Laura Wright 
A car is supposed to be a machine.
Steel, glass, rubber, wiring and fuel.
It has no memory. No personality. No capacity for resentment.
And yet people name them.
They talk to them.
They become emotionally attached to them.
They insist certain cars are temperamental, stubborn or somehow unlucky.
Occasionally, a particular automobile acquires a reputation considerably darker than that.
It becomes cursed.
One car repeatedly breaks down despite apparently sound mechanics. Another changes hands and misfortune seems to follow every new owner. A vehicle survives accidents that kill the people inside it. Parts salvaged from a wreck supposedly carry the bad luck into entirely different automobiles.
The idea was brilliantly exploited by Stephen King in his 1983 novel Christine, in which a 1958 Plymouth Fury possesses something approaching a murderous personality.
But King didn’t invent the idea of the malevolent automobile.
By the time Christine appeared, America already had its most famous supposedly cursed car.
It belonged to James Dean.
And its name was Little Bastard.
James Dean and the Porsche Spyder
In September 1955, actor James Dean purchased a new Porsche 550 Spyder.
Dean was already fascinated with automobile racing. The lightweight Porsche was considerably more serious than an ordinary sports car, and Dean intended to race it.
The car became known as Little Bastard.
Then came the warnings.
The most famous came from actor Alec Guinness.
Guinness later recalled meeting Dean outside a restaurant on September 23, 1955. Dean proudly showed him the new Porsche.
Guinness experienced an immediate and inexplicable sense of dread.
He told Dean not to drive it.
According to Guinness’s later recollection, he warned him that if he got into the car, he would be dead by the following week.
Seven days later, James Dean was dead.
September 30, 1955
On September 30, Dean was driving the Porsche toward a racing event in Salinas, California.
At an intersection near Cholame, a Ford Tudor driven by college student Donald Turnupseed turned across Dean’s path.
The Porsche struck the Ford.
Dean was killed.
His passenger, mechanic Rolf Wütherich, survived with serious injuries.
A young actor whose image had become inseparable from rebellion and speed had died at only twenty-four.
That alone would have guaranteed Little Bastard a place in popular culture.
But the wrecked Porsche supposedly wasn’t finished.
The Curse of Little Bastard
This is where history and folklore become tangled.
According to the famous version of the curse, automobile customizer George Barris acquired the wreck.
Then strange things began happening.
The Porsche supposedly slipped while being unloaded and injured a mechanic.
Parts were removed and sold.
Two physicians and amateur racers, Troy McHenry and William Eschrich, acquired components from Dean’s Porsche for their own racing cars.
On October 21, 1956, both men were involved in accidents at the same racing event.
McHenry was killed.
Eschrich survived.
That coincidence became one of the foundations of the Little Bastard curse.
Other stories accumulated rapidly.
Tires supposedly removed from Dean’s Porsche were installed on another automobile and mysteriously blew out simultaneously.
People trying to steal pieces from the wreck were injured.
A garage containing the Porsche supposedly caught fire, yet the wreck survived.
At another exhibition, the car reportedly fell from its display and injured someone.
During transportation, another accident supposedly occurred.
Eventually Little Bastard disappeared entirely.
It sounds remarkably convincing when all of the incidents are placed together.
There is a problem.
Many of them are extremely difficult to document.
George Barris and the Growing Legend
A great deal of the Little Bastard mythology can ultimately be traced to George Barris.
Barris was a legendary automobile customizer and an exceptionally talented promoter.
He also had a tendency to improve a story.
Over the years, his accounts of Dean’s Porsche became increasingly elaborate, and researchers have questioned whether Barris ever possessed the complete wreck in the manner later claimed.
Some incidents associated with the curse have documentation behind them.
Others appear primarily in later retellings.
Still others changed substantially as the story traveled.
This doesn’t mean the entire Little Bastard story was fabricated.
It means something more familiar happened.
Real tragedy became folklore.
And folklore began collecting additional tragedies.
The Parts Really Did Travel
One particularly important detail is true.
Parts from Dean’s Porsche were reused.
William Eschrich obtained the Porsche’s engine and installed it in his Lotus race car. Troy McHenry used other components.
Both men subsequently crashed during the same racing event, and McHenry died.
That is certainly an eerie coincidence.
But racing during the 1950s was extraordinarily dangerous.
The fact that two race drivers were involved in accidents while racing does not require a supernatural explanation.
The interesting question is why these particular accidents became remembered differently.
The answer is obvious.
The parts came from James Dean’s death car.
Once an object develops a reputation, every subsequent misfortune becomes evidence.
Good fortune tends to disappear from the story.
Where Is Little Bastard?
The ultimate fate of Dean’s Porsche remains surprisingly murky.
The wreck was used in safety displays emphasizing the dangers of reckless driving. Eventually it disappeared from public view.
The familiar story says Little Bastard was being shipped back to California around 1960. When the sealed railroad car arrived, the Porsche had inexplicably vanished.
