Lore - Episode 127: Tipping the Scales

Episode Date: October 21, 2019

Episode 127: Tipping the Scales If you flip through the pages of history long enough, you’ll eventually run into stories about life out of balance, and how something—fate or chance or something otherworldly—has stepped in to make it right. In fact, some of those stories have become a part of our modern popular culture—all despite the deadly stories at their center. ——————— Lore Resources Episode Music: lorepodcast.com/music Episode Sources: lorepodcast.com/sources Lore News: www.theworldoflore.com/now Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com Access premium content!: https://www.lorepodcast.com/support See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Philip Musgrave Philip Musgrave had survived the English Civil War, but not without suffering. A lifelong royalist, he had spent the better part of two decades under the watchful eye of the parliamentarians who had executed King Charles I and exiled his son Charles II. But after the younger Charles reclaimed the crown in 1661, Musgrave began to relax. In 1677, he sat down to put his will to paper, and in it he listed the many possessions that his son Richard would someday inherit. Among them was an item he'd kept secret and hidden away until that very moment. A decorative glass, about six inches tall, with a fluted top and sides

that are covered in beautiful, colorful designs. And this cup, he said, was the source of his family's good fortune. The cup is known as the Luck of Eden Hall, named after Musgrave's home, and it has the most curious origin story. It's said that centuries earlier, a butler working for the Musgraves had gone to the garden well for some water, only to discover a group of fairies dancing near it. In one version of the tale, the fairies leave in haste and abandon the glass cup they brought with them. But as the butler takes it, a curse fills the air around him. If this cup should break or fall, farewell the Luck of Eden Hall. And that was all it took. From that moment forward, the cup became legendary. In the years

after Philip Musgrave's death in 1678, the cup was kept safe and secret, never listed on official inventories of the household, and always protected inside a leather box marked with the names of Christ. The family's fortune depended on it, after all. Today, you can visit the Luck of Eden Hall in the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. I've seen it, and it's a stunning piece of ancient glasswork. But scientists today are certain that it wasn't crafted by fairies. Instead, they believe it was made in the 1300s in the Middle East, and brought back to England during one of the Crusades. True or not, though, the legend surrounding the glass cup illustrate just how attractive a good curse story can be. Good fortune was something that could be dashed to pieces by

a careless person, shattering centuries of legacy with the hammer of bad luck. Philip Musgrave's enchanted fairy glass wasn't the first magical cup in English tradition, and it certainly wouldn't be the last. But powering all of those stories, like an engine tucked away beneath the hood, was the notion that stealing an object away from its true owners could only result in tragedy and suffering. In the coming centuries, that idea would only grow more powerful. The details of the stories would change, of course, but the underlying theme would persist. And by the 19th century, England found itself wrestling with the newest iteration of that ancient tradition. This one didn't come from the land of the fairies, though,

but to many in England, its home was just as mysterious. And because of that, the idea became so powerful that it still echoes through pop culture today. The legend of the mummy's curse. I'm Aaron Mankey, and this is Lore. Thomas Douglas Murray was a bit of a social gentleman. He was well known in various circles throughout London and well connected in some of the more distant colonial territories. And in 1868, he used some of those connections to travel to Egypt with a handful of friends. While they were there, they did the typical colonial tourist things. They hunted through the graves in the Valley of the Kings and pretended to be adventurers who were destined to discover

great things. What they ended up finding, though, was a gift shop. I'm not sure what sort of merchant they visited, but in the late 1800s, many of them were the same. Locals would go out and gather up portable artifacts and sell them to the wealthy white travelers that passed through. And Thomas Murray snagged a wonderful find. It was a beautifully painted coffin lid, said to belong to a long-dead priestess of Amenra. Murray and his friends all fell in love with the piece and ultimately chose to draw straws to see who could display it in their home back in England. Amazingly, it was Murray's friend Arthur Wheeler who won the coffin lid, not Murray, but it didn't dampen their fun. Soon after,

they began preparing for an African hunt. But that's where things went sideways. The night before the hunt, Murray had a dream that he had been sentenced to be hanged in Turkey and told his guard that he would rather be shot. He awoke with the distant memory of the dream still lingering in his mind, but went on with the hunt as planned. He even decided to use the rifle that was labeled dangerous because of its tendency to go off unexpectedly. You can see where this is going, right? On their way back from the hunt, Murray tripped on the path, dropped the gun, and took the blast in the right arm, which shattered the bone. Remembering the dream from the night before, he somehow managed to laugh it off. But that accident would soon look like

a warning shot, not the end. Back in England, Wheeler took possession of the coffin lid and promptly experienced a series of financial catastrophes due to bad investments. He lost everything and had to sell off the family home to pay off his debts. Blaming the coffin lid, he took it to the British Museum, where photos were taken of the inscriptions so that they could be translated. But things took a darker turn at that point. The photo seemed to show a human-shaped figure inside the coffin lid, but no one could explain how it got there. Shortly after that, the translator who was given the photo soon took his own life. A few weeks later, that man's assistant died of a mysterious fever.

