Some Spooky Car History For Tuesday...!

We don't do many stories about haunted cars here at the Hermit's, but today we will.

The story of this auto is so strange that it bears a mention, I think. Hard to read about something like this and not feel that something isn't right.

The Cursed Car Of Franz Ferdinand

The Graf & Stift company is one of the unsung heroes of the automobile business. Before World War I, their cars were actually quite successful and had some fairly famous clientele.

Sadly, one of their models happened to be the car Archduke Franz Ferdinand was shot in.

The assassination of Franz Ferdinand was the final straw in the long-building tension between various European nations, and marked the beginning of World War I. Everyone knows the political and historical consequences of the killing, but not many are aware of the strange ghost story that is associated with it. According to legend, the car (a 1910 Graf & Stift Double Phaeton) itself was so shocked by the events that every single subsequent owner met a violent fate.

During the following 12 years, Franz Ferdinand’s car saw 15 different owners. During the same time, it was involved in several accidents that led to 13 deaths. One owner, an Austrian general, became insane and died in an asylum. Another, a captain, fatally ran into two peasants and a tree (despite attempting to avoid the accident) only nine days after purchasing the car. Yet another owner committed a suicide.

And it gets worse. The governor of Yugoslavia had four separate accidents during his possession of the vehicle—one of which cost him an arm. When his friend, a doctor, later bought the “cursed” car for a dare, but it flipped over, and the doctor was crushed. The same fate later met another owner, a Swiss racing driver. A Serbian farmer never even had a chance to drive the car—the car fell over and crushed him during the towing process.

The last owner of the car, a Romanian man, was arguably the most unlucky: while on his way to a wedding with five friends, the vehicle suddenly spun out of control. All five were killed in the crash.

That’s the legend, anyway. The ”jinxed” nature of the car has been called into question since the story emerged in the 1950s. We may never find out the car’s true nature for certain; these days it’s just a broken-down artifact in an Austrian museum.

We had better have our coffee in the kitchen this morning. Looks like more rain coming.