The Deadliest Song

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The record feels perfectly normal in your hands.

A black vinyl disc about the size of a dinner plate.

But when you set it on the turntable and the needle begins tracing the grooves,

the music is curiously overwhelming. Music has never made you cry in the past.
You're just not that type of person. And yet, there's a melancholy quality to this song that is so pure, so effective, that tears immediately rise in your eyes.
A lump in your throat. The pain of the world almost seems reflected in the melody.
Suddenly, you feel the urge to rise from your chair and cross to the window of your high-rise apartment. But you resist.
You were warned that this song has a power unlike any other.

In fact, for nearly a century, it's been banned by broadcasters across the world.

Authorities have made desperate attempts to suppress the publication of its cheap music.

Because when this song plays, people inexplicably die. The year is 1932.

It's raining in Paris.

Laszlo Jaber is taking a walk.

He's an aspiring poet from Budapest, struggling to make a living in post-war France.

He had thought the life of an artist would be easier in the city of love.

But the only thing he found was a larger community of struggling artists.

And now, after the love of his life left him, all he has are the gloomy streets of Paris. It's a quiet, wet morning.
Most Parisians are clustered indoors. The buildings loom above him like melancholy tombstones as he walks.
Passersby look like ghosts. Slowly, before his eyes, a familiar figure takes shame from the mist.
Yavor's eyes light up with recognition. It's his good friend, Rezo Ceres.
They are kindred spirits in a way. Ceres is a fellow Hungarian, a musician and songwriter, who came to Paris for much of the same reason.
As the two men meet each other, Yavor notices that Ceres is also downcast. The two of them start walking together.
Yavor tells Ceres about his broken heart, how his lover took a contract in Sicily, and how he has neither the funds nor prospects to follow her. Ceres understands his pain.
His girlfriend has also left him. She'd long insisted that he get a stable job and quit pursuing his dream of becoming a successful musician.
Ceres had hoped that she'd come around. For a while, it seemed like he would become a famous songwriter.
He did write a hit song in 1925 and made a decent living as a live accompanist of silent films. But now that silent films have been replaced by talkies, picture houses have no need for a pianist anymore.
That period of Ceres' life is over, and he has no idea what in the world is next for him. Without much more to say, the men walk on in silence, each lost in their own thoughts, but grateful for the company.
Ceres starts whistling. It's a melody that he wrote earlier that day, seized by inspiration.
The tune catches Yavor's ear, and he shivers. If he was emotional before, this tune caused the sadness to well up inside him.

It makes him think of a poem he wrote not long ago.

And so, he begins to recite it alongside his friends whistling.

Two stanzas long, the poem is a prayer to a loved one who has passed on.

In it, the unnamed narrator is so tormented by the loss of his lover that he considers suicide. The piece's title is fitting for a day like this.
In Hungarian, it's called Somoru Vasarna, or in English, Gloomy Sunday. Both Yevore and Sures recognize something fortuitous about this meeting.
Not only are they both pining for their lost loves,

but the poem and the tune fit together almost perfectly.

They work feverishly on the song for the rest of the afternoon,

transcribing Suresh's tune into sheet music and adjusting Yevore's poem to fit the melody.

Eager to get their song in front of an audience,

they approach a band leader at the Shingi restaurant that evening. They ask him to play their tune, and the band obliges.
Immediately, a hush falls over the restaurant. Everyone is enraptured.
Interested murmurs wander from one person to another, but that's not the most telling sign. Yavor begins to notice shudders.
Yavor and Saras look at each other. There's something potent in this song.
They're certain of it. It could be a hint for both of them, and now all they have to do is find someone to publish their sheet music.
Their first inquiries are promising. The second publisher they visit likes the song.
However, after a while, they stop hearing from him. Eventually, word gets out that the man has died.
Yavor and Ceres are frustrated, but all around, believe this to be nothing more than an unfortunate coincidence. The songwriters press on, but as they struggle to get anyone else interested, publisher after publisher rejects the song as it's too depressing.
For a while, it seems like their song is cursed to never see the light of day, but finally, they find someone willing to print the sheet music in their native Hungary. And Paul Kalmar, an internationally renowned Hungarian singer, signs on to record the song.
After years of struggling at the edge of poverty, Yavor and Suresse grow cautiously optimistic.

Because maybe, just maybe,

their depressing song won't be a hit after all.

And it is.

