The TV witch accused of casting the hex that killed James Dean: “Darling, come and join me!”

Lily Hardman

Wed 6 November 2024 20:15, UK

The death of any young Hollywood star in the prime of their fame sends shockwaves through the industry. Jean Harlow, Sharon Tate, River Phoenix, and Heath Ledger all died t incredibly young ages and continue to be mythologised today for the roles they played and the potential they never got to explore fully. 

Of all the premature movie star deaths, however, James Dean’s looms particularly large. The actor was just 24 when he crashed his Porsche into another car in September 1955 and died on the scene. At the time, he was just bursting onto the Hollywood stage as the most exciting young talent since Marlon Brando a few years before. He had made just three movies (though he had appeared as uncredited extras in several others), East of Eden, Rebel Without a Cause, and Giant. The latter two were released after his death, and the former made him the first actor to posthumously win an Academy Award.

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When Dean died, conspiracy theories abounded. One of the most prominent was attached to the car that he was in, a 1955 Porsche 550 Spyder that he dubbed the “Little Bastard.” Actor Alec Guinness claimed, rather improbably, to have dined with Dean by chance the week before his death and warned him point blank that if he got into the car, he would be dead within seven days. The man who bought the totalled car later claimed that it was cursed, detailing stories about how it burst into flames in a garage and had been part of multiple accidents over the years. 

But perhaps the strangest mystical theory about Dean’s death involved a prominent television witch. Maila Nurmi was an American actor who developed a character called Vampira, who became television’s first horror host. Modelling herself as a witch, Nurmi had jet black hair, dramatically arched eyebrows, and long pointed nails. Her show, The Vampira Show, aired on Los Angeles’s local television station from 1954 to 1955, and she went on to become an actor in cult sci-fi movies like Ed Wood’s Plan 9 From Outer Space. Her brand of the occult was decidedly campy, but there was a rebellious edge to it, too. She overtly mocked the housewife stereotype and played up her sexuality in ways that only a self-professed witch could get away with at the time.

It was this persona, one that made 1950s audiences equally uneasy and fascinated, that led to the legend of her involvement in Dean’s death. Given the sources at the time, it’s impossible to know exactly where fact ends and myth begins, but it is clear that Nurmi was a friend of Hollywood’s newest heartthrob, and possibly a lover according to some sources. She even built an altar to him over fears about his car racing.

Both were interested in mysticism and the occult, but when columnist Hedda Hopper questioned Dean about Nurmi, he retorted, “I don’t go out with witches.” This comment gave Hopper plenty of grist for the mill, and she began writing stories about Nurmi summoning black magic to punish Dean for spurning her.

Four months after Dean’s death, Whisper magazine ran an article titled “James Dean’s Black Madonna: The Most Chilling and Tragic Love Story in Hollywood History,” in which it published a postcard showing Nurmi sitting by an open grave with the caption, “Darling, come and join me!” Under the photograph, the magazine enticed readers with a juicy sentence: “It’s a story so chilling, so gruesome and macabre, that more than once in the course of tracking it down this reporter was tempted to drop it cold and run.”

Nurmi didn’t help matters by attending a Hollywood costume party shortly thereafter with a date dressed as a bandaged James Dean.