"Of all things jinxed, few can have bestowed more misery than a motor car
owned by the Hapsburg dynasty of imperial Austria. The open-topped
limousine was given to the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the troubled
throne. He rode in it in July 1914 on a state visit to Sarajevo. Sarajevo
then was in Bosnia and Herzegovina, a state recently annexed by the
imperial court of Vienna. In the car with the Archduke on this ill-fated
day were his wife, General Potiorek of the Austrian army and three other
dignitaries, plus a driver.
A fervent young nationalist called Gavrilo Princip stepped in front of the
vehicle on its official tour of the city and shot the Archduke and his
wife, the Archduchess Sophie. More catastrophic still, this event was to
trigger the First World War.
General Potiorek became the next owner of the car. Several weeks into the
war his armies suffered a rout at the hands of the ill-organised army of
Serbia. The General was summoned back to Vienna by the Emperor Franz Josef
I. And there in Vienna, his reputation ruined, his sanity destroyed, he
died. [Another version adds the detail of Potiorek becoming an impoverished
lunatic who eventually died in the almshouse.]
A captain of Potiorek's staff took charge of the jinxed vehicle; nine days
later in a terrible accident he killed two peasants on the road before
swerving into a tree and killing himself.
After the war, the governor of newly independent Yugoslavia took charge of
the car. He endured a succession of terrible accidents, one of which cost
him his left arm. [Four accidents in four months, according to another
source.] The car was then sold to a doctor, who was crushed to death when
he overturned it into a ditch. [He had the car six months before it
"turned" on him.]
The next owner was Simon Mantharides, a diamond dealer. He fell to his
death from a precipice. [The other version gives a slightly different
sequence of events. According to it, the car passed from the crushed doctor
to a wealthy unnamed jeweler who enjoyed it for all of a year before
commiting suicide. Its next owner was yet another doctor, one whose
patients deserted him out of fear for his cursed car.]
The car passed into the hands of a Swiss racing driver who was later killed
in an accident in it. [Thrown over a stone wall to his death, says another
source.] A Serbian farmer, who paid a fantastic sum for the car which had
acquired great historical value, was the next owner and victim. He cadged a
tow from a horse and cart one morning because the engine would not turn
over. He forgot to switch off the ignition and the engine caught suddenly.
The car lurched forward into the horse and cart, and overturned, killing
the farmer.
Finally, a garage owner lost his life in the car returning from a wedding.
He tried to overtake a long line of vehicles and was killed as the car spun
out of control. [On his way to the wedding, says the other version. And the
spin out killed both him and four of the six friends with him.]
The car now rests harmlessly in a Viennese museum. It is never taken out on
the road."
Blundell, N. & Hall, A. 'Marvels and Mysteries of the Unexplained''.
London: MacDonald & Co., 1988 (pp. 119-120).
At urban legends' page:
http://www.snopes2.com/horrors/ghosts/jinxlimo.htm
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