Cafés in Paris adopt a tango version of the song,

which proves immensely popular among patrons,

who requested as many as 30

times a day. The city that offered Javor and Suresh nothing but heartbreak and failure

is now embracing their music. It seems, for the first time in their difficult lives as artists,

that things are finally looking up. Gloomy Sunday is a genuine hit, and royalties are on the way.

But the men's excitement won't last forever, because their song is about to become world famous for all the wrong reasons. A few years later, it begins as an ordinary night at the Theater d'Uipest near Budapest.

The audience chatters excitedly as Olga Kerekes, a renowned singer and dancer, takes the stage.

But the chatter dies away as the orchestra begins to play.

Kerekes sings a song that catches the audience off guard. Gloomy Sunday.
The performance is magnetic. Kereke seems carried away with the emotion of her song.
There are tears streaming down her face, glittering in the stage lights. As the final note fades away, the audience sits in a strange silence.
The intensity of the performance seems to have had a visceral effect on them. Ketakas thrusts her arms out into the audience as if reaching for help, then abruptly turns and exits stage right.
The audience sits there waiting for her to return for her curtain call.

She doesn't come back.

Seconds turn to minutes.

Troubled mutters begin to echo throughout the audience.

The stage manager runs backstage

to make sure that Kerekes is all right.

He pounds on the dressing room door,

and when no answer comes,

he forces it open, uncovering a scene straight out of a nightmare. Olga Kerekes is lying on the floor by her makeup table.
She is dead, with the vial of poison still clutched in her lifeless hand. This incident, by all accounts, is horrifying.
However, it isn't isolated. It seems that by the mid-1930s, the hit song had thrust the city of Budapest into crisis.
The Hungarian capital is gripped by an epidemic of melancholy, a rash of suicides apparently linked to Gloomy Sunday. One night, not long after the death of Olga Kerekes, a fiddler in the Green Frog Cafe begins playing the song, aware only that it's a popular tune.
One of the patrons beckons him over, and so, still playing, the fiddler approaches.

The man begins to sing along with the music.

He knows the words by heart.

However, the moment the fiddler finishes,

the man out of nowhere draws a pistol from his belt and shoots himself dead.

The only motive left behind,

a single note in his pocket,

which explains he wanted to die singing along to Gloomy Sunday.

Across town, a housekeeper is found dead, having drunk sodium hydroxide.

Newspapers report that a crumpled up piece of paper is found in her hands.

The sheet music to Gloomy Sunday. Newspaper speculation runs rampant.
Was something in these lyrics responsible for this woman's death? After all, the song describes suicidal longing, and it's the closest thing the housekeeper left to a suicide note. Critics write this off as paranoia.
A song can't have this kind of power over someone. It's just as likely, they say, that the presence of the music was nothing but a coincidence.
But as these so-called coincidences continue to pile up, the theory becomes ever harder to dismiss. In an upscale part of the city, a married couple retires to their bedroom upstairs

after hosting a dinner party. And there, a terrifying scene awaits them.
Their linens

are shredded as if by knives or scissors. Their paintings too have been brutally slashed.

At first, it seems like some sort of act of burglary or vandalism,

until they find the bodies of two housemaids in the adjoining room. The women, it seems, have taken their own lives after hearing the song from their employer's party downstairs.
By now, well over a dozen Hungarians have committed suicide, leaving some reference to Gloomy Sunday. On one victim, police find a suicide note requesting that a hundred white roses be scattered on his grave, a phrase taken from the song's lyrics.
And a similar note is found on the body of yet another man after he shoots himself in the back of a taxi. The Budapest community is paralyzed, unsure how to handle this bizarre trend.
For a while, they do nothing, hoping it'll pass on its own. Yet it doesn't.
One morning, a mother in Budapest finds the words Gloomy Sunday in a note left by her 15-year-old daughter, Elizabeth Gugulai. Fishermen discover the girl's body in the Danube River that same day.
As it turned out, the teenager was one of at least two people who jumped into the Danube after hearing the song. The death of young Elizabeth scandalizes the people of Budapest.
And it's not just tabloids either. A local archbishop publishes a pastoral letter to Hungarian Catholics, sternly addressing the wave of suicides.
The public outcry starts to swell. They want this song banned as a safety measure.
News of the Budapest suicides reaches the song's two authors, and both men are shocked. When asked by the press whether he feels responsible for the deaths, Rezo Ceres gives a defensive response.
Only 32 years old, he's had to struggle to make a living for himself. He lost his youth to military service in World War I and his young adulthood to poverty.
If his songs are sad, it's because the music reflects his life experience, not because it's cursed. Laszlo Yavor, meanwhile, admits that this news disturbs him.
When he wrote the lyrics, he had hoped that they might help validate or heal those experiencing pain in their lives.