That wonderfully mysterious disappearance is also difficult to substantiate in the form usually repeated.
The car may simply have been dismantled, scrapped or otherwise disposed of.
Parts had already been removed.
Documentation is incomplete.
Nobody has conclusively produced the original wreck.
That uncertainty has inevitably generated rumors that Little Bastard still exists somewhere.
Collectors have searched for it.
People have claimed to possess pieces.
And occasionally someone announces that the lost Porsche has finally been found.
So far, the mystery remains.
Perhaps the most famous cursed automobile in America ended exactly as a cursed automobile should.
It disappeared.
Did Little Bastard Inspire Christine?
My original article repeated a rumor that Stephen King based Christine upon James Dean’s Porsche.
I would remove that claim.
There isn’t good evidence that Little Bastard directly inspired King’s novel.
King’s murderous Plymouth belongs to a much broader tradition in which machines acquire personalities and turn against their owners.
The resemblance is nevertheless interesting.
Both automobiles develop unusually powerful relationships with the people associated with them.
Both acquire histories involving death.
Both seem to exert an influence extending beyond ordinary machinery.
But James Dean’s Porsche did not need to inspire Christine for the comparison to work.
Little Bastard had already become America’s real-life version of the idea.
The Car That Helped Start World War I
There is another automobile whose alleged curse makes Little Bastard look positively well behaved.
On June 28, 1914, Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie traveled through Sarajevo in a 1910 Gräf & Stift Double Phaeton.
Their assassination helped set in motion the political crisis that led to World War I.
The automobile survived.
And according to one famous story, it spent the following years killing or ruining virtually everyone unfortunate enough to own it.
There is only one problem.
That story is largely nonsense.
The Supposed Curse of Franz Ferdinand’s Car
The familiar version claims that the automobile passed through a remarkable succession of owners.
General Oskar Potiorek supposedly acquired it and subsequently suffered military disgrace and insanity.
An army captain bought it and died after swerving into peasants.
A Yugoslav governor supposedly survived four accidents but lost an arm.
A doctor bought it and died in another crash.
A diamond merchant committed suicide.
A Swiss racing driver was killed.
A farmer was supposedly run over by the vehicle.
Finally, another owner crashed while traveling to a wedding, killing most of the passengers.
It is a magnificent cursed-object story.
It also collapses rather badly under historical examination.
Researchers examining the automobile’s actual provenance have found that the supposed chain of doomed private owners cannot be reconciled with the history of the car.
Most obviously, the vehicle still exists.
It is preserved at Vienna’s Museum of Military History.
Stories claiming that successive owners repeatedly wrecked and destroyed it are rather difficult to square with the remarkably intact automobile sitting in a museum today.
General Potiorek
Even the first alleged victim illustrates how legends distort real events.
General Oskar Potiorek was indeed involved in the Sarajevo events.
He was riding in the automobile carrying Franz Ferdinand and Sophie when they were assassinated.
He later commanded Austro-Hungarian forces against Serbia and suffered disastrous military defeats.
But that doesn’t establish that he subsequently owned the assassination car, much less that the automobile caused his downfall.
The curse story takes a real person who experienced genuine misfortune and attaches that misfortune to the vehicle.
Once that happens several times, coincidence begins looking remarkably like a pattern.
The Truly Strange License Plate
Ironically, Franz Ferdinand’s automobile doesn’t need an invented chain of dead owners to provide an eerie coincidence.
It has a genuine one.
The car bears the registration:
A III 118
When viewed without spacing, it can appear remarkably similar to:
A 11 11 18
November 11, 1918.
Armistice Day.
The date convention isn’t historically perfect, and Austria-Hungary itself had already signed an armistice on November 3 that became effective November 4. Nevertheless, the resemblance is genuine and the plate appears in historical photographs of the automobile.
A car carrying the man whose assassination helped ignite the First World War apparently bore a registration that, decades later, people realized could be read as the date traditionally associated with the war’s end.
Pure coincidence?
Almost certainly.
But it is a wonderfully uncomfortable one.
Why Do Cars Become Cursed?
Automobiles are unusually well suited to curse legends.
We spend enormous amounts of time inside them.
They move us at speeds the human body could never survive without protection.
A minor mechanical failure can have catastrophic consequences.
And unlike most machines, automobiles develop remarkably personal relationships with their owners.
People name cars.
They become sentimental about them.
They recognize the sounds they make.
They know when something “doesn’t feel right.”
Ask almost anyone who has driven for decades and eventually you’ll hear:
“That car hated me.”
Usually they are joking.
Usually.
The Lemon Becomes Something Else
There are perfectly ordinary reasons why one automobile can seem extraordinarily unlucky.
A manufacturing defect may cause repeated mechanical problems.
A poorly repaired collision can create difficulties that persist for years.
Electrical faults can appear intermittently and seem almost malicious.
Previous owners may have neglected maintenance.
One problem can create another.
