So Supernatural - MYSTICAL: King Tut’s Curse

Episode Date: October 7, 2020

Can the dead actually curse the living? After the 1922 unearthing of an Egyptian pharaoh's tomb, a mysterious string of misfortunes plagued the archaeologists who discovered it—and it’s not the first time a cursed mummy has wreaked havoc.  

Okay, this is going to sound a little obvious, but what's like the number one rule of horror movies? Don't mess with the dead. Whether it's zombies, ghosts, or an ancient burial ground, leave it alone or else. If you disturb someone's final resting place, well, it's an act so disrespectful, so powerful, it could bring them back to life just to get revenge on you. You might even invoke a curse. Now, this sounds pretty crazy, but it's actually what happened in 1922. Egyptian archaeologists uncovered a tomb of an all-but-forgotten pharaoh in Egypt's Valley of the Kings. His name was Tutankhamun, or King Tut.

But when they broke open his chamber, they unleashed something so dark and potent, people started turning up dead. This is Supernatural, and I'm your host, Ashley Flowers. This week, we're talking about King Tut's curse, a mysterious string of misfortunes that took place following the discovery of this ancient pharaoh. It's one of the most well-known cases in modern history that poses an age-old question. Can the dead actually curse the living? We'll have all of that and more coming up. Stay with us. So the story of the Pharaoh's curse actually begins way before King Tut. It starts with the legend of Osiris. Osiris is the Egyptian god of the underworld, but he didn't always have that title. He was actually born as a man who becomes the pharaoh or king of Egypt. But at some point, Osiris is murdered by his jealous brother. He's not only killed,

his brother literally dismembers him, like hacks his body up into 14 pieces and scatters them all over Egypt. And according to legend, without a body, Osiris' soul isn't able to move on to the afterlife. His widow Isis knows this, so she goes on a desperate search trying to collect all the pieces. She manages to find them, but she doesn't really know what to do, so she prays to the gods for help. As the story goes, Anubis, the god of funerals and the caretaker of the dead, takes pity on Isis. He shows her how to wrap Osiris' body in cloth, making him the first mummy. Once he's reassembled, Osiris comes back to life, and he goes on to become one of the most powerful and important gods in Egypt,

ruling over the underworld. Now, obviously this is mythology, but this one story shapes how Egyptians view death and the afterlife for thousands of years. Just like Osiris, they start to mummify their dead. So we've all seen Scooby-Doo. We can all picture the classic mummy figure wrapped in bandages. You may have even learned in school how these bodies were disemboweled, then cured, then wrapped in linen. I mean, this is a really extreme process. It's expensive and it takes months to do properly.

So even if it worked for Osiris, why is this the go-to funeral for Egyptians? Well, it has to do with the rest of the myth after Osiris is resurrected. Like I said, he goes on to rule over the afterlife, and apparently it looks pretty identical to normal life. Spirits eat, go to the store, pay rent, and this is where the mummy part becomes so important. Because whatever your dead body looks like, that's the form your spirit takes. So you can see why preserving someone's body matters so much. And Egyptian pharaohs and other nobility, they don't just need their bodies, they need their stuff. I mean, you know the phrase, you can't take it with you? Yeah, the Egyptians don't buy that. They believe you absolutely can and should take all of your earthly possessions

to the grave. We're talking food, jewelry, clothing, chariots, beds, pets, even people like servants or war slaves. They throw it all in the tomb along with the mummy to ensure that their loved ones are all set for the afterlife. So now it's not just here lies Ramses II, it's here lies Ramses II and all of his valuables. So as you'd expect, these tombs become huge targets for grave robbers. We don't know a ton about these ancient tomb raiders, but it's clear they were ignoring some pretty crazy warnings. You see, tombs in Egypt are inscribed with warnings, threatening that priests of certain gods will beat any trespassers. Or they could be eaten by a crocodile or a hippopotamus. There is even one pharaoh's tomb that reportedly warns about a quote

