For a hundred and twenty years, a strange rule seemed to hold over the most powerful office on earth. Every president elected in a year ending in zero died before he could leave it. Seven times in a row. And it began, they say, with a curse.

In 1811, on the banks of the Tippecanoe river, an American army led by William Henry Harrison destroyed a confederacy of Native American tribes and burned their capital to the ground. Those tribes had been united by a great Shawnee chief, Tecumseh, and his brother, a holy man they called the Prophet. According to legend, the Prophet laid a curse on Harrison, and on every leader who would come after him.

Thirty years later, Harrison was elected president. At his inauguration he gave the longest speech in the nation's history, bareheaded, in the freezing rain. One month later he was dead. He was the first president ever to die in office.

Then it kept happening. Lincoln, elected in 1860, shot dead. Garfield, elected in 1880, shot dead. McKinley, elected in 1900, shot dead. Harding, 1920, died suddenly in office. Roosevelt, 1940, died in office. Kennedy, elected in 1960, shot dead in Dallas.

Seven presidents. Each elected almost exactly twenty years apart. Every single one dead before his time was up.

By now the pattern was so exact that Americans half expected the man elected in a zero year to die. Then came 1980, and Ronald Reagan. Two months in, a gunman shot him in the chest. The bullet stopped less than an inch from his heart. And Reagan lived. For the first time in a hundred and forty years, the curse had missed.

Here is the catch. There is no record that the Prophet ever spoke a curse at all. The whole legend was made famous by a trivia column in 1931, long after most of those men were already dead. It may be nothing but coincidence, dressed up as prophecy.

But the deaths are real. Seven presidents, twenty years apart, every one of them gone. You can look up every date.

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