The Curse of the Pharaohs' Tombs

by Harrison Paul

  When the mummy board arrived at the British Museum, many lives had been lost and permanently damaged since it became the property of Western owners, yet the anguish and carnage did not end there. In late 1906, Will Scott, a Scottish (Borders-based) writer and storyteller, carried out his own research into the phenomenon. Scott had relatives who had visited Egypt and told him many tales of cursed Egyptian tombs, stolen artifacts and of the pain, suffering and mayhem such curses could cause. In private letters, Scott was able to physically identify at least seven people who had died as a result of the so-called cursed coffin lid. Robert Batty told him:

  When we moved the thing (coffin lid) into its place of storage at the British Museum, it was taken to a room where it could be prepared for display. Inside its crate no one felt it to be of any danger, and the carter who was crushed by the wagon transporting it to the museum was said to have tripped and fallen into the path of the reversing wagon. At the time, no one believed it to be part of any curse, it was just one of those things, an accident. It was only when people rushed to help him that they found him not to be screaming in pain, but in fear! He claimed that he felt a gust of wind, followed by what he thought was a strangely dressed woman floating close to the back of the wagon, he described her as ghost like and having long dark hair and a very angry face. He could hear hissing serpents and then saw a black dog-like creature looking down at him from the back of the wagon. Within moments, the ghostly women had seized him by both arms, her grip was strong, she blew cold air into his face and mouth that caused him to gasp until it filled his lungs with what felt like a blast of ice, thus preventing him from crying out, she then pulled him down into the path of the reversing wagon.

  The man was quickly removed to hospital and the coffin lid taken inside. It was then that others present claimed to hear strange whispering voices coming from the shadows. One person, a Welshman called Davies, thought he saw two snakes slithering on the floor; other people, including me, heard a woman’s scream, it was a shrill terrifying noise much as a banshee would sound I would imagine. Many of those present went into faints as a sickly death-like smell filled the air, it was a sweet smell, but deathly. When I saw the face that was painted on the lid I felt every hair stand up on my body, it was like looking death in the face, it looked tortured. We were each given a sum of money not to discuss anything with anyone outside the museum, we were told that the curse was evil and to talk about it may invoke the curse on each of us. It’s only now that I feel safe and able to freely mention it to you. I know two fellows who died within days of handling that thing, fit and healthy men. One just dropped to the floor dead, there was no warning and no illness, the other was in his bed and had woken his wife with his tormented screaming. Asking him what was wrong, he said he had seen a tall man whispering over him, then there was a weight on his body, it was a black dog that sat on his chest, snarling at him. No sooner had he told his wife about this dream, that he felt pain in his chest, like someone was pulling his heart from his body, within a few moments, he was dead.

  Will Scott also claimed that other people visiting the museum had witnessed a snarling and ferocious large black dog wandering the corridors, and that the authorities were doing their utmost to stifle such speculation and claims. The interest in the mummy lid had become almost frenzied, and everyone wanted to know more about the cursed object and the evil presence attached to it. Gradually the story became so popular that many eminent figures of the time opted to get involved and publish their own opinion on the matter.

  Also in 1906, a close friend of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Bertram Fletcher Robinson, once editor of the Daily Express, carried out twelve weeks of personal research at the museum. His aim was to disprove the tales surrounding the mummy case. It is claimed that on 21 January 1907 he died suddenly at his London home. Conan Doyle was interviewed about his friend’s death and said:

  It is impossible to say with absolute certainty if this is true. If we had proper occult powers we could determine it, but I warned Fletcher Robinson against concerning himself with the mummy at the British Museum ... I told him he was tempting fate by pursuing his enquiries, but he was fascinated and would not desist. Then he was overtaken by illness. The immediate cause of his death was typhoid fever, but that is the way the elementals guarding the mummy might act. They could have guided Mr Robinson into a series of such circumstances as would lead him to contract the disease, and thus cause his death – just as in Lord Carnarvon’s case, human illness was the primary cause of death.

  There is much more intrigue to reveal. In 2003, it was suggested by researcher and author Roger Garrick-Steele, that Robinson was in fact the sole author of The Hound of the Baskervilles, and that Conan Doyle had plagiarised the work, and that Conan Doyle was allegedly having an affair with Fletcher Robinson’s wife (Gladys). According to Garrick-Steele, Conan Doyle persuaded the wife to administer laudanum to her husband to kill him, which she did. If this assertion seems far-fetched, then the following detail will cause more than a few brows to furrow.