It was all enough to give birth to rumors of a curse, and part of that can be blamed on Egyptomania. That's what historians call the public obsession with all things Egypt that began decades earlier when a series of French books were published in English. They were the result of Napoleon's campaign in Egypt, and they ignited a fire in the imagination of everyone back in England. Everyone jumped on the bandwagon. England's great exhibition of 1851 was filled with replicas of ancient Egyptian jewelry, architecture, and clothing, and it seemed that there was something for everyone to take home and build off of. Wealthy explorers brought back enormous Egyptian obelisks to display in London, while everyday citizens could buy porcelain dishes covered

in Egyptian patterns. But it got creepier. Some people managed to bring the ancient bodies of mummified dead back to their English manor houses, and then they hosted unwrapping parties. This was done before modern archaeological standards had been established, so there was more of a wild west attitude about it. When the parties were shut down in the late 1930s, people switched gears and flooded the movie theaters to watch films about them instead. All of it created a sort of mystical aura around the subject of ancient Egypt. The spiritualists became involved, claiming to be able to speak with dead pharaohs. Others believed that true alchemy had its roots in Egypt, which was their way of explaining how

such an ancient civilization could have preserved their dead so successfully. Clearly, there was a power at work there, and everyone wanted a piece of it. There was even a fringe group that believed that Egyptians possessed electrical lighting. How else were they able to create such elaborate paintings deep inside the darkest corners of all those tombs, right? And it didn't help that Nikola Tesla himself professed these ideas. In fact, he himself claimed to be their spiritual successor, and because he was so respected in the scientific community, these unusual ideas were given far too much attention. But if Egyptomania tilled the soil, then it was Thomas Murray's coffin lid that seeded it. Soon after, all of those amazing theories were growing right alongside

another product of their obsession, the notion of the mummy's curse. Because how else could you explain all the things that happened to Arthur Wheeler after he brought it home? By the time Howard Carter opened King Tut's tomb in 1922, the world was ready to believe in the curse. In fact, they were expecting it. And when a number of people connected with his achievements died without warning, well, that was all the confirmation they needed. But the oldest tale of a mummy's curse wasn't Thomas Murray's. It took place two decades earlier, and although it's full of all the thrills and twists that you might expect, it also illustrates a darker truth. Our fears of the supernatural are often born of

something closer to home. Our guilt is Before we go exploring, we need to get a lay of the land. Egypt in the second half of the 19th century wasn't what you might expect, and much like the sand that surrounds it, things tend to look a bit different after the years have piled up. I mentioned Napoleon earlier, and it's fair to say that the historical relationship we think of between England and Egypt began with him. It was his naval defeat in the 1798 Battle of the Nile that unlocked access to much of the country to the British. They even stole the Rosetta Stone from

the French in 1802. And then of course, Egyptomania hit England, as we've already discussed. Egyptian-style decorations filled households all across the country, and a love affair began. However, one sided between the two cultures. But there were darker aspects of that connection, and much of it falls to the idea of colonialism. England saw financial opportunities in Egypt, and so investment after investment flooded in. In the 1860s, they helped fund the Suez Canal, and that deepened their financial ties. But some Egyptians didn't care for that. In 1881, rebellions started to break out, including farther south in Sudan. A year later, British troops marched into Cairo to bring peace, and of course protect all those valuable investments.

