by John Pinkney
Several weeks later Kurt Fritz, the mountaineer who had guided Dr Henn to the Iceman’s body, died in an avalanche. Fritz, an experienced climber who had known the region all his life, was the only member of his party to be struck by the flying rocks. He had been the first person to lift Oetzi’s head and to see the soon-to-be-famous grimace. He had later given tours to the site.
Next purported victim was Rainer Holz, 47, the Austrian journalist who exclusively filmed the cadaver’s removal from the ice-cocoon. Holz wove the footage into an hour-long documentary shown around the world. Several months later he died of a brain tumour.
Helmut Simon, the retired Nuremberg caretaker who, with his wife Erika, had found the Iceman, subsequently ventured alone on a second hiking trip, 150 kilometres from Oetzi’s tomb. When he did not return, an Austrian rescue team went out and found him lying dead at the bottom of a 90-metre crevasse. His body (like Oetzi’s before him) was frozen in the ice and had to be removed with picks and a drill. The rescuers assumed Simon had lost his way during a freak blizzard that struck the area days earlier.
Erika Simon subsequently revealed that her husband had returned to the area to celebrate winning a court case, entitling them to a $140,000 Italian government ‘finder’s fee’ for discovering Oetzi’s body. But because Helmut had not signed the court papers, his widow received no money. The judge had earlier dismissed a Slovenian woman’s claim that she saw the Iceman first. She said she had spat on the corpse to mark the discovery with her DNA.
Dieter Warnecke led the mountain rescue team which found Helmut Simon’s body. Less than one hour after Simon was buried, Warnecke died of a heart attack. He was not known to have cardiac problems.
Professor Bernardino Bagolini, an Italian archaeologist who had specialised in studying the Iceman, visited his mother’s grave on the first anniversary of her death. The following morning he suffered a fatal cardiac arrest.
Professor Friedrich Tiefenbrunner of Innsbruck worked at close quarters with the mummy for several years, perfecting a way of protecting it from fungal and bacterial attack. He died during open-heart surgery in January 2005.
Head of the team to which Tiefenbrunner belonged was a fellow-Austrian, archaeologist Konrad Spindler, who was regarded as the leading expert on the 5300-year-old cadaver. He had often dismissed journalists’ questions about a continuing jinx as sensationalism, declaring on one occasion, ‘It’s all media hype. The next thing you’ll be saying is I’ll be next.’ Spindler died in April 2005 of complications arising from multiple sclerosis.
‘Victim’ Number Nine, Californian-born Dr Tom Loy, gained his PhD from the Australian National University before joining the University of Queensland in 1995. He headed a team of molecular biologists which minutely studied the Iceman’s body, his clothing and weapons, and his ancient DNA. Dr Loy won regard as an international expert on Oetzi after he and his colleagues identified four different types of blood on the hunter’s clothes - and were able to formulate a persuasive theory explaining how he perished. In 2004 Tom Loy told the ABC’s Science Show, ‘He shot somebody or two somebodies at different times. He retrieved his arrow and then, the last time he shot it he missed. He might have had a partner who was wounded and was helping him away.’
When he died of unknown causes, Dr Loy had almost completed a book on the Iceman. The manuscript answered many questions about the long-dead hunter’s bitter and perilous life.
But there was one question it did not address.
Could it be that that when Oetzi’s ice crypt was destroyed, some dark form of consciousness stirred in its immemorial inhabitant? And might that consciousness somehow have reached out to create a trail of vengeance and death?
Did a Furious Pharaoh Sabotage
BBC Film?
Iceman Oetzi was not, of course, the first mummy to be accused of wreaking havoc from beyond the grave.
Early last century, 24 deaths occurred among the archaeologists and other workers who had helped open the tomb of boy-Pharaoh Tutankhamun. The eerie and often fatal ‘coincidences’ continued to resonate across subsequent decades.
One sinister example of what a newspaper called ‘Tut’s troublemaking’ occurred in 1992 when Professor Christopher Frayling made a BBC documentary, The Face of Tutankhamun. After days spent filming in the pharaoh’s desecrated burial vault, Frayling and producer David Wallace almost died when the cable of their hotel lift snapped - sending them plunging 21 floors to the basement.
