The Curse of the Mandela Effect
The following article first appeared in the January, 2023 issue of Paranormality Magazine. It explores some complicated ideas I had around the so-called Mandela Effect, with broader ideas about problematic tropes that persist in Forteana and some near-forgotten weirdness that may tie in to it all. I explore prophecies, manifestation, alternate timelines, and how we all shape these things with our words and the stories we choose to tell.
I have also included additional Mandela Effect content not included in the original article.
The Curse of the Mandela Effect
Memory is a strange aspect of the human psyche. We all forget a good deal of what we’ve learned or experienced, and often when recalling particulars from our minds we remember incorrectly. A stunning number of people even have memories of events that never occurred; others remember details in a slightly different way than can be demonstrated as true. These instances can, and often are, explained away as simply the product of things misremembered. To others, who ascribe to the idea of a so-called Mandela Effect, they are evidence of parallel universes and alternate timelines.
Examples are easy enough to find online, as the Mandela Effect became something of a cultural meme in recent years. The return of the classic paranormal drama The X-Files even dedicated an episode to it, entitled “The Lost Art of Forehead Sweat”. Reddit and YouTube are filled with users documenting their own accounts or listing the common examples, such as whether a popular children’s book series that features Bears are Berenstein or Berenstain. Many remember the former, while the latter is true- in this universe, anyway. A recent study was conducted testing visual memory using popular characters and logos, which found that participants consistently identified them incorrectly when faced with multiple versions of the same image. Strangely, however, they also seemed to gravitate toward the same wrong answers, which seems to indicate that not only is memory faulty- for some reason it’s faulty in the same way for a variety of people!
This aspect of the Mandela Effect seems to be what pulls people in, and keeps them hooked. Fiona Broome, a paranormal investigator and researcher, is credited with coining the term based on her recollection of news coverage around Nelson Mandela’s funeral, years before it happened. Upon realizing that she had been mistaken, she had tried to figure out what it was that she did remember- only to find others shared memories of the same funeral. Mandela of course did not die in prison, as she and others remembered seeing on the news, but rather went on to become President of South Africa and an icon of democracy and social justice. In this respect, it is rather unfortunate that his name now calls to mind this “Effect” more than it does his accomplishments. Broome notes on her website that being a civil-rights advocate herself, she is glad her memory appears to be wrong. While he was still alive, however, she was collecting evidence from others who shared this memory along with a host of other such glimpses into alternate timestreams. Notable among them was legendary radio personality Art Bell, the host of Coast to Coast AM. Broome and others discussed these concepts with him on the airwaves, years before the Mandela Effect went viral online. When Bell passed away in 2018, fittingly enough, many claimed to have remembered him dying a few years prior.
Nelson Mandela died in 2013, at the age of 95. Around the same time, author Colin Wilson also passed away. Writing in the April 2014 issue of Fortean Times, Alan Murdie wrote a belated tribute since Wilson’s obituary had been overshadowed by the news of Mandela’s death in the press at that time. He saw a bit of “cosmic irony” in the fact that the two died so near to each other, as he recalled a lecture in 1992 during which Wilson mentioned a prediction, sent to him by an unnamed clairvoyant, that Mandela would be assassinated in the near future. One wonders, perhaps, if either Broome, Bell, or both had been privy to the same prediction, and had unintentionally confabulated a memory of the events playing out. Murdie goes on to describe how Wilson was the first to point out that the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand occurred at the same time as an attempt on Rasputin’s life from a crazed woman. Facts such as these, as Wilson would put it “make one incline to doubt the “blindness of history”’. One can’t help but wonder what the world would be like if Rasputin had died and Ferdinand had survived. In typical Fortean fashion, we are thus presented simultaneously with a rational explanation of a prediction that never came to pass leading to a false memory, and the fantastic explanation that perhaps both versions of events played out, albeit in alternate versions of Earth history.
As it happens, Mandela’s assassination as remembered by Broome and others was predicted before anyone had even heard of Mandela. A prophet of the Boers named Nicolaas van Rensberg, later called “Siener” or “Seer” for his visionary claims, had made a great many predictions at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century regarding South Africa and its future. While familiar in South Africa, and popular among far-right white supremecists there, these prophecies from the “South African Nostradamus’’ weren’t widely known elsewhere in the world until the 1990s when they were translated into English. Cited as motivating factors for attempts on Mandela’s life among extremists, van Rensberg’s predictions which those same extremists tried to fulfill, have become tied to Mandela’s legacy in a similarly unfortunate manner to the eponymous “Effect”.
An American analogue to this, it could be argued, is the Curse of Tippecanoe, which apparently was broken during the Reagan administration in the 1980s. The premise is very problematic by today’s standards, but the story goes that in defeating the indigenous tribes at Tippecanoe, William Henry Harrison incurred a curse from Tenskwatawa, the Shawnee prophet and brother to Chief Tecumseh. The curse allegedly would allow for Harrison to become President, but that he would die in office- and further, that every American president elected in a “Zero Year” or year divisible by 20, would also die before completing their term.