This was the climate that Walter Herbert Ingram encountered when he arrived in Cairo in 1885. He was the wealthy son of a newspaper tycoon who traveled with his own sketch artist to record his adventures, hoping they would land him in his father's paper back home. And when he arrived, he rented a steamship and headed up the Nile south toward a military outpost. Ingram was the typical British colonial playboy. He treated Egypt like a playground where he could see and do things that had no consequences other than his own pleasure. I know that sounds harsh, and you probably think there's more nuance than that. But honestly, there isn't. He was simply there to see how much fun he could have, no matter the expense

it placed on other people. After reaching the military outpost, he was introduced to the commander of a British naval brigade, Lord Charles Bearsford. Today, he would have been chased off as an annoying civilian, but Bearsford didn't live in the 21st century. Instead, he noticed that Ingram had a ship and some guns, and invited him to join them on a mission to the Sudanese city of Khartoum. It was the romantic notion of cutting a path across the desert that pulled Ingram in, so he agreed. They sailed as far as the ships would take them, and along the way, acquired a reputation for how eagerly he killed the local Egyptians. When they arrived in Khartoum, though, the city had already fallen, so they simply turned back.

But Ingram wasn't in Egypt purely for the easy access to adventure. No, like a lot of his fellow countrymen, he was also on the watch for souvenirs, things he could carry home to remind himself of the trip. Because if England viewed Egypt as an ancient tomb that they could crack open and plunder, why couldn't Ingram do that himself, right? What he found was a fully intact mummy, still wrapped and inside the coffin it was discovered in. He later claimed that he purchased it for 50 pounds and then had it loaded on a ship to come home with him. But he didn't keep it. Instead, he gave it to a friend. You see, back in England, Ingram had a friend named Henry Muse who had recently married.

Henry's wife Valerie, it turns out, was obsessed with anything Egyptian, and she had been using Henry's substantial brewer fortune to buy anything that caught her eye. Ingram saw a chance to impress Valerie, and so after bringing the mummy home, he gifted it to her. That was 1886. Just a couple of years later, Walter Ingram met his own perfect match in a woman named Faye Hemming. Like him, she enjoyed hunting and adventure. So after their wedding, Ingram proposed that he and Faye go to Egypt and bring Henry and Valerie Muse along for the ride. Everyone involved eagerly agreed. It was the sort of honeymoon that a young couple would most likely never forget. Traveling to a foreign land, seeing things most people could only dream of

or read about in books, getting the chance to let loose, take risks, and collect experiences. It was the perfect beginning to a story that everyone knew would leave them happily ever after. And yet fate, it seems, had a different plan in mind. By 19th century standards, their honeymoon was perfect. Keep in mind that, as the daughter of a wealthy industrialist, Faye Hemming loved every bit of their plan to travel Egypt with hunting rifles. And Walter Ingram had no reason to complain about that. To him, it merely signaled how well matched they were. The couple headed east with Henry and Valerie Muse at their side, aiming their hunting party for Somalia. At some point in their journey, they spotted a herd of

elephants in the distance and prepared their guns. Later reports claimed that rather than taking the large elephant gun, Walter Ingram instead picked up a small rifle. Some historians believe he intended to have a little fun, but fate had other ideas. According to Henry, Walter wrote his horse closer and managed to shoot one of the females. But in her panic, the elephant collided with his horse and knocked Walter off the saddle. Chaos erupted, with frightened animals rushing in every direction. Before Henry could rescue him, his friend had been trampled to death. One writer would later describe the violence of his death in the most unusual way, stating that

the elephants crushed him, and I quote, till he was black current jam. A vivid picture of a gruesome end, if there ever was one, but apparently also very accurate. Henry and the others, including Walter's distraught widow, took the time to place what little remained of their friend in a shallow ditch and then continued on their way. They planned to collect those remains on their way back, but when they returned a few days later, they discovered the grave had been dug up. All that remained of Walter Ingram was a sock and a piece of bone, which they collected to bring back to England for burial. Ingram's gruesome demise made the front page of his father's newspaper naturally,

and then the rumor mill took over, spreading the story far and wide. Everyday people were sharing the tale over meals, while writers like Rudyard Kipling and H. Ryder Haggard were entertaining party guests with their own retellings. Soon enough, it was the stuff of legend. In 1896, 10 years after Walter Ingram had traveled to Sedan with Lord Charles Bairford, the London magazine called The Strand published a feature on The Man, and because the story mentioned Ingram, the magazine chose to include the most complete and mature version of Ingram's story to date, and featured prominently was an idea that had only been whispered about until then. Ingram had been killed by the mummy's curse.