Later the lights fused inside the tomb, leaving two crew members stranded on a platform in pitch-darkness. In an attempt to rebuild morale a well-meaning associate director persuaded the unit workers to re-enact a play intended to raise friendly departed spirits. Instead most of the crew were blinded by a sudden violent sandstorm which left them with severe conjunctivitis. After the film unit returned to Britain a sealed canister containing the print arrived at the BBC from an Egyptian laboratory. Mysteriously the canister was covered in fresh earth.
Frayling, Professor of Cultural History at the Royal College of Art, was interviewed by the TV program Today (17 November 1992). ‘I was extremely sceptical when I went out to Egypt,’ he said. ‘But now I’m not so sure. I know this sounds like hype, but I promise you that I don’t come from the sort of academic background where we get involved in hysteria.’
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Pharaoh Tutankhamun was born around 1367 BC and ascended the throne at age nine. He died - possibly from infection in a broken leg - eight years later and was mummified and entombed in secret splendour in the Valley of the Kings.
Enclosed within the mummy’s wrappings were 143 charms and amulets to ward off evil spirits and repel sacrilegious tomb-raiders.
Tutankhamun’s concealed remains lay in silent, impenetrable darkness for more than 3000 years. Then, on a distant island which had been home to primitive tribes in Tut’s lifetime, Lord Carnarvon, a rich Egyptologist, decided to mount a search for the burial chamber. Convinced he would find it in Luxor he spent five years studying old records and digging, but without success. Finally he entrusted the task to the British archaeologist Howard Carter, who, toward the end of 1922, enjoyed a stroke of what he modestly called ‘unbelievable luck’. A member of Carter’s digging team literally stumbled upon a step carved into rock beneath the debris of an ancient structure.
Pharaoh Tutankhamun: torn from stygian darkness after 30 centuries.
Carter’s men excavated the site and found a flight of stairs leading to a doorway. On it, hieroglyphically carved, was the name TUTANKHAMUN. Overwhelmed, Carter immediately conveyed the news to his patron, who immediately cancelled all commitments and travelled post-haste to Luxor.
On 26 November 1922 Lord Carnarvon and Howard Carter knelt peering through a hole their men had made in the sealed doorway. Before them, in the powerful light of their lanterns, lay a breathtaking display of antique riches: a golden throne inlaid with precious stones, gilded chariots, ornamental caskets and alabaster vases. And when they managed to enter this mere anteroom they discovered beyond it a chamber in which stood a stone sarcophagus containing three nesting golden coffins, the inner one housing the mummy of Tutankhamun.
Sacred beasts, birds and reptiles guarded the pharaoh’s lavish tomb.
In his diary Carter wrote, ‘It was a sight surpassing all precedent.’
According to contemporary newspaper reports (possibly embellished), Howard Carter returned to his hotel that night to hear that a cobra had swallowed his pet canary. The terrified manservant warned that by interrupting the pharaoh’s long sleep, Carter had unleashed a deadly curse and should leave Egypt without delay. A cobra and a vulture were the pharaoh’s magical guardians, the servant correctly asserted. (Both, in fact, can be found on Tut’s ceremonial headgear.)
Carter was saddened by his bird’s demise, but had no time for superstition. He grew even more impatient the following day when he returned to the dig to find that many of the native workmen had fled. They had learned, a trusted associa
te told him, that the tomb’s exterior was inscribed with a terrible curse:
DEATH SHALL COME ON SWIFT WINGS
TO HE WHO DISTURBS
THE PEACE OF THE KING.
Pharaoh Tut’s alleged threat swiftly found its way into international headlines - and can still be found today in numerous histories of the excavation. But, in fact, no such inscription was ever discovered. The only ‘warning’ remotely close to it can be found on the Anubis shrine: a carved jackal on a pedestal, whose hieroglyph reads:
IT IS I WHO HINDER THE SAND FROM
CHOKING THE SECRET CHAMBER.
I AM FOR THE PROTECTION OF THE DECEASED.
