7 Terrifying Monsters That Are (Sort Of) Definitely Real
6. Cursed Mummies
While theres nothing more ridiculous on Halloween than seeing someone meander down the street wrapped up in three rolls of Andrex, real life mummies are not to be scoffed at. The most famous one of all, the boy king Tutankhamun, had apparently put measures in place to stop anyone fiddling around with his rather extravagant burial place (housing treasures now insured for £430 million). The tomb was excavated by Howard Carter and Lord Carnarvon in 1922 and rumours quickly circulated that the site was cursed by the Ancient Egyptian priests who buried Tut.
While some people, including Carter himself, mocked the idea, the excavation seemingly resulted in a number of mysterious deaths. The first and perhaps most unexpected victim of King Tuts curse was a canary belonging to Carter. Upon returning home on the night that the tomb door had been uncovered, he found that the helpless bird had been killed by a cobra (a symbol of Egyptian royalty) that had got into its cage. Unfortunately, the canary was only the first of many to allegedly suffer at the hands of the Pharaohs curse.
Six weeks after the tomb was opened, Lord Carnarvon accidentally slashed a mosquito bite with his razor whilst shaving. The bite soon became infected and he eventually succumbed to blood poisoning. Some reports claim that as he slipped away, all the lights in Cairo went off in a huge power outage. Carnarvons son who was back in England also claimed that, at the moment of his fathers death, the family dog began to howl uncontrollably and then also passed away. Stranger still were the reports that an autopsy carried out on the mummy showed a scar on Tutankhamuns cheek in the same place where Carnarvon had been bitten.
A number of others who went to see the tomb soon met their demise in unexpected ways not long after its discovery. Egyptian Prince Ali Kamel Fahmy Bey visited the site and was subsequently shot dead by his wife. Arthur Mace died of arsenic poisoning following his work as part of the excavation team. Richard Bethell, the Baron of Westbury and father of Carters secretary, visited the tomb only to later commit suicide by leaping from a seventh floor window.
All in all, by 1930 the deaths of eleven people (and one canary) were attributed to the opening of the tomb but, to be fair to Tut, if you cant sleep when youre dead, when can you? I mean, its bad enough being woken before 10am on a Sunday, let alone being dug up and stuck in a museum after death.