But instead, it seems that he's created a monster.

Though Yavor tells the press he considers himself an optimist, his lifestyle has become undeniably dark in recent years.

Everything in his home is black. His writing desk, the drapes, even his piano.
On his writing desk, two objects stare at him. A skull and plaster casts of a woman's face and hands.
The casts belonged to the woman who had inspired the lyrics to Gloomy Sunday. He had commissioned them as a memento when she had left him all those years ago.
He last heard from her when she wrote from Sicily, informing Yavor that she was getting married to a man she met there. Yavor hasn't had the heart to write back.
But then, all those years later, in the midst of public outrage about the song, he receives an unexpected telegram from her. And inside, it contains just two words.
Gloomy Sunday. Yavor stares at this telegram for a very long time.
He tries to convince himself that this is her way of congratulating him on the success of his song, but it still doesn't sit right. A terrifying possibility takes hold of him.
He frantically runs to the post office to send a return message. He tells her that her life is worth living, that she's beautiful and has only happiness waiting for her.
He sends the telegram, hoping it reaches her in time.

But the next day, a small package comes for him in the mail.

It's a ring.

There's no letter attached,

but he recognizes the jewelry as one that belonged to her.

As it turned out, she has already committed suicide in Italy,

and Eufor's telegram arrived too late to stop her.

Whatever horrible curse this song carries with it has spread beyond Hungary.

It's beginning to circle the globe, and there's nothing that Laszlo Javor or anyone else can do about it. A beggar sits on a street in Rome.
People rush past. Some drop change in his outstretched palm.
Others pretend not to see him. His mind wanders, and he begins whistling a tune he heard once, filtering from a nearby cafe.
As he whistles, an errand boy stops to place some money in his hand. A generous amount, in fact.
The beggar realizes that the boy has given him all the money he has. He looks up to ask the boy why,

but he's already gone. The boy is running to a nearby bridge, and before anyone can stop him, he throws himself over the railing and into the river.
It's 1936, and the international community is waking up to the terrifying, repulsive power of Gloomy Sunday.

Even still, though, few believe the song's popularity will cross the Atlantic. In the United States, Gloomy Sunday is only available in one small music shop in New York, and its appeal is limited to Hungarian-speaking Americans.
Some of the American papers are so sure that the song is harmless that they print out an English translation of the lyrics in their articles. This only makes more people aware of the song's existence, and it's only a matter of time before someone puts these English lyrics to music.
Music publishers and record companies smell opportunity in the song's lid reputation. They leap into action, each eager to become the first to produce an English-language recording.
Eventually, the record company assigns the task of recording the tune to one of the most reliable composers of 1930s American jazz, Hal Kemp. Kemp gathers his orchestra and they begin working overtime to record the song.
During the grueling recording sessions, the vocalist struggles to get through the song. The band around him, usually in high spirits, find their energy lagging as they play through Rezo Ceres' gloomy tune in E-flat minor.
And after 22 takes, they finally land on one that satisfies the record company.

And so, here we are.

The song is now ready for print in America.

And print it will, under the title, The Famous Hungarian Suicide Song. Hungarian suicide song.
The famous Hungarian suicide song is poised to take America by storm. Almost immediately after Kemp's version is released, a Republican congressman proposes a preemptive ban on the song.
He tells Congress a horrifying story. A 13-year-old boy named Floyd Hamilton Jr.
recently hanged himself in his Michigan home. In the boy's pocket, police found a newspaper clipping with the song's lyrics.
The congressman's plea makes local news, but it doesn't spur any federal legislation. If anything, the song grows even more popular.
Tabloids eagerly spread news about the song's effects. A music dealer in Toledo, Ohio, provokes a local controversy by decorating his store with fake blood, as well as skulls and crossbones and references to suicide.
A murderer in prison requests a violin so that

he can play Gloomy Sunday to himself. Even the stars of the day start to catch on to the song's

reputation. When she records what would become the most famous cover of the song,

American jazz singer Billie Holiday adds a third stanza to the lyrics. In this new part, Holiday clarifies that her lover's departure and the thoughts of suicide it inspired were merely a bad dream.
But it's not enough. Holiday's version is banned by the BBC after a woman

dies of a barbiturate overdose while listening to it. Whatever the song's mystical source of power

may be, it definitely seems to go deeper than the lyrics.