But there are many unsettling facts in the Tutankhamun case on which sceptics and ‘curse’-believers agree:
Of the original tomb-raiders only the discoverer, Howard Carter, and a minor member of the party, Richard Adamson, survived into old age. Carter died in 1939 of natural causes.
Two weeks after the tomb’s official opening, Lord Carnarvon was bitten by a mosquito at his hotel. Next morning he cut the bite while shaving, and it became infected. His resistance lowered, he succumbed to pneumonia and died. Official records show that at the moment of his demise the lights went out in Cairo. And there was a second matching of events. Relatives in distant London testified that they were perplexed when Carnarvon’s pet dog Susie suddenly began to howl pitifully, in an unprecedented way. Not until the news, and hour, of Carnarvon’s end reached them did they realise that the dog had keened at the time of her master’s passing. Susie herself died several hours later.
Shortly after Lord Carnarvon’s funeral a blemish was found on the Tut mummy’s cheek. It mirrored the position of the mosquito bite on Carnarvon’s face.
In the fortnight following Lord Carnarvon’s death, expedition member Arthur Mace fell into a coma and died, puzzling his doctors.
Antiquarian George Gould travelled to Egypt after learning of his friend Carnarvon’s fate. Before leaving he visited the pharaoh’s tomb. Next day he collapsed with a high fever - and 12 hours later was dead.
Archibald Reid, the radiologist who used X-rays to determine Tutankhamun’s possible cause of death, was struck down by a condition doctors could not diagnose. He sailed back to England and died soon after disembarking.
Richard Bethell, who had been Carnarvon’s secretary, died of heart failure four months after the tomb was opened.
British industrialist Joel Wood visited the tomb and was dead weeks later, following an unidentifiable illness.
Theorists produced elaborate scenarios to explain these events. Perhaps, they surmised, the unsealing of the tomb had released lethal spores which entered the lungs of certain excavators and visitors. Or possibly, later speculation suggested, the burial chamber’s floors were covered with a radioactive substance…But no evidence of spores, tomb viruses or uranium has ever been discovered.
As decades passed, Pharaoh Tut remained fresh in the public’s memory - largely because people associated with him kept dying or suffering inexplicable injuries.
In 1966 Mohammad Ibrahim, Egypt’s Director of Antiquities, warned his government not to allow Tut and his tomb’s treasures to tour abroad. ‘I have experienced terrible nightmares about what will happen if they leave our country,’ he said. On a bright, cloudless day Ibrahim left a final meeting and stepped out onto a quiet road. A car struck and killed him.
Ibrahim’s successor Dr Gamal Mehrez told a press conference that it was ‘ridiculous’ to blame a pharaoh’s curse for a road accident. ‘I’ve spent my entire life in Egyptology - and I can assure you that all the deaths and misfortunes over the years have been pure coincidence,’ he said. ‘Tutankhamun has been deceased for a long time and he has no ability to influence the course of our 20th century lives.’ In 1972 Mehrez signed papers authorising the removal of Tut’s golden mask from Cairo Museum so that it could be sent to London to appear in a Pharaoh’s Treasures exhibition. ‘I’m in charge and I don’t have the slightest fear,’ Mehrez told a media conference. On 3 February, the day the golden mask was flown out of Egypt, Mehrez died.
An RAF transport command plane flew the pharaoh’s mask to London. Over the next five years six members of the plane’s crew died or experienced severe misfortune. The trouble began on the initial flight when technical officer Ian Landsdowne playfully kicked the crate containing the mask. Shortly after arriving back in England he broke the ‘offending’ leg. The transport aircraft’s navigator Jim Webb lost all his possessions in a fire. Sergeant Brian Rounsfall suffered two heart attacks. Chief pilot Rick Laurie and engineer Ken Parkinson had passed many stringent fitness tests for the RAF. But in the wake of the Tutankhamun trip they were assigned to ground duties. The reason: they began having regular cardiac arrests - always on the anniversary of the golden mask flight.
