Ted Kennedy Suspected His Family Had A Curse, & He Might've Been Right

On the evening of July 25, 1969, Senator Ted Kennedy verbally acknowledged a troubling pattern in his family's history: tragedy dogged the Kennedys. A week earlier, Kennedy had crashed his car off a bridge on Chappaquiddick Island in Massachusetts, killing his 28-year-old passenger. So Ted wondered, during a televised broadcast following the Chappaquiddick accident, whether "some awful curse did actually hang over all the Kennedys."

The Chappaquiddick accident was awful, and unfortunately it fits among the Kennedy family's equally awful history. The Kennedy Family Curse, as it's called, features four plane crashes, two assassinations, and an alarming number of young deaths. While this is an eerie string of unfortunate events, the so-called pattern may realistically be chalked up to the fact that the Kennedys are all so firmly in the public eye — we're paying attention and cataloguing every turn for the dramatic. “Certainly those tragedies have equally affected other families, but [the Kennedys] are the people who are in the public eye. Other people are not known," psychotherapist Melody Masi told the Cape Cod Times.

If you were born any time in the '90s or later, you might be vaguely aware of this legendary "curse," but not familiar with the details. Are the facts enough to convince you of some curse following the Kennedys? Read on to see.

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