And across the globe, the suicides continue. 1940.
The Second World War is underway, and the original authors of Gloomy Sunday find themselves at a terrible crossroads. Ever since writing the tune, Rezo Ceres has struggled.
His song is a hit, but in a way that makes him ashamed. Though he gives measured responses to interviewers, in private, he's deeply concerned for his own reputation.
He's proud of his work that has resonated so deeply with people, but bitter that this song's grown a connection to suicide. His co-author, Laszlo Javor, has already fled Hungary for America.
Suresh considers doing the same. He's Jewish, after all, and Europe has become a dangerous place for him, especially now that Hungary has joined the Axis powers alongside Nazi Germany.
But Ceres misses his window to flee. One morning, he wakes up to uniformed men pounding on his door.
The soldiers grab Ceres and drag him onto a trunk full of other men in shabby workwear. Without warning, he's been ripped from his life.
Ceres is joining the war effort, whether he wants to or not.

And he's forced to leave his mother and wife back in Budapest.

The army ships Ceres off to Germany, where he spends the duration of World War II digging trenches and clearing minefields.

He's as miserable as he's ever been.

But he's about to learn the hard way that it can always get worse. While toiling away in desolate war zones, Ceres receives word from his wife.
In his absence, she has left him for another man. Yet soon, even more devastating news reaches him.
His mother was deported from Budapest and has died in a Nazi labor camp. Ceres, it seems, is bound for the same fate.
He suspects he'll either die through hard labor or get executed on a whim. To pass the time during Sleepless Nights, he writes new lyrics to Gloomy Sunday, to which he retitles The World Has Ended.
One day, late in the war, while digging a trench for the Germans, he hears the approach of a car, an officer presumably coming to inspect his work. Ceres stands at attention, trying to blend in and stay invisible.
Perhaps this is just a routine inspection, nothing more. However, when the officer's eyes lock onto him, Ceres feels his heart plummet.
The man shouts at Ceres, roughly pulling him out of the ditch. As the officer shoves him toward a nearby house, Ceres thinks his time has finally come.
How many Jewish people have been dragged behind buildings and shot like this? But as soon as they're out of sight, the officer's demeanor instantly shifts. He stops hitting Ceres and apologizes, explaining that there was no way to get him out of there without such a show of force.

The officer tells Ceres he knows of his work. He had seen Ceres perform back in Hungary and wants to save him from further brutality.
The officer gives him clothes and a place to hide for the remainder of the war. And for the first time since 1936, Sures is actually grateful to have written the infamous Hungarian Suicide Song.
He returns home, depressed but alive. His home city of Budapest bears the scars of intense fighting between the Germans and the Soviet Red Army.
Bridges are destroyed, ancient buildings reduced to rubble. He reunites with his wife at his old home.
Her wartime fling has ended and she wants to return to him. Ceres forgives her and the two move back in together.
He hopes that his career as a songwriter can get back on track now that the world is returning to normal.

But unfortunately for Ceres, Gloomy Sunday isn't finished with him.

Years pass. The suicide reports linked to Gloomy Sunday die away.

Rezo Ceres, inspired by the Years pass. The suicide reports linked to Gloomy Sunday die away.

Rezo Ceres, in spite of being a world-famous songwriter, struggles to make ends meet.

He's heard nothing from Laszlo Yavor since the war, and his flow of royalties has apparently been disrupted by war-era regulations on money transfers.

Once again, Ceres is forced to live the life of a starving artist. He's hired at a local restaurant as a piano player.
It's like 1930s Paris all over again, only this time at middle age he feels like his career has passed him by. Shortly after the war, Budapest falls under Soviet regime, and any hope Suresse had of a musical career fully dissipates.
This new regime has very strict rules about what's acceptable to play on the radio. The songs Suresse wrote before the war appear on lists of band music, barring him from ever writing commercially again.
He considers leaving Budapest, but can't quite bring himself to do so. Though he's never sent to a gulag, he would still feel imprisoned inside his own home.
On the radio, songs by the Beatles and Elvis eclipse the jazz and tango music he's made his living writing. He feels like a relic, an echo of what he once was before the war began.
One night after work, he comes home and pulls out a record he hasn't listened to in some time. The original Hungarian recording of Gloomy Sunday.
He places the disc onto his turntable and allows the music to sweep over him. He understands the song's power more than most.
He wrote it, after all. But this time, the song overwhelms