This pattern appeared to be accurate, although the offensive “Indian curse” origin of it only emerged after the pattern was noted. It is thought to have been an invention of Robert Ripley, who featured the tale in his popular “Believe It- Or Not!” cartoon column in 1931. By that time, Harrison had died in office, serving only 31 days; Lincoln, elected in 1860, was of course assassinated; Garfield, elected 1880 was also shot and killed; McKinley in 1901 suffered the same fate; and Warren Harding had died after two years in office due to a cerebral hemorrhage. After the alleged “Curse” had been established, Franklin D. Roosevelt died during his fourth term in office (elected in 1940) and finally John F. Kennedy, elected in 1960, was assassinated in 1963. Of the eight U.S. Presidents who have died in office, seven of them fit the pattern.
Regardless of the origin of such a strange pattern, it does seem significantly improbable as mere coincidence. A continuation of such a trend would have meant death for Ronald Reagan during his term, having been elected in 1980. Reagan was shot, but survived- seemingly breaking the curse. Next in line would have been George W. Bush, who managed to survive choking on a pretzel during his time in office; and, bringing us to the present, President Joe Biden. The Curse becomes more obscure as time passes, and as it’s continually proved wrong. This is for the best, perhaps, due to its problematic attributes. In much the same way, the “Siener” of South Africa, long embraced by hateful extremists, seems to have been diminished following Mandela’s survival into old age.
One is tempted to construct a cosmology wherein a select few of us mortals have glimpses of alternate realms, where Reagan was killed in order to fulfill one prophecy allowing for another to come to pass in the form of Mandela’s death. Perhaps in that timestream, Rasputin would have been stabbed to death by a deranged attacker, instead of Franz Ferdinand dying, reshaping world history and altering the events of the First World War- perhaps even preventing it happening at all. And maybe in that universe, Colin Wilson’s death would have attracted more notice in the press. Of course, with such dramatic changes to history as we know it, who’s to say Wilson- or any of us- would have been born in the first place?
Science Fiction writer Philip K. Dick played around with these ideas in his writing, which he claimed were actual visions of alternate realities translated into fiction. After a series of mystical experiences in the mid-1970s, he came to realize that what he was sensing- or remembering- was a series of bifurcated branches of reality, resulting in various dystopian outcomes. These “pluriform pseudo-worlds” were not simply musings or thought experiments meant to generate a fictional story- they were very real worlds, just not as “actualized” as the one we commonly agree on as reality. In his 1977 lecture at the Metz Science Fiction Conference, entitled “If You Find This World Bad, You Should See Some of the Others”, he ultimately concluded that what we perceive as reality is merely a computer hologram. Years before The Matrix franchise birthed another buzzword in the paranormal world — those puzzling “glitch in the Matrix” stories — Dick had already explained many of these strange phenomena in such a way.
Perhaps strange phenomena does manifest as the reality we perceive coalesces to adjust for changes within its timeline. Or perhaps it’s much more complicated than that. Maybe there is a feedback loop between predictions, the creative impulse, and the actions of humans to them that creates a more messy version of how history and time actually play out. And just maybe the “Matrix” of a simulated reality is merely the current technological skin on very ancient ideas about our ignorance of reality as it is, versus what we perceive. There very well may be a quantum entanglement between events, and moments in time, just as it’s theorized there is with particles of matter. Why should there be any connection between Rasputin and Mandela? Or Reagan and some seer on a far-off continent a century earlier? We don’t know that any of these things connect at all, but the mind seeks patterns to make sense of the data we take in. All we know of it are the stories we tell each other, and the stories we believe.
It’s also entirely possible that these questions all represent yet another convoluted attempt to create a map of all realities that could be, and quite possibly are, have been, and will be. Storytelling, myth making, or simply naming and labeling concepts like this are all vain efforts to describe the ineffable. That fact, however, does not mean they are without value. To the contrary, they may very well be inextricably tied to all that exists- from the most catastrophic conflicts the world has ever seen to the spelling in the title of a children’s book series. The stories we choose to tell, and how we tell them, have power.
Addendum:
Years ago I came up with an explanation of how the Mandela Effect came to be, in the form of a joke. As tends to be the case, this joke perhaps contained some profound ideas that could only be reached via humor, as they take a bit of humility and a leap of credulity to entertain. Paranoiacs of the internet were keen to involve the Large Hadron Collider, and its experiments to prove the existence of the Higgs Boson as the catalyst for “splitting the timeline”- but perhaps the answer is much simpler and sillier than all of that. It also doesn’t involve particle physics that I’m sure most of the aforementioned internet paranoiacs have no real understanding of.
