Albatross around one's neck

An albatross is a large, white seabird and a widespread superstition says that it is unlucky to kill one of these birds. In Samuel T. Coleridge's poem The Rime of the Ancient mariner (1798), a sailor kills an albatross, and when the ship is at a halt near the equator and runs out of water, his shipmates blame him for this unlucky situation and force him to wear the dead albatross around his neck