That mummy, of course, was probably on display in the home of Henry and Valerie Meuse, a gift from Ingram back in 1886. But I can't help but wonder if the mere presence of it was a reminder to both of them of the friend they lost in Africa, and if they wondered about its power. Whether they did or not, it's clear that the general public believed the stories, which quickly became accepted as the gospel truth. Four years after The Strand's article about Walter Ingram, Henry Meuse passed away unexpectedly. He and Valerie never had children, something many believers in the curse chalked up to the powers of the mummy, because in a society built around hereditary wealth and titles, having no heirs

might be seen as a failure. Around the same time, an article was published that claimed that the mummy's coffin had been inscribed with a powerful curse. The article even included the translated text as proof. And while the words were certainly frightening in context, most people were unaware that they had been fooled. The text, it seems, had been lifted from an older Babylonian inscription, entirely unrelated to the coffin owned by the Meuse family. When Lady Valerie died in 1911, her collection of Egyptian antiquities were listed out in her will to be given to the British Museum. She had spent years gathering all of the items, devoting a significant portion of her fortune to the collection. But those years had also allowed

the stories of the mummy's curse to take root and spread, tinting her bequest with more than a bit of darkness. Perhaps they had no use for her personal collection, or maybe they bought into the stories about ancient powers and evil forces. Whatever the reason truly was, when presented with the opportunity to take possession of Lady Valerie's collection, the British Museum politely declined. Looking back, they might not have fully believed in the curse, but one thing was certainly clear. There was no sense in taking chances. There are a lot of ancient beliefs and ideas that we still carry with us today. Sea monsters, tricksters, and angry spirits are all examples that can be traced back thousands of years.

Whether or not we believe them, they create a legacy that connects us to our ancestors. But the mummy's curse isn't one of them. It's a modern invention that feels like an old one, which has helped it slip into the public consciousness and make itself at home. Yes, it borrows ancient things, like mummified corpses and exotic, beautifully decorated coffins, but the overall idea is relatively new. And like I said before, much of that can be traced back to colonialism. This idea that Europeans had some sort of divine mission to travel the world and lift other cultures up out of the dirt. But many historians today believe that while the public went along with those conquering ways,

they felt a bit of guilt about it, guilt that manifested in things like the mummy's curse. Because it wasn't all about helping other cultures, there was a whole lot of taking going on too. The British Empire robbed Egypt of much of its ancient heritage, hauling it back to London museums and the manor homes of the English countryside. It was something people couldn't help but notice, and many felt guilty about that, if only subconsciously. And the curse stories fit neatly into that guilt-shaped hole. If stealing artifacts was wrong, then picking up a curse in the bargain even the score. It made sense, and that allowed the idea to stick around. And it's still with us today.

There are a few reasons why it's had such stain power. The stories of Thomas Douglas Murray's cursed coffin lid and the mummy purchased by Walter Ingram both come to mind. But there are many more, and a good example took place in 1912. That's the year the Titanic sank into the cold waters of the North Atlantic. Afterwards, thanks to a story told by one of the survivors, the rumour mill began to circulate that Thomas Murray's coffin lid had been on board, and that was the cause of the tragedy. A complete fabrication, of course, but it caught the attention of a woman named Margaret Murray, no relation to Thomas Murray, as far as I can tell. Margaret was a powerhouse. Aside from being an archaeologist who had worked

in Egypt before returning to serve as the president of the Folklore Society in London, she was an early feminist who fought for women's rights to vote in England. She's also the scholar responsible for a witch cult hypothesis that helped give birth to the modern Wiccan movement. And in 1963, the year she turned 100 years old, she finally published her autobiography, entitled My First Hundred Years. Margaret Murray didn't mess around. And she was upset that stories about Egyptian artifacts were being used in such an unsavory way. So she created an experiment. She carefully crafted a rumor that claimed that Thomas Murray's very same coffin lid had also been on board the RMS Empress of Ireland,

which sank two years later in 1914, and that it had been the only piece of wreckage found floating in the ocean. She even crafted a communication from the British Museum to the shipping company that basically said, there's no way we're taking that thing back. Her goal was to show how easily fictional stories can spread. And it worked. The public believed the rumours helped along by their fascination with all things Egyptian and the curses they assumed came with them. But something else happened too. Because Margaret Murray's fictional story gave birth to rumor after rumor, and over the years it spread around the globe, until finally it arrived in Hollywood, where it inspired one of the most influential monster movies of the past 80 years. And I'm sure

you can guess what it is. Universal Studios' 1932 classic, The Mummy. I hope you've enjoyed today's exploration of the power of a good curse story. History is full of them, and the 19th century mummy's curse certainly lives up to the hype, even if most people believe it's all a work of fiction. But there are other stories that are a lot less simple, ones that defy the logic and rationality that we love so much. And if you stick around after this short sponsor break, I want to share one of those with you. Sometimes a curse feels an awful lot like revenge, from a certain point of view. Folks who whispered about the mummy that Walter Ingram had purchased and brought home to give

