The Mummy's Curse (Classic)
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A new episode of Cautionary Tales will be released on the usual schedule, but while you wait, in honour of the centenary of the opening of the tomb of Tutankhamun, I present another chance to hear the mummy's curse. Three and a half thousand years ago, in ancient Egypt, the princess of Amun-Ra passed away.

She was laid to rest in an exquisite wooden coffin and buried in a deep vault at Luxor, on the banks of the mighty Nile. More than 30 centuries later, in the late 1800s, four young English tourists, rich gentlemen all, were offered the chance to purchase a delightfully painted mummy case. They drew lots to decide who had the right to buy the prize.

The man who won paid a small fortune and had the coffin taken to his hotel. A few hours later, he was seen walking out onto the lone and level sands. He was never to return. The second fellow was wounded in a hunting accident. He lost his arm.

The third man lost everything in a bank run. The fourth was struck with a severe illness, lost his job and ended his days selling matches on street corners. The coffin case was purchased by another gentleman. His house caught fire and he quickly donated the unlucky item to the British Museum. The removal did not go smoothly.

The removal wagon lost control and hit a passer-by. One workman fell and broke his leg while carrying the casket. His colleague simply died inexplicably two days later. Night watchmen at the museum frequently heard sobbing and hammering from inside the coffin. One died on duty. The others refused to go near the Egyptian room where the item was stored.

A visitor who treated the exhibition with scorn soon paid the price. His child died of measles. A photographer took a picture of the case, but when he developed the picture, he saw only a tormented human face. The photographer went home, locked his door and shot himself.

The British Museum sold the cursed object to a private collector, who soon regretted the purchase. Eventually, he found a buyer bold or foolish enough to take it off his hands. An American archaeologist, who simply did not believe in unlucky mummies. He paid top dollar for the coffin case and arranged to have it shipped across the Atlantic to New York for safekeeping.

The lid of the coffin of the Princess of Amun-Ra travelled on the bridge of the finest ocean liner in the world, the pride of the White Star Line. The ship's name was the Titanic. I'm Tim Harford, and you're listening to Cautionary Tales. In 1922...

A decade after the Titanic had slipped beneath the icy waters of the North Atlantic, another archaeologist, the Englishman Howard Carter, was at the head of the Valley of the Kings in the heart of ancient Egypt. He was patiently encamped outside what he described as a magnificent tomb with seals intact. It had been a long wait.

Not just the three weeks for Carter's patron and financier, Lord Carnarvon, to arrive. Not just the 15 years of excavating different sites around the valley with limited success. No, someone, or something, had been waiting still longer, for more than 3,000 years. Deep inside that tomb...

Behind a sealed door, a corridor filled with rubble, another sealed door, a chamber full of treasures, and yet another sealed door was something that nobody had dared to disturb for millennia. And perhaps with good reason. Everyone knew the story of the unlucky mummy in the Titanic. Such tales were popular in late Victorian and Edwardian society. A famous psychic, Count Hayman,

sent a telegram with a warning. Lord Carnarvon not to enter tomb. Disobey at peril. If ignored, will suffer sickness. Not recover. Death will claim him in Egypt. And yet, Lord Carnarvon had come.

After weeks of further digging, he now stood at the shoulder of Howard Carter, who, after patiently working on a small hole into the burial chamber, put a candle to the hole and peered in. At first, I could see nothing.

"'Carter later recalled. "'But presently, as my eyes grew accustomed to the light, "'details of the room emerged slowly from the mist. "'Strange animals, statues, and gold, "'everywhere the glint of gold. "'For the moment, I was struck dumb with amazement, "'and when Lord Carnarvon, unable to stand the suspense any longer, "'inquired anxiously, "'Can you see anything?' "'It was all I could do to get out the words. "'Yes, wonderful things.'

Wonderful things, perhaps. These treasures were there to guard and sustain the mummified body and the golden burial mask of the young pharaoh Tutankhamen. The story was a sensation. The world's press had gathered in Cairo and were jostling for access to the tomb or to Carter or Carnarvon.

The Times of London lauded it over the other papers, having paid handsomely for exclusive access. But every newspaper was there, and every newspaper had an angle. These rival newspapers reported that Carter and Carnarvon had deliberately destroyed a terrible warning over the tomb, because they were afraid that the locals would refuse to dig. That warning read...

Death shall come on swift wings to whoever toucheth the tomb of the pharaoh. Reports too that Carnarvon had received a tiny injury in the tomb. A stinging or biting insect had pierced the skin on his cheek just as he had entered the presence of Tutankhamen. And Count Hayman was not the only person to have warned about the consequences of Lord Carnarvon's arrogance.

