[imagesource: E+ / Getty]

Honestly, it’s like some people have never watched a B-grade horror movie.

You’re looking at Mount Vesuvius above, with Pompeii in the foreground. Back in AD79, the city was buried under volcanic ash following a monster eruption, and it would remain buried until the 16th century.

Pompeii has since become a major tourist attraction, although some people tend to take more than just their photos home with them.

One such person, a Canadian woman identified only as Nicole, has now returned artefacts she took 15 years ago, claiming they are cursed.

Here’s the Guardian:

[She] sent a package containing two mosaic tiles, parts of an amphora and a piece of ceramics to a travel agent in Pompeii, in southern Italy, alongside a letter of confession.

Nicole, who was in her early 20s when she visited Pompeii’s archaeological park in 2005, blamed the theft for a run of misfortune that she had suffered in the years since, including having breast cancer twice and experiencing financial hardship.

“Please, take them back, they bring bad luck,” she wrote.

At the time of the theft, she said she wanted to have a piece of history that “nobody could have” but that the relics had “so much negative energy … linked to that land of destruction”.

Her letter to the travel agent went on to say that she didn’t want to pass the bad luck on to her family, who were “good people”, and said she would return to Italy one day “to apologise in person”.

In the same package, another Canadian couple also sent back artefacts taken during that trip, along with a letter of their own:

“We took them without thinking of the pain and suffering these poor souls experienced during the eruption of Vesuvius and their terrible death,” they wrote. “We are sorry, please forgive us for making this terrible choice. May their souls rest in peace.”

A spokeswoman for the Archaeological Park of Pompeii said that over the years, around a hundred visitors have returned small artefacts like mosaic tiles and pieces of plaster stolen from the site.

Many of those artefacts, along with the letters that accompanied their return, are now on show at the Pompeii Antiquarium.

I guess that means they’re now a small part of their area’s history, too.

[source:guardian]