disease which no doctor can diagnose. From what we can tell, these warnings are only mildly effective over the next 3,000 years or so. The power of the Egyptian empire slowly declines until it's folded into the Roman empire, which gives way to the Dark Ages. And of course, the Dark Ages ends with the Crusades. Christian soldiers returning to Western Europe from Africa bring plenty of stories of Egyptian artifacts. So tomb raiding had to have been in full swing by then. Then, in 1798, Napoleon lands in Egypt. For the next hundred years, Western archaeologists explore every inch of the Valley of the Kings, uncovering some of the most recognizable treasures

of Egyptian history, like the Rosetta Stone, the bust of Nefertiti, the Luxor Obelisk. By the early 1900s, it's pretty widely accepted that everything noteworthy has already been found. Everyone thinks the Valley of the Kings has been cleaned out from thousands of years of looting. Except for this one archaeologist named Howard Carter. Carter actually gets his start as an artist, not an archaeologist. When he's 17, he's hired to draw sketches of artifacts from a tomb in the Middle Kingdom. He becomes really well known for his work, and he's brought on to document several other excavations over the years. All the while, he's becoming fascinated with ancient Egyptian history,

which is how he learned about this little-known pharaoh from the 18th dynasty, Tutankhamun. Now, Tut wasn't an important king. He only reigned for 10 years, and he died when he was 19, sometime around 1325 BCE. In fact, he's considered so unimportant that most Egyptologists in Carter's day don't think he even has a real tomb. But Carter doesn't buy it. He knows that another excavation found evidence that Tut was mummified. There were bandages with his name written on them left over from the embalming process. And where there's a mummy, there should be a tomb. So in the early 1900s, he decides to look for King Tut's tomb himself.

Now, to most people, Carter is on a wild goose chase, but he actually manages to find financial support in the form of a British aristocrat named George Herbert V, Earl of Carnarvon, or just Lord Carnarvon for short. Like Carter, Carnarvon's always been fascinated by Egypt, but he's really more of an armchair archaeologist with no real qualifications or training. Still, he has plenty of money and he's particularly excited by the idea of King Tut's scoop, the treasure that no one believes exists. So the two become partners. Carnarvon will provide the money, Carter will do the hard work, and they promise to split everything 50-50 with the country of Egypt. But here's the thing, five years go by and they don't find anything. By 1922, Carnarvon is losing hope, but Carter

convinces him, just give me one more season, one more shot. So on November 1st, Carter and his team head out to the desert for the sixth time. They set up their grids in the sand and search as usual. Only this time, three days later, they come across a step made out of stone. They clear away some rubble and sure enough, there's another step, and then another, and then another. They just keep going down into the sand. Eventually, they uncover a door to a tomb. It is still sealed with a knotted rope, so by all appearances, no robbers have ever broken in. And the inscription reads, Tutankhamun, jackpot. Carter is ecstatic. He tells his men not to touch anything. He has to let Lord Carnarvon know right away. So he leaves the dig site and rushes to the nearest city, Luxor. There, he sends a telegram to Carnarvon in London. But while Carter's gone, something happens at the camp

that the other archaeologists find really disturbing. Coming up, King Tut's curse takes its first life. Now let's get back to the story. While Carter was away telegraphing Lord Carnarvon about his discovery, his archaeology team has a startling encounter. One of the assistants at the dig site, a guy named Arthur Callender, is walking by Carter's tent one afternoon when he hears something cry out inside. Arthur rushes into the tent and finds a cobra. It's slithered into Carter's birdcage and eaten his canary whole.

Callender is shook. He tells the other people in camp, and word gets around to some of the Egyptian locals, and they warn that this is a terrible omen. In ancient Egypt, the cobra was a symbol of the pharaoh and royalty. So basically, the locals think that Carter and his men are playing with fire by digging at King Tut's tomb. Like, they should probably back off before something really bad happens. But when Carter hears about the incident, he just brushes it off. He's not going to let superstition keep him from

capitalizing on what is surely the greatest archaeological find of the 20th century. He has to keep going. So like I said before, the door to Tut's tomb is still sealed with its original rope, which is a huge deal considering how picked over the Valley of the Kings is. But when Carter looks closer, he realizes someone cut a hole in the door at some point and resealed it. Worried that someone beat him to the punch, he drills a small hole in the top corner of the door, just big enough to fit his hand through. Now, this next scene is like something out of a movie. Carter pokes a candle through this hole into the darkness, and he can't see much. But what he can make out is glittering gold.

