Cursed mummies are common in the lore. Take the mummy of Nesmin, whose British buyer was trampled to death by an elephant. Or Khentika Ikhekhi, a vizier whose tomb contains a warning that he will rise and strangle anybody who defiles it. But the mummy whose curse is the subject of this entry is weirder than most cursed mummies. Because it’s not actually a mummy. It’s a…lid. Granted, that lid belongs to the coffin of a mummified priestess, but it’s still a lid. Mummy board is the technical term. And the name of this mummy board is the Unlucky Mummy. Seriously. That’s the exact name that appears in the British Museum catalog.
The Unlucky Mummy is about five feet long and is shaped and painted like the woman it once covered. She’s depicted with dark hair that falls down to her shoulders. Her arms are crossed, with her hands held out flat like she’s making butterfly wings with them. She’s covered in colorful patterns and repeating images of people and gods and insects and animals. She doesn’t look malevolent. She looks mildly peaceful with her lot in death. She is an image of a priestess of Amen-Ra who lived about three thousand years ago, during the Twenty-first Dynasty of Egypt. But the mummy priestess that this board shaded in death has long since disappeared to history.
Even without counting a massive ocean liner and a world war, this ancient Egyptian artifact with a name like a children’s picture book title is supposed to have inflicted death and disaster upon an uncounted number of British citizens, starting with the group of four Oxford graduates who picked it up in 1868 during a trip to Dayr el Bahree in Egypt. Two are said to have died on the trip. A third, Thomas Douglas Murray, had his arm amputated after accidentally shooting himself while quail hunting in Cairo. The fourth, Arthur Wheeler, was the only member of the party to make it back unscathed…until he lost his fortune, twice. Wheeler eventually became the sole owner of the mummy board. After it made it to England, a photographer died after photographing it, as did a porter after carrying it, and a translator of the board’s hieroglyphs shot himself after trying to solve its secrets.
The one-armed Murray is likely the original source of most of these claims. Murray made frequent visits to Egypt in the 1860s and was a member of the Ghost Club, a spiritualist society whose members would weave ghost stories into their pipe smoke. He shared the tale of the cursed lid with his fellow members on multiple occasions, and eventually the story made it into the newspapers with big bold headlines. He lived to the age of seventy, telling paranormal stories and helping introduce the Western world to the Pekingese dog breed.
Eventually, the Unlucky Mummy arrived at the most prestigious place for an ancient Egyptian artifact in England — the British Museum. Once there, in the public eye, its bloody provenance really got people talking, especially after a journalist named Bertram Fletcher Robinson wrote a front-page article on the board in the Daily Express in 1904, calling the painted piece of wood and plaster the “Priestess of Death.” It was a much better moniker than Unlucky Mummy, but the nickname didn’t stick. For his trouble, Robinson died three years after writing about the mummy board.
Deaths were continuously attributed to the Unlucky Mummy. For a while, you couldn’t die in England without your survivors wondering if your trip to the British Museum had caused it. And those rumors gradually expanded so that anything unfortunate happening anywhere in England was traced to the Unlucky Mummy…like the voyage of the Titanic, which picked up its doomed passengers in Southampton.
There are a few stories about the Titanic transporting a secret mummy in its hold. In the version featuring the Unlucky Mummy, it’s there because the British Museum had tired of losing so many staff and visitors to the curse and got rid of the item by selling it to a museum or rich collector in America. Yet, somehow, the Unlucky Mummy was lucky enough to survive the sinking of the Titanic. The cursed object supposedly arrived in America in 1912, where it immediately began causing havoc and was therefore returned to its sender two years later. The ship that returned it was the RMS Empress of Ireland, which also sank, after colliding with the SS Storstad in the Saint Lawrence River in Quebec, killing more than one thousand people.
But three ships full of the wet dead can’t hold a prayer candle to the casualties of World War I. The Unlucky Mummy was recovered again out of the Canadian drink, and this time it was sold to a German who presented it to Kaiser Wilhelm II, the last German emperor. Then a globe-encompassing war ensued, which had never happened in the history of the planet until the Unlucky Mummy came to Britain.
However, none of these globe-trotting and seafaring tales are true. During all the time when the Unlucky Mummy was supposed to be in ship holds, at the bottom of oceans and rivers, and in Germany, this cursed object in fact stayed dry and behind glass at the British Museum. It only left English soil a few times, and that was after 1990, when it joined exhibitions in countries that had little regard for the damage it was rumored to cause.
Today, the Unlucky Mummy is still on display in the British Museum, among all the Egyptian treasures that make it one of the best collections of Egyptian antiquities in the world. In fact, it’s surrounded by many complete mummy coffins and actual mummies and other spooky artifacts that seem much more worthy of being cursed.
Heck, it’s even easy to miss. You can walk through the entire exhibit, taking pictures of everything that seems eye-catching or noteworthy…and still completely miss her amid all the other mummy boards in the vast collection.
Which is fine. Because, hopefully, that means she’ll miss you, too.
The Ring of Silvianus
PLACE OF ORIGIN:
SILCHESTER, HAMPSHIRE, ENGLAND
YEAR OF DISCOVERY:
1785
AGE:
1,700 YEARS
CURRENT LOCATION:
THE VYNE, SHERBORNE ST. JOHN, ENGLAND
If you’re a farmer in Great Britain, you’re used to turning up museum-quality stuff when you plough through the dirt. Maybe a coin from when the Roman Empire ruled the land. Or a buckle dropped by a questing knight during the medieval period. Perhaps a small Celtic blade used in some dark and mysterious druid ceremony. After all, you’re planting crops atop a small island whose rich history spans millennia.
In 1785, while working in his fields in Silchester, Hampshire, a farmer did just this and found a gold ring, one that would turn out to be a cursed gold ring — a cursed gold ring that would inspire the ultimate cursed gold ring.
The artifact was a large signet ring bearing the concave image of the goddess Venus on its bezel. The band had ten subtle facets, like a worn lug nut. Engraved into the outside of the band were letters spelling out the Latin phrase “SENICIANE VIVAS IIN DE” backward, so that when pressed into wax the phrase could be read from left to right as, “Senicianus live well in God.” Although the phrase was misspelled, like whoever had it engraved was in a hurry. Turns out, he might have been running from a curse.