Awesome or Off-Putting is a weekly delve into cryptozoology, ufology, aliens, medical marvels, scientific wonders, secret societies, government conspiracies, cults, ghosts, EVPs, ancient artifacts, strange facts, odd sightings or just the plain unexplainable.

Anytime we’ve ever heard that Arms Wide Open Song by Creed, within 10 minutes we’ve found ourselves standing barefoot atop a very tall bridge looking for a nice place to land.

This is not an allegory. It’s fact.

We’ve often thought it odd that somebody else’s extreme musical mediocrity could effect us so – and then we heard of Gloomy Sunday. It’s blamed for scads of self-imposed death. We do encourage you to read on – but not until you’ve surrounded yourself with baby bunnies, daffodils and pictures of your sweet old Mammy baking up a sheet of cookies.

It’s a type of insurance, if you think about it.

Something very strange slid across our desk recently – it’s often referred to as The Hungarian Suicide Song. It was written in 1933 by Rezso Seress, and apparently it’s a real downer. We say that, obviously, because over 100 people have offed themselves with its sheet music clutched in their stiff white fingers.

Or something like that. The website Phespirit.info states the following:

“…one man jumped to his death from a seventh story window followed by the wailing strains of “Gloomy Sunday”. He was over 80 years old! In contrast to this, a 14 year old girl drowned herself while clutching a copy of “The Suicide Song”.

“Perhaps the strongest of all was the case of an errand boy in Rome, who, having heard a beggar humming the tune, parked his cycle, walked over to the beggar, gave him all his money, and then sought his death in the waters beneath a nearby bridge. As the death toll climbed, the B.B.C. felt it necesssary to suppress the song, and the U.S. network quickly followed suit. A French station even brought in psychic experts to study the effects of “Gloomy Sunday” but had no effect on the ever climbing death rate.”

Seress is said to have written his one and only masterpiece after getting dumped. And guess what – the girl that dumped him – she fell victim too. This according to cmkxunofficial.proboards.com:

“[Seress] wrote to his ex-fiancée, pleading for a reconciliation. But several days later came the most awful, shocking news. Seress learned from the police that his sweetheart had poisoned herself. And by her side, a copy of the sheet music to Gloomy Sunday was found.”

Not only that – but thirty some-odd years later – Seress himself did the deed. He tossed himself out the window of a tall building.

Morbid as the world at large is – we know you want to hear the song. We’d post the original, but we couldn’t find a version that wasn’t audio spliced by nerds with keyboard music they stole from a Freddy Krueger movie. So instead we’re giving you the next best thing. The tune’s been covered by tons of people, you see, the most popular of which was done by Billie Holiday. Enjoy!

But first you might want to consider what you want to with all your stuff. We’ll take your ice trays. It’s because we’ve moved recently and we didn’t bring any ice trays.

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