Even then, though, Carter isn't prepared for what he finds when he actually opens the door to the tomb. The antechamber is filled with treasures. Like, it's literally stacked from floor to ceiling. There's a chariot, two different thrones, three funeral beds, and much, much more. All of it inlaid with gold. But it is also clear that someone was in this room at some point and had kind of shuffled things around. There's a haphazard pile of objects stacked near the door, like a robber was ready to carry them out, but just never got around to it.

But all of this, this is just in the first room. On the opposite wall, Carter can make out another sealed doorway. He assumes this is probably the burial chamber, but he can't open it until they've cleared everything out of the first, which is going to take a really long time. Every item in the antechamber is an important part of history, so it has to be carefully cataloged, photographed, and then packed up to be taken to a museum. By the time they're actually ready to open the burial chamber, it's been three months since they first found the tomb. Lord Carnarvon has since made the trip to Egypt and he's now at the dig site alongside Carter. On February 16th, 1923, the two men carefully break through

the sealed wall to the burial chamber. The brick crumbles, sending a gust of hot air into their faces. Slowly, the dust settles and they can make out what's inside. It's a giant sarcophagus, practically the size of the room, and it's completely intact. Like, no one has been inside this room since it was sealed up 3,000 years ago. Both men are rejoicing at this point. I mean, it's an unparalleled find. They know that King Tut's mummy is waiting for them inside the sarcophagus, perfectly preserved. But neither one of them really understand the full implications of what that means. Like, sure, we found tombs before, and yes, we found complete mummies before.

But again, they are the first ones to ever crack open a sealed burial chamber. And King Tut is still sealed in his coffin, which is actually a coffin within a coffin within a coffin. His body has been untouched since burial sometime in 1325 BC, exactly as his loved ones would have wanted. This means that more than any other modern archaeologist, Carter and Carnarvon are literal grave robbers disturbing the body of the pharaoh. And there are consequences to this. Now, Carter and Carnarvon aren't superstitious at all. They are obsessed with their find, which is making them really famous. Like, all over the world, people are talking about King Tut's tomb.

Then, in early March of 1923, about a month after the burial chamber was unsealed, Carnarvon is bitten by a mosquito on his face. Right away, this is bizarre because mosquitoes don't typically live in the desert, but even stranger, the bite just won't heal. Carnarvon nicks it a few times while shaving, but he doesn't really think anything of it until a few weeks go by. And now the bite is infected. It's grown into this angry red blistering patch on his face, and it's painful and hot to the touch. Now, Carnarvon is 57, so not a young guy, but certainly not an invalid. But he was in a nearly fatal car accident several years earlier that left him with a permanently weakened immune system. So once this thing is infected, he has a

really hard time shaking it off. By March 17th, he's been diagnosed with erysipelas and streptococcus blood poisoning, which basically means that the bacteria from his face has entered his bloodstream and it's spreading to the rest of his body. Over the next few weeks, Carnarvon gets sicker and sicker. He's in unbelievable pain, has a raging fever, and his lungs are filling up with fluid. Eventually, on April 5th, Carnarvon's heart and lungs give out, and he dies in a hotel room in Cairo. His autopsy says his death was caused by this infected mosquito bite, but his official cause of death is listed as complications of pneumonia or fluid in the lungs.