One eyewitness turned to the fellow standing next to him. "I give him six weeks to live." Nearly six weeks later, Lord Carnarvon's family were rushing to be at his side in Cairo. He was gravely ill. A wound on his cheek was infected and the malady was spreading through his body.

The Express newspaper reported that at the moment that Lord Carnarvon breathed his last feeble breath, the lights in his hotel went out, plunging all into darkness. Death had claimed him in Egypt. It was another Pharaoh's curse, and it had claimed its first victim.

Cautionary tales are true stories of disaster, and lessons for us all to learn, lest we make the same mistake ourselves. But what lesson should we learn from stories about the unlucky mummy, or the curse of Tutankhamen? First, let's establish what exactly is said to have happened to Carnarvon and Carter's expedition.

The first indication of trouble was a little on the nose. The death of a canary. Howard Carter's beloved pet canary had been eaten by a cobra the day Carter began to excavate the tomb. The cobra was well known as a symbol of the power of the pharaohs. Another symbol was the jackal, representative of Anubis, the Egyptian god of the dead.

In his diary, Howard Carter recorded the unsettling sight of two black jackals, the very image of Anubis. He noted that it was the first time he'd seen a black jackal, despite 35 years working in Egypt. Carter's canary wasn't the only pet to suffer. Lord Carnarvon's dog howled in sorrow and then expired at the same moment that Carnarvon himself did.

which is all the more remarkable since Carnarvon was in Cairo, while the dog was in Highclere Castle in southern England. Highclere is better known these days as the filming location for Downton Abbey. If it had just been Carnarvon and a menagerie, that would be one thing, but the pharaoh's thirst for revenge was not easily slaked.

Soon, Howard Carter was showing signs of illness too, and the list of people struck down by the curse grew and grew. A railroad baron from pneumonia after visiting the tomb of Tutankhamen in 1923. The same year, Lord Carnarvon's half-brother. A year later, a close colleague of Carter suffered a breakdown and retired.

A noted radiologist, after performing an X-ray of Tutankhamen's sarcophagus, died mysteriously also in 1924. A leading British diplomat was assassinated in Cairo again in 1924. A respected French Egyptologist died in 1926 after stumbling near Tutankhamen's tomb. Carnarvon's secretary survived a little longer.

He died in his sleep in 1929, in circumstances also said to be mysterious. And the Times of London noted that he is believed to have been troubled by the legendary curse of the pharaohs. The man's father, Lord Westbury, killed himself three months later. His suicide note included the line, "'I really can't stand any more horrors.'"

But the horrors kept coming. Lord Westbury's hearse knocked down a boy of eight on the way to the cemetery. The boy had died to satisfy the honour of a 3,000-year-old Egyptian. The man who'd given Lord Carnarvon six weeks to live was to die in 1934. The Daily Express noted that he had been killed by the curse. Finally,

In 1939, Howard Carter, the leader of the expedition, the man who was the first to glimpse the mask of Tutankhamun in more than 3,000 years, after picking off his pet, his patron, his friends and his colleagues one by one, the Pharaoh's curse finally came for Carter, a man doomed to watch all around him die. Even then, the curse was not lifted.

After four decades in a museum in Cairo, the Egyptian government arranged to have Tutankhamen's mask and treasures exhibited in Paris and later in London. Numerous untimely deaths followed, in particular of two successive directors of Egyptian antiquities. A Royal Air Force crew took on the job of flying the treasures from Cairo to London and paid the price.

One of them jokingly kicked the box containing the pharaoh's mask. I've just kicked the most expensive thing in the world. Later, a ladder broke underneath him for no apparent reason.

That leg was in plaster for five months. Another crewman lost everything in a house fire. A third suffered two heart attacks in his 30s, while two others died of heart attacks in their 40s, including flight engineer Ken Parkinson. His wife said that he had had a heart attack every year at the same time of year until the last one killed him.

Let's try to be rational about this. Could there have been some toxic substance in the tomb that caused death? It's possible. One explanation is that some strange virus, mould or bacteria evolved in there, ready to burst out and wreak havoc. A second possibility is that the ancient Egyptians were masters of poison and primed the tomb with toxic paints or powders. Or...

Perhaps the tomb was built out of radioactive material, delivering a lethal dose to grave robbers with the temerity to disturb it. All of these explanations have been attributed to scientists, but there are some obvious objections. Radiation is easily detected. If Tutankhamen's tomb was packed with plutonium, I think we'd know about it by now.

