I'm sure ways of transferring bad luck (among other things) have been a staple of playground culture for a long time, mind.

I'm pretty sure there are forms of folk magic which are all about vectoring a problem onto someone else! Just fictionally, I think of it as different from a contagious haunting, which wrecks everyone who encounters it regardless of where they fall in the chain, and James may be the earliest literary example I have encountered of the transferrable kind.