to the muse family claim that he had ripped the merchant off, paying a fraction of what it was worth. In their minds, his tragic death was nothing more than a resetting of the scales of justice in a cosmic sort of way. You see that a lot in curse stories, in fact. The big showy stuff is always how the curse plays out, but tucked away behind all of that are the reasons, the injustices or mistakes that tip the scales in their favor. Scales that the curse is meant to put back to normal. And when I think about unfortunate events that demand repayment, I can't help but think about the horseshoe brewery. They were at the center of an arms race of sorts among London breweries back in the late 1700s. It probably goes without saying, but the larger the vats

inside a brewery, the more beer you can make, and the more you can make, the more you can sell. Along with that, there's also the bragging rights that come with owning the largest vats. So for a number of years, the various breweries went back and forth, each one setting new records on the size of the vats they used. The family that owned the horseshoe brewery spared no expense, knowing that their fame would lead to fortune. By the 1790s, they owned the largest vat ever recorded. It was their crowning achievement. To put things in perspective, during the build-up to that massive vat, they celebrated the completion of the second largest vat in London by hosting a sit-down dinner party for 200 guests, a party that was set up inside that vat, and the newest one

was even bigger. As I said, bigger vats meant larger output. In the three years between 1809 and 1812, the company tripled their production, topping out at over 100,000 barrels of beer. But all that profit wasn't funding safety standards. In the late 1790s, three men climbed inside one of those big vats to clean it out after it had been emptied, but the fumes were still too strong, and they suffocated to death. In 1812, a visitor to the brewery reported that the place was filthy inside. Just about every surface was covered in rust or smoke residue, or both, and some of the copper hoops that held the large vats together had a tendency to fall off and need to be put back in place. And two years later, that turned to tragedy.

On October 17 of 1814, a newly filled vat burst open, sending a wave of steaming hot beer outward. It pushed out one of the brewery's walls and managed to knock over other vats as well. The result was a tidal wave of roughly 1 million litres of beer that swept out into the surrounding streets. Neighboring homes were destroyed, and at least eight people were killed. And naturally, the brewery was taken to court. It seemed like an easy case. They had ignored safety standards in their race to increase production, and that had come back to bite them. More than likely, the tragedy was about to shut down the family business for good. Except that's not what happened. The judge who heard the case declared the tragedy an act of God,

shifting the blame away from the owner, and refusing to hold them accountable for all the destruction and death that took place. And I have to imagine that there was a lot of muttering by the locals about how unfair that must have seemed. The brewery had cut corners, and the resulting tragedy had taken eight innocent lives. It gets worse though. You see, the horseshoe brewery was planning to sell that beer like any good brewery should, and the loss of that inventory meant that they weren't going to be able to pay off their debts. Bankruptcy was right around the corner, so they asked for help. They literally asked the British government to give them financial aid to help weather the storm, and the Crown agreed. Adding it all up, the scales of justice

seemed entirely out of balance. They had allowed their greed to blind them to safety concerns, which led to a deadly tragedy, and yet they walked away with zero responsibility and a stack of cash for their troubles. If the people who suffered spent any time praying for revenge, I honestly can't blame them. Of course, horseshoe brewery recovered from the mess and went on to rebuild their fortune. Over the coming decades, the owner would become incredibly wealthy and eventually pass his fortune on to his only son, a fortune that would one day pay for the owner's son to take a hunting trip to Egypt with his wife and friends. And that son's name? Walter Ingram's friend, Henry Muse.

This episode of Lore was written and produced by me, Aaron Mankey, with research by Carl Nellis and Music by Chad Lawson. Lore is much more than just a podcast. There's a book series available in bookstores and online, and two seasons of the television show on Amazon Prime Video. Check them both out if you want more lore in your life. I also make two other podcasts, Aaron Mankey's Cabinet of Curiosities, and Unobscured, and I think you'd enjoy both. Each one explores other areas of our dark history, ranging from bite-sized episodes to season-long dives into a single topic. You can learn more about both of those shows and everything else going on over in one central place, theworldoflore.com slash now.

And you can also follow the show on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. Just search for Lore podcast, all one word, and click that follow button. And when you do, say hi. I like it when people say hi. And as always, thanks for listening.