The Curse That Never Ends

The last time the treasures of Tutankhamun came to my home town of San Francisco, a policeman guarding the boy-king's gold funerary mask claimed compensation for a mild stroke based on the effect of the Tut curse. A judge dismissed the claim.

And that's the way the mummy's curse has gone these past 87 years, with no end in sight. Others have been more successful than our hapless cop in exploiting the curse myth for personal gain. Hollywood lost no time getting into the act with a series of mummy's curse and revenge movies that first appeared in 1932 and continue on ad infinitum.

The distracting business of the curse, appears to have begun with the death of Howard Carter's patron and partner, Lord Carnarvon. The bon vivant British Lord died from an insect bite that became infected when nicked during a shave. The story goes that when Carnarvon died there was a power failure and all the lights in Cairo went out. His son informed the press that at the moment of his father's death, Carnarvon's dog howled and suddenly dropped dead.

The locals of Luxor and Cairo had another reason to believe in the curse. Carter had, shortly before the discovery of the tomb, purchased a pet canary to cheer up his desert home. When the house servants saw the yellow canary, they declared it to be a "bird of gold that will bring goodluck." Thereafter the natives called the Valley of the Kings excavation "the tomb of the golden bird." A few months later, one of Carter's engineers, Pecky Callender, while house sitting, heard a fluttering and sqawking and went to the next room to find in the cage, a cobra in the act of gulping down the canary. The House servants, horrified at the event, declared that the canary's death would cause someone to die before the winter was out. That person turned out to be Carnarvon.

The story of the curse was lent some authority when the novelist, Mari Corelli, two weeks before Carnarvon's death, published a warning that there would be dire consequences for anyone entering the sealed tomb. Later, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes, and a well-known believer in the occult, added fuel to the flames by warning of the curse. The press, more interesting in selling their publications than telling the truth, stirred the pot with made up stories. One alleged nonexistent inscription read: "They who enter the sacred tomb shall swiftly be visited by wings of death." Newspapers began arbitrarily killing off people involved in some way withe the tomb's discovery. One list had 26 people dead within a year. As it turned out, only six people died during the first decade, while many directly involved lived on to a ripe old age.

If anyone deserved to suffer from the curse, it would have been Howard Carter, but he lived on until 1939, dying at the age of 65. Dr. D.E. Derry, the physician who carried out an autopsy on Tut's mummy, was a natural for premature death, yet lived for several more decades, dying in 1969. Carnarvon's daughter, Lady Evelyn, the first person to actually descend into the tomb, died in 1980 at the age of 79.