 Before I go into the curse itself, I'll give a little background on where it may have come from. The property my house was built on in Connecticut once had a huge garden of flowers that were used for all our town's events. Flowers for weddings, flowers for ceremonies, and flowers for funerals, lilies, orchids, and the most unique, the black carnation. It's a beautiful flower that locals deem was the result of selective breeding the same way kale has been bred into cauliflower, broccoli, etc. Back in the late 1700s, a revolutionary warship captain named Stephen Stowe cared for 54 small pox infected war prisoners in a small building on the property used as a hospital before dying from the disease himself. He was carried to the graveyard with his casket bearing one black carnation. In the 1860s, a civil war widow named Heather Gladshire received a $100 check from the U.S. government from the death of her husband, which she used to dismantle the building and construct the house that we now own today. It's one of the oldest buildings in our town. At the end of our backyard is a tall concrete wall smothered with ivy and was part of a massive greenhouse which Heather used to grow the same flowers that had been on the property for nearly a hundred years. Another home at the end of our street was the town's funeral home. Back then, when a person passed away, their body was carried to the funeral home at the end of the street, bearing a bouquet of flowers from Heather's greenhouse, topped with one black carnation. They didn't grow anywhere else in town naturally, though a bit morbid to think about these mysterious black carnations were beautiful and my sister and I loved picking and saving them. Now, it never felt like a haunted house. There's no strange noises, doors slamming, voices, flying books, none of that. It's a rickety old house with plenty of deaths over the last couple hundred years, but nothing out of the ordinary ever happens, except for this thing about the flowers. Years ago, when one of us would get sick, the flowers would start to bloom in the yard. The sicker we got, the more they would appear. As we got better, they would wither and die. This went on for years and my sister named it the Curse of the Funeral Flowers, a title my parents were completely not thrilled with and asked us to not talk about. It seemed pretty harmless, but not something our family wanted getting out. It's a small town and the locals like to gossip. Something like that would mark our family as a bunch of weirdos in town. Then came the smell. It began one day my aunt had caught pneumonia. When we went to visit her in Maryland, she spotted a black carnation growing in her yard which hadn't been there earlier that day. It was the first time we'd ever seen one grow outside of our home and it certainly wasn't the last. Over the years, when a friend or family member became ill, we would often find a black carnation growing somewhere on their property too. It came to us that we must have inherited some sort of stigma from living in that house. One day, the aroma of the flowers suddenly filled the house. The smell was overwhelming as if someone smashed a bottle of perfume right underneath our noses. Later that night, we got a call that my uncle's illness took a turn for the worse and he wasn't going to live very long. A few months after, the same scent filled our home just a day before my great grandfather passed away. About two years later, when my sister moved off to college, she claimed her entire dorm reeked of the flowers, the night a girl in her hall accidentally overdosed. About four years ago, while my parents were on vacation, my mother said the aroma filled their cabin during the day she learned her closest friend was terminally ill. He passed away that weekend before they even got back. This odd mark of black carnations became a sign to us that someone very close was going to die. There was no telling who, where they would be, when it would happen, or how. Just an ominous smell that would warn us a week, a day, or just an hour before it happened. As we all got older, the flowers would stop appearing. They quit growing in the yard. We didn't see them when we were sick and we wouldn't see them at friends and families homes. We thought we beat the curse. Then last week happened. My best friend was helping me move a couch into my room on the second floor. He lost his balance and fell over the railing, head first. He fell unconscious immediately. His head had split open and he was bleeding everywhere. I tried talking to him but he wouldn't respond. As the overwhelming scent of the flower began to fill the room, I freaked out and dialed 911. It seemed as if the smell got stronger at every passing minute and every minute felt like an hour. Finally, the ambulance arrived and rushed him off to the hospital. He was in critical condition. I followed the ambulance to the hospital and began to cry as the tenant smell of flowers overcame me. The smell followed me, convincing me that he wasn't going to live. I sat in the hospital, staring at my knees and just crying. I was so upset that I didn't even notice the smell anymore or the fact that it had completely vanished. 20 hours go by and I've gotten no sleep. A nurse came in to tell me that he was stable but unconscious but I could visit him. I pulled the chair up to the bed and slept the rest of the night with him. I woke up in the morning to the fresh scent of, you guessed it, flowers. My friend was still sleeping. I looked up and saw a beautiful bouquet of assorted flowers from the hospital florist on the table, different kinds to some of them I didn't even recognize. There was no card. When I got up and asked the nurse about them, she said she hadn't even seen anyone enter the room with them. When I went back inside, I took a look through the bouquet and among all the roses, daffodils and tulips was one black carnation.