Princess Johanna of Hesse and By Rhine - "Family Curse"

"Family Curse"

Some considered the Hessian family victims of a curse due to the number of premature deaths in the family. Johanna was a great niece of Tsarina Alexandra and Grand Duchess Elizabeth Fyodorovna, both of whom were killed with family members during the Russian Revolution of 1917. Her maternal great-grandmother Princess Alice of the United Kingdom and a great aunt, Princess Marie of Hesse and by Rhine, died of diphtheria. A haemophiliac great-uncle, Prince Friedrich of Hesse and by Rhine, tumbled twenty feet through an open window at age two and died of a brain hemorrhage hours later. An aunt, Princess Elisabeth of Hesse and by Rhine, died at age eight of virulent typhoid, though she was rumored to have eaten from a poisoned dish meant for Nicholas II of Russia. One of Johanna's great-uncles, Louis Mountbatten, 1st Earl Mountbatten of Burma, was killed in 1979 by the Provisional Irish Republican Army along with his 14-year-old grandson, Nicholas Knatchbull, and his daughter's mother-in-law, Doreen Knatchbull, Baroness Brabourne. Early deaths continued into the next generation, when Leonora Knatchbull, a great-granddaughter of Earl Mountbatten of Burma, died at age five of a kidney tumor in 1991.