Richard Adamson, sole survivor of the British expedition that found the boy-pharaoh, had long been strident in his belief that there was no curse. In March 1970 he appeared on BBC TV to explode the myth yet again. He did admit to the interviewer that, within 48 hours of his previous debunking of the jinx, several ‘unpleasant coincidences’ had occurred - one being his wife’s death, which was followed by a car accident in which his son broke his back. In this latest interview Adamson stuck to his sceptical guns. But soon after he climbed into a cab outside the TV studios it crashed. A week later, recovering in hospital from head injuries, Adamson conceded to reporters that he was ‘now having second thoughts’.
More than 85 years have passed since Tutankhamun was torn from the tranquillity and darkness in which he lay for millennia. Since then, like Oetzi the Iceman, he has seldom been left alone. On 6 January 2005 the noise, chatter and harsh lights surrounded him yet again. An officially sanctioned team of specialists had brought the mummy to Luxor for a high-tech CAT (computer tomography) scan, intended to produce three-dimensional images of the pharaoh’s much-studied remains.
At the end of a disturbing day the scan’s supervisor, Egyptologist Zawi Hawass, remarked to journalists, After the incidents of the past few hours I think we should still believe in the legendary curse of the pharaohs.’
En route to the site one researcher’s car had run out of control, narrowly missing a child. Then a gigantic windstorm blew up in the Valley of the Kings, delaying the expedition. When the party eventually reached Luxor, the usually reliable CAT scanner malfunctioned for two hours. And as soon as computer specialists had it taking pictures of the pharaoh again, one Egyptologist developed a coughing fit so violent that he had to leave.
Zawi Hawass commented, ‘It’s easy, if you’re not in this specialist field, to dismiss such occurrences as random and meaningless incidents. But when, as I have, you have excavated numerous tombs and removed many mummies from sarcophagi, you learn that strange events will reliably happen in those places…events sometimes beyond rational explanation.’
A Jinxed Ship’s Gruesome Secret
The British iron steamer Leviathan, later renamed the Great Eastern, was publicised as the biggest ship ever built. She was also the unluckiest.
As her tally of deaths and hideous injuries multiplied the owners were obliged to offer ever-steeper wages to tempt sailors aboard. But for many, a single voyage was enough. Not only was there the ‘curse’ to cope with, involving at least one major mishap every time she went to sea, there were also the ghosts.
Great Eastern, as she was known for most of her disaster-ridden life, was designed by the renowned English engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel. Standing 163 centimetres in raised boots, he was known for the grandiose nature of his creations - but his investors were excited by the rewards he had promised them this time. His towering sail, steam and paddle vessel - five times the size of any ship afloat - was to be used as a lucrative passenger and mail service linking Britain with India, China and Australia. It would carry such enormous stockpiles of fuel that there would be no need for coaling stops en route. Everyone associated with the ship and her yet-to-be-bui
lt mega-sisters would become rich.
The newly popular travel agents were not exaggerating when they called Great Eastern ‘the wonder of the sea’. But she wasn’t at sea yet.
Brunel announced that he would launch his vessel on 3 November 1857. More than 150,000 Londoners converged on the Isle of Dogs to enjoy the spectacle. Equipped with picnic hampers they were prepared to wait patiently. The Times that morning had predicted that pushing the massive craft down into the river would ‘probably occupy eight to 10 hours’. It was an underestimate.
An early painting of the Great Eastern under sail.
Standing in his supervising tower the top-hatted and nervous Brunel signalled with a white flag for the securing lines to be released. The crowd fell breathlessly silent - a hush that was broken by cacophony as the vast hull began slowly to move down the slipways toward the water. After less than six inches she stopped. But the tiny movement had been enough to place intolerable pressure on the chains.
The windlass collapsed under the strain, its massive handles spinning out of control. To the crowd’s horror four labourers were hurled aside and slammed into the wheelhouse, their bones exploding from the skin of shattered legs and arms. A fifth man was catapulted into the air and fell back into the machinery, which tore his head from his body.
Brunel, cheeks glistening with tears, called off the launching.
Over the following weeks (with gawking spectators kept clear) he tried six times more to launch the vessel he regarded as his masterpiece. But each time the giantess mulishly resisted all attempts to move her forward.