I discussed this theory with writer Tim Boucher on the podcast The Eternal Void, But With Jazz. Sadly this recording is no longer available to stream or download. It’s almost as though “They” don’t want the info out there…
It’s really very simple, and there’s one man to blame for the so-called Mandela Effect. That man is George Lucas. Star Wars had been a cultural institution, a perfect trilogy of high adventure and science fiction and innovation in movie making. Touching on “Hero’s Journey” tropes that became fodder for Joseph Campbell, the timeless seeming tale from a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away was always present and relevant to movie buffs. In the 1990s, however, Lucas thought that these films could be improved upon- hence, the Special Edition of the sacrosanct trilogy us elder millennials and Gen Xers grew up with. At a time before anyone had heard of a “Mandela Effect”, Lucas changed details about stories many of us knew backwards and forwards. Chief among them, much to the chagrin of the most vocal fanboys, was the scene where Han Solo encounters bounty hunter Greedo in a cafe in Mos Eisley.
It might be important to note here as well that the 80s and 90s were a very different time for such fandoms. These days the prevalence of Star Wars, along with comic book superheroes and Star Trek, Lord of the Rings, etc, are so accepted as to be the main attraction in the pop culture zeitgeist. While always iconic, any of these fandoms a few decades ago was more of a fringe affair. It was the provenance of nerds, almost exclusively. Before “geek” became “chic”, the particulars of super fans of these franchises occupied a kind of marginalia in the collective unconscious- which, it may be proposed, is a powerful place from which to alter consensus reality on a bigger scale.
For those of us over the age of 40, as of the time of this writing, the scene played out this way- Greedo manages to track Solo down in a cafe, and holds him at gunpoint in a booth. He is determined to bring Han back, dead or alive, to Jabba the Hut. Being the slick rogue Han Solo is, he discreetly uses his own blaster to kill Greedo before the bounty hunter knows what’s happening. In revising the movies, it seems that it was determined that this scene made Han appear too cold-blooded; they decided to alter the scene so that Greedo shoots first and Han kills him in self-defense. Fanboys were upset. “Han Shot First!” became a rallying cry in protest of these changes, and perhaps they were very right to fight for such a thing. Perhaps the alteration of such a moment, so important in the minds of those superfans, ripped reality a new one and split our dimensions of linear reality apart.
In discussing this Tim and I decided to rename the phenomena The Maclunkey Effect, based on what Greedo appears to say upon being shot in the Special Edition version. A quick glance to check the spelling of this reveals that this sound effect or vocal line is being debated as another example of the Mandela Effect in itself- users posting “they changed it again!” and “did Greedo always say maclunkey?”. The cascading levels of cultural memory, infused with the obsessive fan adoration, becomes in our age of rapid information sharing and short attention spans an ever-rippling surface reality whereupon everything appears warped, and our perception can never quite be trusted. Cast adrift we are, in Fortean seas, rarely mooring ourselves for very long in quiet waters. The Super Sargasso of cultural reference points rains memes upon us, and rarely is anything static or sacred. Everything is subject to change.
As a kid, when I read Ray Bradbury’s classic Fahrenheit 451, I envisioned a future world where books were no longer printed. A world where all information was conveyed digitally, and all books were available with a few keystrokes in a search bar. This terrified me. The main reason this concept was so unsettling is the ease with which text could be altered in a digital form. What makes the Maclunkey Effect (see? Use it! Help it catch on!) so unsettling is that reality can be re-written, erasing all evidence of the change except in our memories. Regardless of your thoughts on that aspect, the very real threat of erasure exists in the form of digital media being the dominant means of information storage. Lucas set a dangerous precedent by cleaning up the Star Wars Trilogy, even going as far as to practically bury the original films. Endless sequels and spinoffs, TV and streaming series, and other media diminish the impact of the original three movies to those generations to whom it was formative. Now with the advent of deepfakes, AI image generation, and less emphasis on owning physical copies of movies, no aspect of any movie is really safe- and this applies to all kinds of media. This is why I own so many damned books.
Einstein was quoted once, referring to some quantum theories as “a dangerous game being played with reality”. A similarly dangerous game is played when we erase or obscure media, cultural hallmarks and other evidence of changing ideas and evolving progress in society. Whether George Lucas’s changes to the original trilogy of movies literally ripped time and space apart and allowed for divergent timelines to be remembered, much in the way Philip K. Dick “remembered” dystopian settings for his books, the fact remains that our perception of events and memory of them is relatively easy to alter. A fractured reality wherein little can really be agreed upon seems to be the chaotic “New normal”. In that sense, blaming a sci-fi franchise for split timelines is really no less silly than blaming experiments at the Large Hadron Collider.
In recent years, ideas about the Multi-verse have popped up quite a bit- most notably in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Aside from being an easy and kind of cool way to reboot or expand upon a franchise, the idea of divergent streams of time and reality is becoming more familiar and digestible to larger audiences all the time. One wonders where this will take us- but without the marginalized fandoms on the periphery, will it still have the same effect? In a world where everything is more accessible than it ever has been, is it still possible to have huge cultural moments like the original release of Star Wars in the late 70s? The future is, as always, uncertain- and perhaps a multitude of different scenarios will prove to simultaneously be true!