The epidemiologist F. de Wolff Miller recently told National Geographic that we don't know of even a single case of either an archaeologist or a tourist experiencing any negative consequences from either tomb moulds or bacteria. He added that given the sanitary conditions of the time in general, and those within Egypt in particular, Lord Carnarvon would likely have been safer in the tomb than outside.

Anyway, no toxin could explain all the mysterious deaths of all these different people across the decades. But something else might. Something as strange as any pharaonic curse. We'll find out more after the break.

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Let's move from the realm of ancient curses to the world of cutting-edge science. Cutting-edge, that is, from the perspective of 1784. We're in Paris, the febrile decade before the revolution and the guillotine. A strange cylinder of polished oak with nautical fittings, ropes, brass wheels and iron rods stands in front of us, in the centre of a room with an audience.

Poor souls, wretched invalids seeking healing, are brought in, firmly fastened to the cylinder by the ropes, then touch their diseased bodies to the iron rods. They're ready to be healed by the awesome scientific power of magnetism. To add to the sense of occasion, a glass harmonica, a strange instrument invented by Benjamin Franklin, plays eerie music.

A contemporary account describes how the patients would cough, spit, feel slight pain, a warmth either localised or all over, and perspire. Others are agitated by quick involuntary movements. These effects build over several hours with crescendos of screams, sobs, hysterical laughter, and of course, the harmonica.

The climax occurs with the appearance of the device's inventor, dressed in gold slippers and a silk robe, waving a wand and laying on hands, provoking yet more convulsions and hysterics. It's Franz Anton Mesmer, the man who gave us the word mesmerise.

Mesmer was a sensation in pre-revolutionary France. A seat at his magnetic device was the hottest ticket in Paris. The charge was steep, but there was no shortage of eager customers. Some were desperate for healing. Others were in it for the thrill and the ability to describe their experiences later in the salon. The queen herself, Marie Antoinette, was a follower of Mesmer.

So was a hero of the American Revolution, the Marquis de Lafayette. But while Mesmer himself claimed to be at the very forefront of scientific thought and practice, the scientific establishment was less impressed. Indeed, the Society of Medicine refused even to debunk his treatments, ignoring him completely. But Mesmeromania could not be ignored for long.

And soon the king demanded a proper investigation into this strange sorcerer scientist and his methods. That investigation would include France's finest scientists, led by a distinguished foreign authority, none other than Benjamin Franklin himself. Franklin's team conducted a test in which a patient sat in front of a closed door.

She was told that a noted mesmerist was behind it, performing his magnetic treatments. The investigators described the results. After three minutes, she stretched both arms behind her back, twisting them strongly and bending her body forward. Her whole body shook. The chatter of her teeth was so loud that it could be heard from outside. She bit her hand hard enough to leave teeth marks. The mesmerist, of course, wasn't there.

The entire effect was in her imagination. Other tests showed similar results. It seemed clear that mesmerism didn't work, which it didn't. But Benjamin Franklin was sharp enough to note an equally important fact. Even a completely phony cure can have powerful effects on the mind.

These patients were having convulsions caused only by their own belief in mesmerism. Franklin also guessed that if these beliefs were powerful enough to cause such reactions, they might also be powerful enough to do some good.

He wrote, "If these people can be persuaded to forbear their drugs in expectation of being cured by only the physician's finger or an iron rod pointing at them, they may possibly find good effects." And Franklin was right. As Shankar Vedantam and Bill Mesler note in their book Useful Delusions, what Franklin had observed is now called the placebo effect.

It's remarkably powerful. Researchers have found that not only do fake painkillers relieve pain, but fake expensive painkillers relieve pain more powerfully than fake cheap painkillers. Doctors have performed placebo knee surgeries, anaesthetic incisions but no actual surgery, and found beneficial effects. The placebo effect is potent. And so too is its evil twin,

The nocebo effect. Just as the placebo effect makes you feel better because you think you're being helped, the nocebo effect makes you feel worse because you think you're being harmed.

When a doctor says, "This is going to hurt," it is more likely to hurt. When you're given a drug or a vaccine shot and told about side effects, you're more likely to experience side effects. In clinical trials, people are often given a placebo, that is a harmless pill or injection that they think might be an actual drug.

It turns out that 5% of these people then drop out of the trial because they're experiencing what they think are side effects, ranging from pain to depression to heart disease. It's a nocebo response. A bad response to a fake pill. Could the nocebo effect help to explain some of the heart attacks reported to be caused by the curse of the pharaoh? It might.