Eventually the owner stops viewing the automobile as a collection of mechanical systems.
It becomes that damned car.
Then something interesting happens psychologically.
Every failure confirms the reputation.
The battery dies.
Of course it did.
A tire goes flat.
Naturally.
Someone backs into it in a parking lot.
Typical.
The vehicle isn’t simply malfunctioning anymore.
It has developed a personality.
Objects With Histories
But cursed automobiles belong to a much older tradition.
Humans have attributed supernatural properties to objects for thousands of years.
Jewelry.
Weapons.
Paintings.
Furniture.
Dolls.
Mirrors.
Stones.
Even entire buildings.
An object involved in tragedy becomes particularly vulnerable to acquiring a supernatural reputation.
This may partly result from what psychologists call magical contagion, the intuitive feeling that qualities can somehow pass from a person or event into an object associated with them.
James Dean dies inside a Porsche.
The Porsche is no longer merely wreckage.
It is James Dean’s Porsche.
A component removed from it doesn’t feel like an ordinary engine part.
It came from the death car.
Then someone using that component dies.
The story almost writes itself.
Phantom Cars
There is another branch of automobile folklore that doesn’t involve curses at all.
Sometimes the car itself is the ghost.
British folklore contains numerous accounts of phantom vehicles appearing on roads and then disappearing.
One of the most famous stories concerns a supposed ghostly London bus associated with Cambridge Gardens and St. Mark’s Road during the 1930s. The driverless double-decker was said to appear suddenly at night, forcing motorists to swerve before vanishing.
After accidents occurred near the dangerous junction, road alterations supposedly eliminated both the hazardous curve and sightings of the phantom bus.
Whether the bus ever existed outside folklore is another question.
But it demonstrates how quickly the relatively new automobile entered an ancient supernatural tradition.
Within a few decades of cars becoming commonplace, we had already invented ghost cars.
Haunted Machinery
That is actually rather remarkable.
Ghost folklore once revolved around castles, battlefields, graveyards and old houses.
Technology changed.
The ghosts adapted.
Trains became haunted.
Ships became haunted.
Telephones became haunted.
Cars became haunted.
Today we have haunted computers, mysterious text messages and supposedly cursed websites.
The supernatural imagination doesn’t reject technology.
It colonizes it.
Perhaps fifty years from now someone will be telling stories about a self-driving car that keeps traveling to the cemetery where its original owner is buried.
Frankly, I’d be disappointed if we weren’t.
Can a Car Remember?
There is no scientific evidence that an automobile can absorb tragedy, develop consciousness or carry a supernatural curse.
Steel does not appear to remember the people who died beside it.
An engine salvaged from a fatal wreck remains an engine.
But that isn’t quite the end of the question.
Because people remember.
And objects become containers for those memories.
A wedding ring is chemically ordinary metal, yet its meaning can be enormous.
A childhood toy can become almost impossible to discard.
An old house can feel different because we know someone died there.
James Dean’s Porsche became something more than a Porsche the instant he died in it.
Not physically.
Culturally.
Perhaps that is where many cursed objects actually acquire their power.
The Christine Syndrome
Maybe there really is something we could call the Christine Syndrome.
Not a supernatural condition.
A folkloric one.
An object becomes associated with tragedy.
Something unfortunate happens afterward.
People notice the coincidence.
The story spreads.
Other incidents become attached to it.
Contradictory details disappear.
New details appear.
Eventually nobody remembers where documentation ends and legend begins.
The object now possesses a reputation.
And every future event is interpreted through it.
James Dean’s Little Bastard is an almost perfect example.
The Gräf & Stift supposedly cursed by Franz Ferdinand’s assassination is another.
Both contain genuine history.
Both contain genuine tragedy.
Both accumulated stories that cannot be substantiated.
And both remain unsettling after the exaggerations are removed.
Maybe Christine Wasn’t Entirely Fiction
There is something about automobiles that encourages us to treat them as almost alive.
We listen to them.
We care for them.
We become irritated with them.
We beg them to start on cold mornings.
We congratulate them when they survive difficult journeys.
And when one repeatedly behaves badly, we sometimes begin speaking about it as though the machine itself were responsible.
Perhaps cursed cars are simply mechanical failures surrounded by coincidence and storytelling.
Perhaps an object associated with death acquires its reputation because humans are exceptionally talented at finding patterns.
Perhaps James Dean’s Porsche was simply a racing car driven by people participating in an extremely dangerous sport.
And perhaps Franz Ferdinand’s automobile is nothing more than a machine unfortunate enough to have occupied one of the most consequential intersections in modern history.
Those explanations are sensible.
But there is still something about an automobile with a history.
You open the door.
You sit where someone else once sat.
Your hands touch the same wheel.
The engine starts.
And for a moment, the distinction between owning an old machine and inheriting its past feels surprisingly thin.
There is no evidence that cars can remember.
But if they could—
some automobiles have considerably more to remember than others.
About the Author