him altogether in a completely new way. It's a sensation he's never quite experienced himself,

only read about in newspaper headlines. Years go by, and Ceres begins listening to Gloomy Sunday more and more.
Not only the initial recording, but the numerous covers as well. The Hungarian and non-Hungarian versions alike, which allowed his cursed song to spread across the world.
Ceres sinks deeper and deeper into his depression. He's now listening to Gloomy Sunday for four hours every afternoon, and his neighbors grow accustomed to hearing the music play from exactly 2pm every day.
To him, every single day has become Gloomy Sunday. Well, that is until January 7th of 1968.
Ceres finally reaches his limit. He steps out onto his balcony and jumps off.
The fall, however, doesn't kill him. Broken, unconscious, and in critical condition, he's rushed to the hospital.
And when he wakes up, he's bandaged all over, plaster holding his limbs in place. He has survived his suicide attempt.
But once the hospital staff leaves him alone, he takes care of that. He slowly reaches out to grasp a wire connecting his plaster casts to a counterweight, and upon returning, the nurse finds that he strangled himself to death.
Today, Gloomy Sunday lives on, both as a popular song and a piece of history from its era.

There have been no documented deaths since that of Rezo Ceres, and over time, the song's reputation shifted away from current events and into the realm of urban legend. In total, over 100 people worldwide have allegedly died by suicide and referenced Bloomy Sunday in the act.
The BBC radio ban outlives both of the song's authors and finally lifts in the early 2000s. To this day, it continues to inspire cover pieces and adaptations, including one from an Oscar-winning film, Schindler's List.
In a film that dramatizes much of the cruelty of the Holocaust, it's perhaps fitting that the famous Suicide Song, written by two Hungarian Jewish men, should play a small role in it. But what was it about this song that caused so much misery and death? Over the years, researchers have compared Gloomy Sunday to other curse songs, all of which have been linked to suicide at one point or another.

These connections, as it turns out, do not only exist in the distant past.

Ozzy Osbourne's 1980 hit, Suicide Solution, was cited in a lawsuit related to teen suicide.

But that wouldn't be the only one.

Several years later, Metallica's Fade to Black would gain similar notoriety. Public outcries would follow suicides from song to song, carrying into the 2000s and beyond.
These songs have little in common beyond this strange, morbid connection. Summer metal, summer rock.
Gloomy Sunday exists as a jazz song of tango in swing time. And even though moral panics about suicide songs continue to this day, Gloomy Sunday maintains a higher, more well-documented body count than any of its successors.
Could it be that the newspapers in 1936 were perhaps correct when they labeled Gloomy Sunday as an unholy, so-called fiend tune, capable of influencing people supernaturally with black magic? There's actually a far more likely explanation for the Gloomy Sunday suicides and why they were bound up so tightly with that song in particular. The song that Rezo Ceres and Laszlo Yavor wrote happened to strike a chord at just the right time to have such a perceived impact.
The Great Depression hit Hungary in the early 1930s, causing waves of unemployment and poverty. The songwriters who struggled to live paycheck to paycheck were no longer writing a song about just themselves, but rather about their whole country.
A country that was mere years away from falling to fascism and condemning thousands of its people to die in Nazi labor camps.

It didn't matter that the song was about yearning for lost love. That despair was universal.

The urban legend of Gloomy Sunday as a suicide song may, in the end, have things entirely backwards. The song does not cause suicidal depression, but rather, those suffering from depression find the song uniquely relatable.
This music, with its profoundly unique words, expressed their longing to be free of despair, of heartbreak,

and sorrow. This is a story not about a cursed tune, but about one of the darkest periods

in world history, and how a single song spoke deeply to that darkness. Nome sané.
by me, Mr. Ballin, Nick Witters, and Zach Levitt.
Our head of writing is Evan Allen. This episode was written by Robert Diemstra.
Copy editing by Luke Baratz. Audio editing and sound design by Alistair Sherman.
Mixed and mastered by Schultz Media. Research by Abigail Shumway, Camille Callahan, Evan Beamer, and Stacey Wood.
Fact-checking by Abigail Shumway.

Production supervision by Jeremy Bone and Colt Locasio.

Production coordination by Samantha Collins and Avery Siegel.

Artwork by Jessica Cloxton-Kiner and Robin Vane.

Theme song by Ross Bugden.

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