I can't help but think of poor Ken Parkinson, the flight engineer who helped transport Tutankhamen's mask from Cairo to London in 1972, whose wife reported that he had a heart attack at the same time of year, year after year. Imagine what he must have been thinking after three or four years of that. It's the kind of thing that would cause some serious anxiety.

And that serious anxiety about a heart attack might turn out to be a self-fulfilling prophecy. So, maybe tomb toxins killed Lord Carnarvon. Maybe the nocebo effect gave Ken Parkinson repeated anxiety-induced heart attacks. Maybe. But there's another explanation for these eerie tales of the curse of the pharaohs.

Unlike tomb toxins, this explanation is everywhere. It's all around us. We can't possibly escape it. And to understand it, I want to tell you a very different kind of spooky story. Once upon a time, a man walked into a branch of Target near Minneapolis, furious, and demanded to see the manager.

He was brandishing a mailer that contained adverts for nursery furniture and maternity clothes, alongside lots of smiling babies. My daughter got this in the mail, he said. She's still in high school and you're sending her coupons for baby clothes and cribs? Are you trying to encourage her to get pregnant? The manager was rather confused and apologised. A few days later, he called to apologise again. Ah, about that...

said the no longer angry dad. I had a talk with my daughter. Turns out there's been some activities in my house I haven't been completely aware of. She's due in August. I owe you an apology. This story, related by Charles Duhigg in the New York Times magazine in 2012, is the modern version of the mummy's curse. It's no longer an ancient pharaoh who wields mysterious power over us,

It's an algorithm, analysing our shopping patterns, predicting what we'll do, where we'll go, what we'll desire, all powerful and subtly nudging us in the direction of corporate profit. Duhigg's story went viral, just as tales of the mummy's curse had been shared a century earlier. People were in awe of the way an algorithm could perceive a hidden truth that even this teenage girl's own family could not.

Well, perhaps. But while we're supposed to assume that everybody who received one of those mailers was a pregnant woman, there's no evidence in the story for that assumption. What if Target sent the same mailer to every woman under the age of 45? What if Target sent coupons to absolutely everyone?

Maybe they did. From the perspective of the angry dad and the pregnant daughter, the algorithm would seem just as eerily good. What's going on here is what a statistician would call selection bias. It's ubiquitous, and while it's easy to understand, it's often hard to solve.

I can name far more rich actors than poor ones, and far more professional footballers than amateur ones, but that doesn't mean most actors are rich and most footballers are professional. So how many non-pregnant people received coupons? I've no idea.

But I do know that if Target sends you some maternity coupons but you're not pregnant, you're probably not going to bother mentioning that to anyone, let alone mentioning it to the New York Times magazine. You see? Selection bias. It's everywhere. But could selection bias have shaped the way we perceive the curse of the pharaoh? We'll find out after the break.

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Lord Carnarvon died not long after he entered Tutankhamen's tomb. It's a striking coincidence, if indeed it is a coincidence. But to understand where the selection bias might be at play, we need to ask how many others have been involved in such excavations.

And what does it even mean to be involved? The mysterious logic of mummy's curse stories casts the net wide. A British diplomat assassinated 500 miles away from the tomb and two years after it was opened. Does that really count?

Or remember the young boy whose connection to Tutankhamen was that he was unfortunate enough to be in the path of the hearse of the father of the secretary of Lord Carnarvon six years after the excavation? If the pharaoh's curse can be blamed for such deaths, we could draw plausible lines of connection to countless thousands of people around the periphery of the original dig. To analyse this rationally...

We need to compare the fates of people associated with the excavation of the tomb with those who are not associated. An epidemiologist named Mark Nelson has published a serious attempt at this analysis. It was published in the British Medical Journal. Dr Nelson looked at 44 Westerners identified by Howard Carter as being in Egypt during the dig.

25 of them were potentially exposed to a curse by visiting the tomb. 19 did not visit. He found scant evidence of any curse. On average, people lived for another 20 years after visiting the tomb.

Howard Carter survived 17 years, slightly below the average, so it's not true that he died quickly, nor is it true that his accursed fate was to live to see all his friends succumb. The only hint of a curse that Dr Nelson found was that the average age of tomb visitors at death was a little younger than the average age at death of the companions who didn't visit.

However, these companions were often the wives of the excavators and women do tend to live longer than men. In any case, even the people who visited the tomb lived on average until they were over 70. It's not exactly the stuff of nightmares. Lord Carnarvon did die before his time, but in an age before antibiotics, such things happened.

He nicked that mosquito bite while shaving. The cut became infected and he developed pneumonia. It's an unusual way to die, but not a mysterious one. Still, there is one final reckoning.

