The real story behind the Curse of Constantine Rafinesque at Transylvania
Editor’s Note: As Lexington celebrates the 250th anniversary of its founding, the Herald-Leader and kentucky.com each day throughout 2025 will share interesting facts about our hometown. Compiled by Liz Carey, all are notable moments in the city’s history - some funny, some sad, others heartbreaking or celebratory, and some just downright strange.
Feb. 28, 1924: To lift a curse, Constantine Rafinesque’s body is returned to Transylvania University.
For alumni of Transylvania University, braving the tomb of Constantine Rafinesque is a rite of passage.
But for those who don’t know about him, the life and death and reinterment of the Turkish professor is a tale best told over a steaming cup of coffee at Transy’s Rafskellar.
Rafinesque was born Constantine Samuel Rafinesque-Schmaltz in 1783 in Constantinople. Mostly self-taught, he sailed to Philadelphia in 1802 after the death of his father and along with his brother studied animals and plants in Pennsylvania and Delaware.
Later, he returned to Europe and settled in Sicily where he studied botany to add to his mastery of Greek, Latin and Italian. Throughout the early 1800s, he continued studying botany and eventually identified and named more than 250 different species of plants and animals.
In 1818, Rafinesque moved to Henderson, Ky., where he met John James Audubon. The next year he took a position as a botany professor at Transylvania. According to the school, his years at Transy were not exactly peaceful ones, but they were productive.
While he often quarrelled with his colleagues, he also named thousands of plants and hundreds of animals including Rafinesque’s big-eared bat. He left in 1826 after a disagreement with the university’s president. Legend has it that he would show up late to classes, if he showed up at all, and was eventually fired by then-president Horace Holley.
In true Turkish aristocrat style, Rafinesque shot a curse at the school during his departure – “I took lodgings in town and carried there all my effects: thus, leaving the College with curses on it and Holley.”
It’s said that his curse was that something bad would happen to the university every seven years. Since then, Holley died (a year after Rafinesque left), the main campus building burned to the ground and several cholera and influenza outbreaks happened on campus.
Rafinesque died in 1840 and was buried in Philadelphia. In 1924, a group of Transylvanian alumni exhumed his body and moved it back to Lexington. It now supposedly rests inside the tomb in Old Morrison. An inscription on the tomb slab reads simply, “Honor to whom honor is overdue.”
Now, every year, the university hosts Raf Week in October, which ends with students vying for an opportunity to spend Halloween night in the botany professor’s tomb.
No word on whether it actually lifted the curse, though.
Have a question or story idea related to Lexington’s 250-year history? Let us know at 250LexKy@gmail.com.
