The horrible spectacle of the submersible and its journey to view remains of the Titanic brings forth the need for prayer (especially now for the families) and also the peculiar “coincidences” attendant to the famous sunken vessel.

Indeed, so prolific is the happenstance that many have proposed the hidden workings of a curse.

Start with the fact that fourteen years before the sinking, a novella entitled Futility was published. The author was Morgan Robertson and the plot revolved around a ship that lacked lifeboats (as did the Titanic) and hit an iceberg — the same four hundred nautical miles from Newfoundland in the same month of April.

The name of the fictionalized ocean liner was Titan — the name also of the missing submersible with five aboard.

One of the passengers on the Titan is Shahzada Dawood Harding, pictured right (with an inauspicious stuffed animal; again, prayer need).

As it turns out, there were other works of fiction that centered on a ship sinking in the frigid Atlantic — two the year it sunk.

Moreover, a number of people avoided the fateful journey due to dreams of lurking disaster.

New York attorney Isaac Frauenthal — who did board the oceanliner — may have been saved by two dreams he had of a sinking ship, one of them before and the second occurring when he boarded the Titanic. In the second dream he had heard a collision, and so knew there was trouble — and what to do — when the real thing happened.

Was the Titanic not just ill-fated, but “cursed”?

Problems were there from the beginning. A fire broke out in the coal bunkers during construction and eight workers died of various causes during that construction in Belfast. Meanwhile, its launch was delayed by several weeks due to mishaps with its sister ship, the R.M.S. Olympic.

When the Titanic did push from port, it was nearly in a collision with the S.S. New York and soon after was hit by another fire that may have weakened its hull.

During the journey, author-spiritualist William T. Stead regaled seven fellow passengers on April 12, 1912, and stretching into the wee hours of April 13, in the lounge, with the account of an inscription on the lid of a mummy warning that anyone who spoke the words audibly would meet a violent death.

Stead, in this version of the story, may have recited it— boasting that he was not prone to such nonsense. Or was he? Other accounts have him saying that anyone who wrote about the mummy — or what is it a malignant goddess, Amen-Ra — would be harmed (while apparently he felt simply talking about it would not bring bad luck).

At any rate, seven of the eight men, including Stead, died when the ship sank that very day, leaving just one, Fred Seward, to recount it.

Superstition?

There always have been rumors that the Titanic harbored an Egyptian mummy or lid of a sarcophagus and that this was the wellspring of foreboding. Was this what Stead was referring to?

Some claimed it was an Egyptian princess named Amen-Ra who died some 3,500 years (and around which great misfortune was said to occur), but no such mummy has been documented. It has been linked to the British Museum, but all that is there is the lid of a mummy coffin, numbered 22542.

There were ancient Egyptian artifacts aboard.

And many are the claims of such items carrying curses — prime among them, accounts of extraordinary mishaps attendant to those who discovered, excavated, or otherwise with King Tut’s tomb.

Ghost stories and premonitions haunted and still haunt the most famous sinking in history, and a television producer nearly died twenty years ago in a submersible when the vessel got entangled in the ship’s wreckage, down thirteen thousand feet below the gray waves at the surface.

[see also: journalist in close call during Titanic expedition]

[resources: Lying Wonders, Strangest Things]