Reszo Seress - The song that could kill

I read this article from a website which i, in my infinate wisdom now cannot find again,thought it might be worth a read. The author of the article is Tom Slemen. Also if anyone can find the website i would be grateful...there be an ice cream type reward in it for you...

In December 1932, a down-and-out Hungarian names Reszo Seress was trying to make a living as a songwriter in Paris, but failing miserably. All of his compositions had failed to impress the music publishers of France, determined to become an internationally famous songwriter. His girlfriend had constant rows with him over the insecurity of his ambitious life. She urged him to get a full-time nine to five job, but Seress was uncompromising. He told her he was to be a songwriter or a hobo, and that was that.

One afternoon, matters finally came to a head. Seress and his Fiancee had a fierce row over his utter failure as a composer, and they split up.

One day after the row - which happened to be a Sunday - Seress sat at the piano in his apartment. Outside storm clouds gathered in the sky, and soon the heavy rain began to pelt down.

"What a gloomy Sunday," Seress said to himself as he tinkled on the ivories, and quite suddenly, his hands began to play a strange melancholy melody that seemed to encapsulate the way he was feeling and the dispiritng weather.

"Yes.Gloomy Sunday. That will be the title of my new song," muttered Seress, excitedly, as he wrote the notes down on an old postcard. Thirty minutes later he had completed the song.

Seress sent his composition off to a music publisher and waited for acceptance. The song-sheet was returned with a rejection note stapled to it that stated: "Gloomy Sunday' has a wierd but highly depressing melody and rhythm, and we are sorry to day we cannot use it."

Undeterred, he sent the song to another publisher, and this time it was accepted. The music publisher told Seress that his osng would soon be distributed to all the major cities of the world. Seress was ecstatic.

But a few months after "Gloomy Sunday" was printed, there was a spate of strange occurrences, allegedly sparked off by the new song. In Berlin, a young man requested a band to play "Gloomy Sunday" but after the number was performed he went home and blasted himself in the head with a revolver, after complaining to relatives that he felt severely depressed by the melody of the song which he couldn't get out of his head.

A week later, in the same city, a young female shop assistant was found hanging from a rope in her flat. Police who investigated the suicide found a copy of the sheet-music on the floor next to her feet.

Two days after that tradedy, a young secretary in New York gassed herself, and in her suicide note she requested "Gloomy Sunday" to be played at her funeral. Weeks later, another New Yorker, aged 82, jumped to his death from the window of his seventh-story apartment after palying the "deadly" song on his piano. Around the same time, a teenager in Rome who had just listened to the unlucky tune, jumped of a bridge to his death.

The newpapers of the world were quick to report many other deaths associated with Seress's song. One newspaper covered the case of a woman in North London who had been playing a recording of "Gloomy Sunday" at full volume, infuriating and frightening her neighbours, who had read of the fatalities connected with the tune. The record player stylus finally became trapped in a groove, and the same piece of the song played over and over. The neighbours hammered on the woman's door, but there was no answer, so they forced the door open - only to find the woman dead in her chair from an overdose of barbiturates.

As the months went by, the steady stream of bizarre and disturbing deaths allegedly connected to "Gloomy Sunday" persuaded the chiefs at the BBC to ban the seemingly accursed song from the airwaves.

Back in France, Reszo Seress, the man who had composed the controversial song was also to experience the adverse effects of his creation. He wrote to his ex-fiancee, pleading for reconciliation. But several days later came the most awful, shocking news. Seress learned from the the police that his sweetheart had poisoned herself. And by her side, a copy of the sheet-music to "Gloomy Sunday" was found.

At the end of the 1930s, when the world was plunged into war against Hitler, Seress's inauspicious song was quickly forgotten in the global turmoil, but the sheet-music to the dreaded song is still available to those who are curious to know if the morbid melody can still exert it's deadly influence..

By Tom Slemen

Pretty long i know, but creepy. I've never heard the song but i must admit i'm feeling curious...Cue X-files tune.