it to friends, but the bad luck continued.Īfter the first friend returned it, he threw it into the Regent’s Canal, but it made its way back to him after a dredger found it. “He sits on his heels in a corner of the room, digging in the floor with his hands, as if searching for it,” he wrote. Heron-Allen wrote that he, his wife, and others were haunted by a “Hindu figure” who wandered his library demanding the stone back. He set the stone in a silver snake ring, said to have belonged to Heydon the Astrologer, a 17th century English occultist philosopher, and added zodiac symbol plaques and two pendants, one a silver Tau symbol and the other holding two amethyst scarabs. Looking to un-curse the violet stone, he tried giving it a makeover by surrounding it with good luck symbols. In a 1904 letter, he described his experience of owning the Delhi purple sapphire and how it haunted him and others. Heron-Allen joined the chorus of those declaring the stone to be bad news. The “sapphire” was passed down to the colonel’s son who gave it to scientist and writer Edward Heron-Allen in 1890.
The gemstone was said to be nothing but trouble from the start, plaguing the colonel’s family with health issues and financial worries.
Ferris of the Bengal Cavalry, who took it back to England. The stolen loot made its way into the hands of Colonel W. It’s said that a British soldier stole the stone from the Temple of Indra, the Hindu god of war and weather, during the Indian Mutiny of 1857 in Kanpur, India. (If you’re going to rob a precious gem, then at least have the decency to know what you’re stealing.)Ī curator and amethyst fan from the Natural History Museum in London, where the stone now resides, shared the tale in a 2013 blog post after consulting with the museum’s mineral curators. The story of the Delhi purple sapphire follows this classic pattern.įor starters, it’s not a purple sapphire at all. (Image courtesy of the London Museum of Natural History)Ī common thread in these stories of allegedly cursed gemstones is a simple morality tale-someone took something that didn’t belong to them and bad luck followed. The Delhi purple sapphire, said to be cursed, is actually amethyst.
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