William Henry Harrison was elected president in 1840 and died in 1841, just a month after being sworn in. In
Tecumseh's War,
Shawnee leader Tecumseh and his younger brother Tenskwatawa organized a
confederation of Indian tribes to resist the westward expansion of the United States. In the 1811
Battle of Tippecanoe, Harrison defeated Tenskwatawa and his troops, acting as the governor of the
Indiana Territory. Harrison thus earned the moniker "Old Tippecanoe". In 1931 and 1948, the trivia book series ''
Ripley's Believe It or Not! noted the pattern and termed it the "Curse of Tippecanoe". Strange as It Seems'' by
John Hix ran a cartoon prior to the
election of 1940 titled "Curse over the White House!" and claimed that "In the last 100 years, Every U.S. President Elected at 20-Year Intervals Has Died In Office!" In February 1960, journalist
Ed Koterba noted that "The next President of the United States will face an eerie curse that for more than a century has hung over every chief executive elected in a year ending with zero." Both of their hints at the elected president's death came true, with Franklin D. Roosevelt's death in 1945 and John F. Kennedy's
assassination in 1963. The first written account to refer to the source of the curse was an article by
Lloyd Shearer in 1980 in
Parade magazine. It is claimed that when Tecumseh was killed in a later battle, Tenskwatawa set a curse against Harrison. Running for re-election in 1980, President
Jimmy Carter was asked about the curse at a campaign stop in
Dayton, Ohio, on October 2 of that year while taking questions from the crowd. A high school student asked Carter if he was concerned about "predictions that every 20 years or election years ending in zero, the President dies in office." Carter replied, "I've seen those predictions. [...] I'm not afraid. If I knew it was going to happen, I would go ahead and be President and do the best I could till the last day I could." He failed to win a second term but later became the oldest former president at 100 years old,
dying at that age on December 29, 2024. Since the assassination of John F. Kennedy in 1963, no president has died in office. Ronald Reagan was
shot and wounded two months after his 1981 inauguration. Days after Reagan survived the shooting, columnist
Jack Anderson wrote "Reagan and the Eerie Zero Factor" in
The Daily Intelligencer and asserted that the 40th president either had disproved the superstition or
had nine lives. As the oldest man to be elected president at that time, Reagan also survived surgery in 1985.
First Lady Nancy Reagan was reported to have hired psychics and astrologers to try to protect her husband from the effects of the curse. Reagan left office in 1989 and ultimately
died from natural causes in 2004. He was 93 years old and had survived his presidency by 15 years. Elected in 2000, George W. Bush also survived two terms in office. In
2005, a live grenade was thrown at him but failed to explode. Bush left office in 2009 and is currently living.
Joe Biden, elected in 2020, served a single term. Biden's presidency ended without incident, casting further doubt on the validity of the supposed curse. He left office in 2025 and is currently living. The only one of the eight presidents who died in office who was not elected in a year covered by the curse was
Zachary Taylor, elected in 1848, but died in 1850, a year ending in zero. Like Reagan and Bush, many presidents outside the curse have faced
assassination attempts or medical problems. ==Applicable presidents==