What of the prophetic warnings that Carnarvon would die within six weeks? What of his dog? What of the lights going out all over Cairo? And what of one final chilling detail? That the wound which killed Carnarvon was in the same spot as a mark on the cheek of King Tutankhamen himself? The rather underwhelming explanation for some of these stories is that they aren't true.

Remember that long before Howard Carter gazed upon the mask of Tutankhamen or Lord Carnarvon succumbed to pneumonia, Edwardians had told each other ghost stories. And no ghost story was more popular than a tale of the mummy's curse.

Such tales sold newspapers. Given that most of the newspapers had been shut out by the London Times' exclusive deal with Carnarvon, what else would they print? Journalists made up spooky stories, and the best such stories lived on. The man who claimed he'd given Carnarvon six weeks to live, six weeks before he died, was writing for a rival newspaper. He only published the details of his prophecy several months after Carnarvon's death.

The Daily Express reported that the lights went out in the hotel when Lord Carnarvon died. Perhaps they did. It would hardly be astonishing to have a power cut in Cairo in 1923, but the timing was probably less uncanny. Otherwise, other newspapers might also have mentioned it. The haunting detail about the wound on Tutankhamen's cheek was published only in the Daily Mail.

Modern examinations of the mummy mention no such wound. Lord Carnarvon's dog? Howard Carter's canary?

Roger Luckhurst, author of The Mummy's Curse, points out that all these tales are second-hand or third-hand accounts, newspapers reporting hearsay about hearsay. What about the pioneering radiologist, Sir Archibald Douglas Reid, said to have x-rayed the sarcophagus and then to have died of a mysterious illness? His mysterious illness wasn't mysterious at all. He had cancer.

one of the hazards of being a radiologist in those days, and it seems unlikely that he ever x-rayed the sarcophagus. He was too ill to be in Egypt. He was convalescing in Switzerland before he died. The mysterious portent of the Black Jackal of Anubis seen by Howard Carter? It happened, but it wasn't a portent. Carter's diary entry records the Black Jackal in May 1926.

Several years after Carnarvon's death, and many years before Carter's, that rather spoils the story of its potency, doesn't it? No wonder it was the inaccurate version that caught on. And what about Count Haman, the man who warned Carnarvon that death would claim him in Egypt? Well, maybe.

Count Haman, who was not a count, also claimed to have warned trophy hunters not to remove the unlucky mummy from Egypt. Since the unlucky mummy left Egypt when Haman was about three years old, this seems implausible. Ah yes, the unlucky mummy. Or, more precisely, the coffin case of the Princess of Amun-Ra. I'd almost forgotten that older tale.

The one which predates the discovery of the tomb of Tutankhamen. The one which ends with a coffin case sinking with the Titanic. It is quite the story, but it is just a story. And one which endlessly mutates. One man who had indeed lost his arm in a shooting accident used to tell it in the 1890s and early 1900s.

He was president of the Ghost Club, at which gentlemen would meet for dinner and frighten each other out of their wits. But there was no shooting accident in his telling of the tale. It was only after he died that others retrofitted that detail to the story. Another "brother ghost", one of the members of the Ghost Club, died on the Titanic. His fate too was woven into the story.

And so the tale grew and grew, despite specific point-by-point rebuttals from the increasingly exasperated curator of the Egyptian room in the British Museum. But unlike my cautionary tales, the story of the unlucky coffin case just isn't true. The case wasn't on the Titanic.

We know that because we have the doomed liner's cargo manifest. It's exhaustive and it lists no Egyptian artefacts. And there is one final reason I'm confident that the coffin case of the unknown priestess of Amun-Ra did not sync with the Titanic. It's that it never left the British Museum. It's exhibit number EA 22542. I know because I just went into the museum and had a look.

Despite everything I've argued, I'll admit I was nervous. But I stood in front of the coffin and now I'm on my way home, safe from the curse of the mummy. Key sources for this episode include Roger Luckhurst's book, The Mummy's Curse, Christopher Turner's article, Mesmeromania, The British Medical Journal, and Snopes. For a full list of our sources, see the show notes at timharford.com.

Cautionary Tales is written by me, Tim Harford, with Andrew Wright. It's produced by Ryan Dilley and Marilyn Rust. The sound design and original music is the work of Pascal Wise. This show wouldn't have been possible without the work of Mia LaBelle, Jacob Weisberg, Heather Fane, Julia Barton, John Schnarz, Carly Migliore, Eric Sandler, Maggie Taylor, Aniela Lacan, and Maya Koenig.

Cautionary Tales is a production of Pushkin Industries. If you like the show, please remember to rate, share and review.

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