Queen Mercedes of Spain died on 26 June 1878, two days past her eighteenth birthday, in the palace where she'd been born. She had been married five months and three days. The official report gave the cause as gastric fever; modern historians believe it was typhoid. In March she had miscarried after a long ride, and she sickened through the spring; the fever took hold in late May, and the hemorrhages began on 22 June, four days before she died. Nothing in the contemporary record mentions a ring.

Twenty years later, on 9 October 1898, the Chicago Tribune ran a story headlined "Fatal Opal: Curse of Spain's Court." By then the ring existed in full: a gift from a spurned countess, slipped onto Mercedes's finger as a wedding present, passed from hand to royal hand as each new owner sickened and died. It is, as far as I can establish, entirely a retrospective construction, built two decades after the fact onto the bones of a young woman's very real, very ordinary death from an infectious disease that killed a great many people in nineteenth-century Spain. I find that more unsettling than any curse would have been.

This is a story about how a gemstone got a reputation it has spent a century trying to live down, and about the specific, traceable mechanics of how that happened: a bestselling novelist, a newspaper looking for a headline, and a trade rivalry that had every reason to help the story along.

In Brief: opal's reputation as an unlucky stone is usually traced to 1829, when Walter Scott's novel Anne of Geierstein gave a fictional opal supernatural, fatal powers. European opal sales reportedly fell by half within the year, though some historians find little evidence the superstition was widespread before the 1850s. The "cursed" opal ring of the Spanish court, which supposedly killed five royal owners including Queen Mercedes, first appears in the earliest source I can trace, a Chicago Tribune story published in 1898, two decades after Mercedes's death from what historians believe was typhoid. Queen Victoria's later, much-repeated championing of opal as a counter-superstition is itself partly an Australian trade-promotion narrative. Opal is one of two official October birthstones, alongside tourmaline.

The novel

Walter Scott published Anne of Geierstein in 1829, the twenty-fourth of his Waverley novels and, by any honest modern measure, not one of the books he's remembered for. Within it, Lady Hermione wears an opal in her hair that shifts with her moods, bright when she's happy, dimmed when she suffers; holy water is sprinkled on the stone, its fire goes out, she falls into a swoon, and by the next day nothing remains on her bed but a small heap of ash.

That single scene is usually credited with doing more damage to a gemstone's reputation than anything before or since. The British Quarterly Review, writing in 1878, is cited as tracing the superstition directly to Scott's novel, and several gem histories describe opal sales across Europe falling by as much as half within a year of publication, with the depressed market lasting, by some accounts, two decades. The evidence is thinner than the legend: the superstition is hard to find in print before the 1850s, and when people asked in 1875 where it came from, the scholars who answered didn't mention Scott. Either way, a jilted, invented love story set in medieval Switzerland is the event everyone points to.

It helped, the story goes, that diamond merchants had every commercial reason to let the superstition spread. Opal has no hardness to speak of compared with a diamond; it had been, until 1829, a serious competitor in fashionable jewellery. A curse is free marketing if you're not the one selling the cursed thing.

The ring that wasn't there

The Spanish court story is where the legend gets specific, and specificity is exactly what should make a sceptical reader pause.

As the story is now told: Virginia Oldoini, Comtesse de Castiglione, a celebrated beauty and former mistress of Napoleon III, was spurned by the young King Alfonso XII of Spain when he married his cousin, Mercedes of Orléans, in January 1878. The Comtesse sent the newlyweds an opal ring as a wedding gift, pointedly, a memento of what might have been. Mercedes wore it and died within months. The king, the story goes, passed the ring to his grandmother, who died soon after; then to Mercedes's sister, Maria Cristina, in some versions his intended second bride, who died of tuberculosis; then to his own sister, who died of tuberculous meningitis. When Alfonso himself died, his widow, Queen Maria Christina, by this point understandably reluctant to keep the thing in the family, is said to have hung it around the neck of a statue of the Virgin of Almudena in Madrid, where it is supposed to have vanished during the Spanish Civil War.

It is, I'll grant, an excellent story. It is also, on the documentary evidence I can find, a story with no trace before the Chicago Tribune's 1898 account, "Fatal Opal: Curse of Spain's Court," written two decades after Mercedes's actual death. (The Tribune couldn't even keep its own cast straight: it named the doomed grandmother as Isabella II, who in 1898 was still alive.) The women who died in 1878 and 1879, Alfonso's grandmother Maria Christina, his sister-in-law Maria Cristina d'Orléans, his sister the Infanta Maria del Pilar, died amid genuine and devastating outbreaks of tuberculosis and cholera that were killing people across Spain regardless of what jewellery they owned. Alfonso XII himself didn't die until November 1885, seven years after he supposedly first handled the ring, of tuberculosis, the same disease that had already killed two of the women in the story. A curse that takes seven years to reach the man who started it all is a curse with very poor aim.

I can find no document from 1878 or 1879, no contemporary letter or newspaper report, that connects any of these deaths to an opal ring. The connection appears to have been assembled afterward, retrospectively, the way these stories always are: take a sequence of deaths that actually happened, which nineteenth-century Spain had tragically many of, and thread a cursed object through them once enough time has passed that no one can easily check.