  Conan Doyle was a member of a group called the Spiritualists. This group believed that the spirits of the dead have both the ability and the inclination to communicate with the living. Spiritualism was popular at the time, with perhaps nine million believers worldwide. As a result of his beliefs, Conan Doyle would often debate with skeptics, arguing the case for the existence of life after death. One such skeptic was legendary escape artist Harry Houdini. Houdini made it a personal crusade to expose Spiritualism as fakery committed only by charlatans, denouncing the mediums who were well paid to speak with the dead. He successfully unveiled many fraudsters before he died of peritonitis on 31 October (Halloween!) in 1926. In 2007, Houdini’s great-nephew George Hardeen said that no autopsy was carried out on Houdini, and that he believes that the death was deliberately caused by a group called the Spiritualists. Matters take a more suspicious turn when one examines the contents of a letter sent by Conan Doyle to a fellow spiritualist. Discussing the American showman, he said Houdini ‘would get his just deserts very exactly meted out... I think there is a general pay day coming soon’. Speculation on what he meant by this is for another time and another book, but the plot thickens…

  A photographer who took images of the coffin lid developed the plates himself. When he viewed them, instead of seeing the painted female face on the lid, he saw that of a malevolent woman of Egyptian origin. He was so horrified and tortured by the images, that without further ado he returned to his home, locked himself in a bedroom and shot himself through the head, leaving a suicide note declaring that he was possessed by an ancient spirit that urged him to commit sinful acts. A school teacher, visiting the museum to inspect the lid, ridiculed stories of a curse being associated with it. She fell on leaving the building broke one of her arms. A short time later, the daughter of the Marchioness of Salisbury visited the museum to see the lid. She mocked and spoke rudely of the pictured face on the mummy board. Within moments, and before she left the museum, she fell on some stairs and sprained an ankle.

  Eventually the mummy board of Amen-Ra was installed in the Egyptian Room at the museum, and the problems associated with it continued. Eric Simms told me of a tale which had existed in his family for as long as he could recall. A family relative was a paid night watchman who was frequently on duty at the museum. Within a few days of the mummy board being placed on display eerie happenings began to occur. The first report of strange goings-on was when some of the men heard a woman crying and wailing. They traced the sound to the mummy board. When they stood beside it the crying ceased, changing to what was described as a ghoulish cackling and whispering in a foreign language. The matter was reported to the management but dismissed as foolish trickery played upon the men by other watchmen. Over a brief period of time the unexplainable occurrences got worse, as other exhibits in the room were hurled about and damaged. Matters came to a head when one night watchman, who appeared to suffer more from the actions of the entity than others, died of fright
one evening while on duty. The authorities dismissed the death as a heart attack, but the dead man was apparently fit and healthy and had never previously suffered serious illness. Several other watchmen left their positions, seemingly through fear. Lower grade museum staff were terrified of the curse and cleaners refused to go near the mummy board. On one occasion, a visitor, dubious about any suggestion that an old piece of wood could cause such chaos, stood above the object and flicked a cloth at the face painted on the board, laughing out loud as he did so and demanding that the entity reveal itself or cause him harm. Nothing happened and he scoffed at the mention of a curse. He left the museum unharmed and returned to his home, but his child died of measles soon afterwards. The adverse publicity meant that the museum authorities had the mummy board removed and taken down to the basement for temporary storage. Within a few days, one of the porters who had carried the board was hospitalised when he fell ill. Shortly afterwards, the supervisor of the move was found dead as he sat at his desk. Again it was announced that his death was due to natural causes.

  There have been claims that the mummy board was accountable for thousands of deaths, including the sinking of the Titanic! There is no evidence for this at all, and I mention it here simply to give the reader an overview of how the story of the mummy board of Amen-Ra has evolved and changed. In the retelling it is said that an American archaeologist paid a good price for the mummy board and arranged for its removal to his home in New York. So in April 1912 the new owner transported his acquisition on the new White Star liner making its maiden voyage to New York. Examination of the inventory logs of the Titanic reveals that no mummy board, mummy or other such artifact was on board, so this part of the story can be safely disregarded.

  Sir Ernest Wallis Budge, the Keeper of Egyptian and Assyrian Antiquities at the British Museum, added his own fuel to the flames surrounding the curse. Budge, who was well respected and had translated the Egyptian Book of the Dead, was quoted as saying, ‘Never print what I saw in my lifetime, but the mummy case of Princess Amen-Ra caused the war’. In 1934, however, Wallis Budge issued an altogether different ‘official’ statement, claiming that the British Museum had never possessed a mummy, a coffin or cover that had been involved in any unusual events. He confirmed the case had never been sold since it arrived at the museum, and that it had never been on the Titanic. In fact, it had never left the museum at any point since its arrival (aside from a brief period when it was stored in the basement during the First World War). Wallis Budge died in the same year he made this declaration. Was he too struck down by the malevolent curse for daring to dismiss it? I will leave the reader to decide, with a full reproduction of a an article published in the New York Times in 1923.

  WEIRD MISFORTUNES BLAMED ON MUMMY

  Saturday 7 April 1923 Beautiful but Malignant Priestess Is Said to Resent Touching Her Coffin Lid

  IT IS IN BRITISH MUSEUM

  Officials Call Stories Myths, but Superstitious Even Blame Her for Sinking of Titanic

  The New York Times Company

  Special Cable to THE NEW YORK TIMES

  LONDON, April 6

  ‘The death of the Earl of Carnarvon has revived interest in stories told concerning a mummy-case which once contained the mummy of a priestess of Amen-Ra, who died in Egypt 3,500 years ago and which is now in the British Museum. Is it really ill-omened? Can it bring misfortune to all who touch it? Sir Ernest Budge, keeper of Egyptian antiquities at the museum, laughs at those who suggest it, but the guides who show visitors round are not so sure.

