The Twelve Nightmares of Christmas, Day 4: Not All Songs Are Jolly
This bizarre story comes to us courtesy of Karl P.N. Shuker, in his book The Unexplained.
Some songs have strange tales to tell, but few of them are more unnerving than the history of the song “Gloomy Sunday”.
It was written in Paris one rainy Sunday in December 1932 by the Hungarian composer Reszo Seress, on the day after his girlfriend had ended their engagement. Intensely depressed, Seress was contemplating just how very gloomy this particular Sunday was when a hauntingly sad tune began to play in his mind. Shocked out of his despair by this unexpected event, Seress jotted down the tune and entitled it “Gloomy Sunday”. The words that he penned for it told the tragic story of a man whose lover had recently died and who was now considering suicide in order to be reunited with her again. (Editor’s note: She’s just not into you, man. Move on!)
The first publishers to whom Seress took “Gloomy Sunday” turned it down, claiming it to be too melancholy. Indeed, one of them felt that it might be better if people never heard it. This proved to be prophetic, for soon after the song was published its unrelentingly sad strains gained a notorious reputation for inciting people to commit suicide.
The first of these happened in spring of 1933, when a young man sitting in a Budapest cafe asked the house band to play “Gloomy Sunday”. After they had finished the request, the man promptly went outside and shot himself. The song’s victims included singers who had added the fatal song to their repertoires. In one of the most disturbing cases, people living next to an apartment in London broke in, because the mournful sounds of the song were playing incessantly inside. When the neighbors broke down the door, they found the young woman who had been living in the apartment lying dead on the floor from an overdose. A gramophone in the room was playing the song in an endless loop. In all, around 200 deaths in total were blamed on the song’s influence.
By the late 1930s, “Gloomy Sunday” had incited such a degree of public alarm that the Hungarian government discouraged public performances of it. The BBC in England considered banning it altogether, and some radio stations on America did refuse outright to play it. The English-language version of “Gloomy Sunday” was written by Sam Lewis and recorded in 1941 by Billie Holiday. By that time, world events had begun to capture more of the world’s attention, and the song’s notoriety began to fade somewhat.
Even so, the song continued to give people the collywobbles. The English pilot Gordon Beck recalled that one of his fellow pilots would become very upset if he heard Beck playing his record of “Gloomy Sunday” (the Artie Shaw Orchestra version, with a female singer). The pilot claimed that it made him feel suicidal. Beck thought little of this, until he listened to it before one of his own flights. To his alarm, he found that the song’s haunting melody got stuck in his mind, and he could hear the melancholy earworm even over the sound of the plane’s engines. He never played the song again.
According to the author of The Unexplained, “Perhaps the most poignant cases linked with ‘Gloomy Sunday’ are those of the two people who were responsible for its creation. its composer, Reszo Seress, committed suicide in 1968 by leaping off a building, after confessing that he had never been able to write another hit song. As for the girl who had jilted him all those years ago, she had already been found dead, alongside a sheet of paper on which she had written the words ‘Gloomy Sunday’.”
For more information, follow this link (if you really want to); https://www.historicmysteries.com/gloomy-sunday-suicide-song/ As for me, I hope your Sunday isn’t gloomy at all. And to make up for today’s downer, tomorrow we’ll have another fun Christmas-themed Today I Learned, as well as a trip back in time to Christmas 2016. And don’t forget to visit Weird Darkness at www.weirddarkness.com, to see what Darren Marlar is up to today.
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