But here's where things get really creepy. Allegedly, at the moment of his death, all the electricity in Cairo went dark. And according to Carnarvon's son, at the same time that he died, the family dog, a three-legged terrier named Susie, sat up and howled in anguish. Then she rolled over and died too. Now, whether or not the electricity and the dog story are true, Carnarvon's death is still so unexpected and so close to the time he opened the tomb that rumors start flying. I mean, when you think about it, he's killed by a mosquito bite? Not even two months after exposing King Tut's tomb to the light of day? There has to be something darker at play here. So like I said, King Tut's story was

international news. And as journalists chase down the details of Lord Carnarvon's death, they uncover evidence that he may have been cursed. The reporters take a closer look at some photographs from inside the tomb published in the Times of London. In a few of them, there are inscriptions and hieroglyphics. One of them is translated to, quote, They who enter this sacred tomb shall swift be visited by wings of death. Another says, I will kill all of those who cross this threshold into the sacred precincts of the royal king who lives forever. Now, to be fair, a pharaoh's curse, a few hieroglyphics, and one dead man make for a great story, but it's not exactly hard evidence. But as the weeks go on, it becomes more and more clear that Carnarvon's death was only the beginning. In May of 1923, railroad tycoon George J. Gould visits King Tut's tomb. Two weeks later, on May 16th,

he dies of pneumonia, the exact same cause of death as Lord Carnarvon. Right away, people are scrambling to figure out a connection. In the process, they take a closer look at the photographs from inside the tomb, and it's obvious that there's mold growing on the walls. You can clearly see the little black splotches. So it's possible that when Carnarvon and Gould visited the tomb, they both inhaled something really toxic that basically strangled them from within. Which is actually pretty crazy because as you remember, there's an ancient Egyptian warning to tomb robbers about a disease that no doctor can diagnose.

So maybe this curse is some kind of biological booby trap. Carter had even made note in his diary earlier that year mentioning how Carnarvon was looking at something on the floor by crawling on his hands and knees. That could have been the point of exposure that sealed his fate. Now, everyone is trying to figure this out. But in the midst of all of this, one of the guys from the dig site, archaeologist Hugh Evelyn White, develops this bad feeling. He has this unshakable sense that the curse is coming for him. It's this feeling of doom that lingers over him as the months drag on, and no matter what he does,

he can't alleviate his anxiety. That is until finally, in 1924, when Evelyn White takes his own life. Allegedly, he leaves a note behind written in his own blood, and it reads, I have succumbed to a curse which forces me to disappear. So right away, this note is terrifying, and White is now the third person to die in a year. But to be fair, I mean, it could all be a coincidence. Two guys that die from pneumonia isn't exactly a curse epidemic, and suicide is a totally different cause of death. But the next tomb-related fatality is so extreme and so obvious that anyone who doubts the reality of the curse is forced to reconsider. Apparently,

a close friend of Lord Carnarvon's, Dr. Aaron Ember, was present at the opening of Tut's tomb. Dr. Ember is an American Egyptologist, so for him, this would have been like the best field trip ever. In 1926, sometime after he gets back to the U.S., Ember hosts a dinner party. He shows all of his guests photos of the tomb, and he proudly passes around a few artifacts he's brought home for personal collection. About an hour after the party concludes, a small fire ignites in the house. At first, the flames are small, slowly creeping up the wall. I mean, it's plenty of time for Ember to make it outside, but he has to do one thing first. He's been hard at work on a new manuscript titled The Egyptian Book of the Dead.

Ember can't bear to let it go up in flames, so he runs to rescue it. Suddenly, the fire gains steam. Within seconds, the house is devoured in flames. Dr. Ember, his wife, and their daughter die in the blaze. And everyone is left in shock. All the friends who had been at the dinner party all make the same observation. One minute, Ember had been showing off his treasures, and then the next, he'd been

swallowed by fire. The whole thing felt incredibly malevolent. Then, on April 6, 1928, almost five years to the day after Carnarvon died, 53-year-old archaeologist Arthur Cruttenden Mace succumbs to a lung infection, just like Carnarvon and Gould. But Mace's death isn't so cut and dry. It's been years since he visited the tomb. So if he'd gotten mold spores in his lungs, he would have been affected by them much sooner. And when they do an autopsy on Mace, it turns out that his lung infection was incidental. He supposedly died of arsenic poisoning, but no one can figure out the source of the poison.