The queen who fixed it, maybe

The standard rebuttal to all this, repeated in nearly every piece written about opal since, is that Queen Victoria personally rescued the stone's reputation: that she adored opals, wore them throughout her reign, and gave them to each of her five daughters as wedding gifts, deliberately and publicly defying the Scott superstition.

Part of me wants this story to be true in the straightforward way it's usually told, and the honest answer is that it's more complicated than that. Victoria did receive and wear Australian opals, and opal jewellery does appear among gifts connected to her family in the period. But the specific, tidy narrative, that she single-handedly revived a doomed industry through five deliberate wedding gifts, was substantially developed and promoted by the Australian opal trade itself, which had every commercial reason to want a royal rehabilitation story exactly as much as diamond merchants had reason to want a royal curse. Both halves of opal's nineteenth-century reputation, the fall and the rescue, were shaped by people selling something.

What actually revived opal, more plausibly, was supply. Australian opal mining reached commercial scale in the 1870s and 1880s, first in Queensland's boulder opal fields and then at White Cliffs in New South Wales, and Lightning Ridge's black opal followed after 1903. A market that had spent decades without remarkable new opal to sell suddenly had a great deal of it.

What the curse actually cost

Here is what I keep returning to, writing about this. The curse wasn't really about a gemstone at all. It was a story that turned a teenage queen's death from typhoid, and several more deaths from tuberculosis during genuine epidemics, into entertainment: a sequence, a body count, a headline. Mercedes of Spain gets remembered, when she's remembered, as a victim of a ring that by every documentary trace available to me did not exist. She was, in the plainer and sadder version, a teenager who caught a disease that killed enormous numbers of people in her century, five months into a marriage her country had celebrated as a love match.

Opal has spent nearly two hundred years carrying the weight of that story. It seems worth, once, putting it down.

Opal isn't alone in this. The Hope Diamond carries the same kind of legend, assembled the same way, long after the facts it's supposedly built on. For the stone itself, not its folklore, the sapphire buying guide covers the birthstone cluster opal belongs to.

Quick reference

ClaimWhat the record actually shows
Opal has always been considered unluckyNo; it was a good-luck stone through antiquity and the medieval period, linked to hope and clear sight
The curse dates to ancient or medieval superstitionThe origin usually cited is Walter Scott's 1829 novel Anne of Geierstein, though the superstition is hard to find in print before the 1850s
Mercedes of Spain died of a cursed opal ringShe died on 26 June 1878 of what historians believe was typhoid; no contemporary source mentions a ring
The Spanish "cursed ring" story is contemporary to the deathsEarliest account I can trace: Chicago Tribune, 9 October 1898, twenty years after Mercedes's death
Queen Victoria single-handedly revived opal's reputationShe did wear and gift opals, but the full rescue narrative is partly an Australian trade-promotion story
Opal is unlucky to wear if it isn't your birthstoneA late addition to the folklore, with no earlier documented source

Frequently asked questions

Why do people think opals are bad luck?

The superstition is usually traced to Walter Scott's 1829 novel Anne of Geierstein, in which a character's magical opal is linked to her death. European opal sales reportedly fell by roughly half within a year of publication, a decline some sources say lasted two decades, and diamond merchants, who stood to benefit from opal's decline, are widely believed to have helped the story spread. Some historians note the superstition is hard to find in print before the 1850s.

Did a cursed opal ring really kill five members of the Spanish royal family?

The documentary evidence doesn't support it. Queen Mercedes of Spain, the ring's supposed first royal victim, died in June 1878 of what historians believe was typhoid; the earliest version of the ring story I can trace is a Chicago Tribune article published in October 1898, two decades later. The other deaths attributed to the ring occurred during genuine tuberculosis and cholera outbreaks in the period.

Did Queen Victoria really save opal's reputation?

She did wear and give opal jewellery, but the popular version of the story, that she single-handedly reversed a doomed trade through a deliberate campaign including wedding gifts to her five daughters, was significantly shaped and promoted by the Australian opal industry as a counter-narrative to the Scott superstition. Australian opal reaching European markets at commercial scale from the 1870s onward is at least as plausible an explanation for the stone's revival.

Is it true you shouldn't wear opal unless it's your birthstone?

There's no early or well-documented source for this specific rule; it appears to be a later addition to the broader bad-luck folklore. Opal is one of two official birthstones for October, alongside tourmaline, which is presumably where the idea took hold.

Is opal actually a durable, wearable stone?

That's a separate, real question from the superstition, and worth asking on its own merits, not folklore's. Our guide to caring for jewellery covers how to handle a stone with opal's particular fragility.

Sources: GIA; British Quarterly Review (1878), as cited by EraGem; American Gem Society; Chicago Tribune (9 October 1898), as reproduced by SilkPixie and GemSelect; George H. Bratley, The Power of Gems and Charms (1907), as reproduced by Mrs Daffodil Digresses; Wikipedia and Unofficial Royalty on Mercedes of Orléans, Alfonso XII and Anne of Geierstein; SkyJems Encyclopedia; Antique Jewellers.