If ever there was a place to be cursed, it’s the ancient Roman city of Pompeii, where thousands of bodies are perfectly preserved under volcanic ash and pumice from an extremely powerful eruption that destroyed everything, including the nearby city of Herculaneum, thousands of years ago. Even smart people who know curses aren’t a thing might think twice about removing an ancient artifact from the spooky realm, even after overcoming the obvious moral reasons why historical things shouldn’t be stolen.

Frankly not for many tourists. Over the years, hundreds of objects have been removed from the UNESCO World Heritage list and returned years later, either out of remorse or because the thieves believed they were cursed by the objects, and these objects were often returned with letters of apology. So many, in fact, that Pompeii has a permanent exhibition of these objects and their accompanying remorse.

Gabriel Zuchtrigel, director of the Pompeii Archaeological Park, recently shared this note left behind by a regretful visitor.

“I didn’t know about the curse.” it was said in the letter written in capital letters. “I didn’t know I shouldn’t have bought stones. I was diagnosed with breast cancer during the year. I’m a young, healthy woman and the doctors said it was just “bad luck.” Please accept my apologies and these writings.”

Similar letters were sent to Pompeii along with the artifacts.

“I am now 36 and have had breast cancer twice,” one unhappy visitor wrote in 2020. “The last one resulted in a double mastectomy. My family and I also had financial difficulties. We are good people and I do not want to pass this curse on to my family or children.”

The curse isn’t real, of course. People attribute bad or unlikely events in their lives to artifacts after hearing about the so-called curse; This is a form of confirmation bias and misunderstanding of statistics.

It may seem unlikely that a teenager would develop cancer a year after an artifact was discovered in Pompeii. But if enough young people remove these artifacts from Pompeii, the chances of anyone in this group getting cancer will be much less. If enough people bought the works from In-N-Out Burger, a small percentage of them would have a miserable life (this isn’t burning the customer base, just statistics). No one can say that the In-N-Out Burger is cursed.

A larger group of people who don’t get cancer or other bad luck are those who don’t tend to yell about it. “I bought this stone years ago and it was generally fine” is not the best joke of all time.