In any case, the last two cursed deaths, and possibly the most mysterious ones, happened the following year, in 1929. This time, it's Howard Carter's personal secretary, Richard Bethel. And I should point out that aside from Carter and Carnarvon, Bethel has been the closest person to the whole excavation. Now, six years after he helped open the tomb, he's found dead in his bed in a hotel room. At first, it looks like Bethel died of natural causes because his hotel room was apparently locked from the inside. But it's later reported

that the autopsy found signs that Bethel was smothered to death, which just doesn't make sense because how would the door get locked from the inside? Not long after his death, Bethel's household staff comes forward and reports that there had been several unexplained fires at the estate. And they only started once Bethel came back from Egypt with items taken from Tut's tomb, just like Dr. Ember. Bethel's staff, his colleagues, his family, everyone is really disturbed by this. So much so that a few months later, Bethel's father dies by suicide when he jumps from a seven-story window. So let's just take a step back here for a second, because with so many deaths related to King Tut, it seems undeniable, right? Like something supernatural must have been at work. But it's also worth talking about why these deaths got so much coverage in the first place. So remember, Lord

Carnarvon and Carter had a deal that they would split everything inside King Tut's tomb 50-50 with the country of Egypt. Well, when they found the tomb and realized that it was still totally intact, they were basically bound to give all of it to the museum in Cairo. Carnarvon was actually not too happy. Like, yes, he was super proud of the discovery and how intact the tomb was, but he also shelled out tons of money at that point. He needed to make at least some of it back. So right when the tomb was discovered, Carnarvon made a deal with the Times of London. In exchange for a lot of money,

he promised to give the Times exclusive reporting rights to anything they found in the tomb. They were the only paper that Carnarvon, Howard Carter, or anyone officially related to the dig would talk to. But this had unintended consequences. Like I said, King Tut's tomb is the hottest story of the 1920s. A mummy mania craze spreads across the West, and journalists everywhere are hungry for any morsel that they can report on, and all of them have been cut out by this deal. So it stands to reason that any weird story they hear, like Carter's canary being eaten by a cobra,

is suddenly blown into huge news articles. And when people start dying, you better believe that's reported on as well. But when we look at actual numbers of the curse, they tell a less sensational story. Like of the first 25 people who first entered the tomb, Lord Carnarvon was the only one who got sick and died. And of the 58 people who were present when the sarcophagus was opened, only eight died in the decade that followed. That's less than 14%. So really, how effective is this curse? For all we know, it's just this one incident where a few people happened to die. The whole curse thing could be overblown. Except it's not just this one incident. As it turns out, the same sort of thing had happened just two decades before.

Coming up, more victims of the curse. Now back to the story. About 20 years before King Tut's tomb was opened in 1904, there was an English journalist named Bertram Fletcher Robinson. He's heard a story about a cursed mummy on display in the British Museum, and he decides to investigate. It turns out it was just a coffin, not an actual mummy, and it wasn't even a whole coffin, just the lid with a painting of a mummy on it. So right away, not a whole lot to go on. But Robinson isn't deterred. He can tell he's about to uncover a great mystery. He writes, for three months, I have been gathering the tangled threads of evidence. I have now in my possession proofs of the identity of all those

who suffered from the anger of the priestess of Amun-Ra. So apparently this coffin used to belong to an Egyptian priestess. Robinson dubbed her the unlucky mummy. According to his investigation, she was originally purchased by a group of Englishmen who brought her home from Egypt. Shortly afterwards, the entire party was visited by misfortune, injury, bankruptcy, and even death. The mummy was later moved to the museum, where she was responsible for the deaths of several terrified night watchmen. And eventually, her body was sold to an American, but the ship carrying her sank in the Atlantic. And supposedly, that ship was the Titanic. Robinson exposes the curse of the unlucky mummy in June of 1904. Less than three years later, Robinson suddenly dies from typhoid

fever at only 36 years old. Robinson's family and friends are shaken. One of these is his close friend Arthur Conan Doyle. Yes, the Mr. Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes. He's convinced that Robinson was actually the latest victim of the unlucky mummy. Now, maybe it's just part of his job or an eccentric hobby, but Doyle is also really into Egyptology and Egyptian curses. And he's one of the foremost spiritualist practitioners of the time, meaning he's into communicating with the dead and he believes they have wisdom for the living. So all told, when Doyle starts reading about the deaths related to King Tut's mummy in the newspaper, he feels compelled to speak up.

