What Is The Mummy’s Curse?

The Mummy’s Curse

London is full of ghosts, but the best supernatural story in Bloomsbury concerns a mummy’s curse.

On the first floor of the British Museum are various rooms devoted to artefacts from ancient Egypt.

There are several mummies and sarcophagi on display, but the one in question is numbered EA 22542 and is in Room 62.

The mummy case was found at Thebes and can be dated by its shape and the style of its decoration to the late 21st or early 22nd Dynasty — about 950 to 900 BC

It is listed as a mummy case for an unknown singer to the god Amon Ra. The case is covered in hieroglyphs and has a portrait of a very beautiful young girl.

The mummy clearly had a long history before being found by Europeans, but the weirdness associated with it begins in the 1880s.

It is said that a group of English tourists in Egypt bought the mummy case in Thebes from a local trader. This trader didn’t say where he’d got it — but grave robbing was very common in those times to supply demand from Westerners keen to have something of Egypt’s history.

The holy mummia was a powerful medicine and those in search of healing would eat the dried mummy flesh. By the 16th Century in Europe, mummia or ground up mummy flesh was…