  In one of the principal rooms of the Egyptian section is a glass case containing a long row of mummy-cases. They are thousands of years old, but one stands out. Its bright coloring catches the eye of every passer-by. It looks almost as fresh as the day it left the painter’s hand, and the figure which is its principal feature is extraordinarily life-like. There can be no doubt it is the portrait of the woman who once occupied the sarcophagus. She was a priestess of the great god Amen-Ra, and apart from that she must have been an extremely attractive and clever woman. Even today, after all these years, her portrait seems to retain that enigmatical smile which men associate with the Mona Lisa, and she appears to gaze mockingly at the idle sightseers as if he knew her secret power. And if legend be true, even to this day she has no objection to using it.

  It was in 1864 that an Arab found the mummy-case and sold it to a wealthy traveler. Within a few weeks, so the story goes, he lost his money and died of a broken heart. Two of his servants who had handled the case died within a year. A third, who did not touch it, but made contemptuous remarks concerning it, lost his arm through a gunshot accident.

  Malignancy in England

  The mummy-case was brought to London and wherever it went carried misfortune with it, of which perhaps the most remarkable was the fate that befell a photographer. He took a picture of the case and when he came to develop the negative received a horrifying shock. It was not a picture of a mere painting he had secured, but, so the story goes, a portrait of a living woman whose beautiful features had taken on a look of awful malignity.

  The curse connected with the mummy-case became known, and as no buyer was forthcoming it was sent to the British Museum. The man who contracted to take it there died a week later and one of his helpers broke his leg the next day.

  Again it was photographed by a well-known London firm and a strange chain of disasters befell the photographer. He first smashed his thumb, and when he got home found one of his children had fallen through a glass frame and had received dangerous injuries. The day he took the picture he cut his nose to the bone and dropped a valuable screen, rendering it quite useless.

  Still the picture was taken and there was something uncanny about it. Its eyes seemed to glow with fire and those who saw it could not believe it could be anything but the portrait of a woman filled with a wild malignity.

  So the old legend went and grew from year to year. W.T. Stead took great interest in it and publication of myths concerning it have invariably resulted in numberless letters to newspapers detailing how some bank holiday visitors to the museum had been attracted by the freshness of pigments on the mummy-case only to be victims sooner or later of such accidents as stumbling on entering a street car or breaking a mirror at home.

  Most disasters, both public and private, seem to have been laid to the account of the beautiful priestess of Amen-Ra, and it was even said that the loss of the Titanic was due to her malign influence. An American, it was declared, had managed to purchase her coffin case from the Museum officials and was bringing her over to the United States on the Titanic. Naturally, the liner struck an iceberg with awful results. But even then its owner was unconvinced of his impiety in moving the mummycase to the New World and with an enormous bribe induced some of the Titanic crew to save it. He lived to regret it, however, and at last aghast at the misfortunes it brought in its train to himself and his family he palmed it off on an innocent Canadian.

  For some reason that gentleman wished to return it to Europe and shipped it on the Empress of Ireland. No one can deny that that ship sank in the St. Lawrence River somewhere, which is complete proof of what the priestess of Amen-Ra can do when she is thoroughly aroused.

  Budge Explains it All

  So goes the legendary lore, but now comes Sir Ernest Budge with a little common sense. Talking a few weeks ago to the Sunday Times he said the whole myth was founded on a series of misunderstandings. [sic] W.T. Stead and Douglas Murray told the story about another mummy which a lady put as an ornament in her drawing room. Next morning she found all her bric-a-brac smashed to pieces, and when her husband locked the mummy up in a cupboard in an upper room the servants declared they saw troops of beings ascending the stairs all night with lights in order to break all the crockery they could find, and resigned en masse the next day.

  Just about the same time a man named Wheeler gave the priestess’ coffin lid to the museum and Mr. Stead and Mr. Murray examined it and declared that to them it
seemed the face of a portrait. It looked like a picture of a soul in torment, they said, and they wanted to hold a séance in the museum to see if they could do something to relieve the lady. But naturally the authorities did not agree.

  The story got out and the public proceeded to identify the priestess of Amen-Ra with the crockery smashing mummy of the suburban drawing room. People have written from so far afield as New Zealand and Algiers enclosing money to place lilies at the foot of the coffin lid. The money has been acknowledged, but it has been put to the much more prosaic use of the general upkeep of the museum.

  As for the Titanic story, Sir Ernest can only say that the museum has never parted with the lid, although during air raids it was removed for safety to the basement and it has, since it became a part of the national collection, never left the care of the museum.