Heron-Allen's Cursed Amethyst

A stone at the Natural History Museum in London, known from Edward Heron-Allen's story as the purple sapphire, which the museum calls a cursed amethyst. The museum repeats a rumour that Heron-Allen made up the curse himself.

The Natural History Museum lists the stone among ten odd objects in its collection and calls it an amethyst. In a 2022 article it passes on a rumour that Edward Heron-Allen invented the curse as publicity for The Purple Sapphire, a short story of his from 1921.

The Heron-Allen Society, writing in 2007 when the stone went on show at The Vault, quotes a warning by Heron-Allen. In it he calls the stone thrice cursed and marked with the blood and shame of all its owners. He says he has put the stone into seven boxes and left them with his bankers, to stay shut until thirty-three years after his death, and advises whoever opens it to throw it into the sea.

The story appeared in 1921 in The Purple Sapphire, and other Posthumous Papers, under the name Christopher Blayre. In it a speaker says his father looted the stone from a Vishnu statue in Naghpir, which he calls a Mutiny stronghold, that the shrine was then levelled, and that his father was wounded the next day and the wound never healed. Nature reviewed the book that year, listing events from it: the damage that followed when a Mineralogical Museum accepted the so-called purple sapphire, and the death of Prof. Markwand.