Clearly, this is another curse in action. Doyle tells a flock of reporters that Lord Carnarvon was clearly the victim of a spiritual booby trap. He says, quote, it is neither decent nor safe to take from their resting places the bodies of old kings. The Egyptians knew much more about the occult than we do today. This must have been a peculiar element of an Egyptian curse. There is reason to believe that the ancient Egyptians placed elementals on guard and such may have caused Lord Carnarvon's fatal illness. End quote. And while it might seem silly that a fictional detective novelist would be trusted as an expert in Egyptian curses, let me tell you, the press

and the public at large take Doyle at his word. After all, he was known for communicating with the dead all the time through seances. He was basically an expert on ghosts and death. Of course, not everyone accepts Doyle's explanation of elementals. More serious publications like the New York Times aren't ready to accept ghost stories as hard-hitting journalism. That is, until a new detail emerges that shifts the conversation back in Doyle's favor. So when King Tut's mummy was finally removed from the tomb, it was sent to a lab to be examined. First, they x-ray it, and shocker,

the man performing the x-ray apparently gets sick and dies three days after the procedure. In any case, the studies continue, and while performing the autopsy on the mummy, the doctors notice something odd. King Tut has a small lesion on his cheek, the kind of small wound that you'd get from a mosquito bite, the same kind of bite that killed Lord Carnarvon and in the exact same location. So maybe there is something to this whole curse thing after all. At the very least, the similarity between Lord Carnarvon and King Tut is just too insane to immediately brush off as coincidence. But it's important to note one very important person who never fell victim to the curse. Howard Carter, the lead archaeologist. He was just as responsible, in fact,

more so than Lord Carnarvon for disturbing King Tut's final resting place. Yet he never seemed to suffer. Carter lived to be 64 and died of lymphoma. Until the day he died, he called the idea of a curse Tommy Rot. I should also point out that later studies of the mold in the tomb showed that it wasn't toxic. Besides, if the mold in the tomb was that potent, it would have infected anyone who came in contact with it, and it would have had a really strong smell. So it's more likely that Carnarvon simply had a bug bite and a dirty face, and the tube didn't mix well. Egypt in 1923 wasn't the cleanest place in the world, so an infected wound isn't that crazy. And Carnarvon's immune system was already weak. According to an article in The Lancet,

one acute attack of bronchitis could have killed him. It's also been revealed that the so-called curse warnings in the tomb were actually mistranslation stirred up by journalists who didn't have exclusive reporting rights but wanted a story. Still, it does beg the question about all the other deaths, especially Dr. Ember, Richard Bethel, and Bethel's dad. All of them wound up dead from undeniably crazy circumstances that seemed linked to the tomb. And the curse of the mummy felt so real to archaeologist Hugh Evelyn White that he actually took his own life to get ahead of it. One researcher has come up with her own theory. Egyptologist and anthropologist Jasmine Day believes that the legend of King Tut's curse

actually arose from subconscious guilt. Basically, she's saying it's easy for us to believe in a malevolent spirit taking revenge from beyond the grave because subconsciously, we believe that grave robbers should be punished. Jasmine Day goes so far as to liken the opening of coffins and the unwrapping of mummies to assault. We know what we're doing is wrong and those wrong actions deserve retribution.

Subconsciously, we may be no different than ancient Egyptians who believed in a concrete afterlife where the dead could spy on the living and take revenge if necessary. So if we do feel like we're being followed by a curse, maybe it's because we actually do feel the gaze of the dead upon us, and we know that they don't like what they see. Thanks for listening. I'll be back next week with another episode. To hear more stories hosted by me, check out Crime Junkie and all Audiochuck originals.