Still its brilliant colors attract most careless visitors and anyone can hear all about its malignant power by approaching tactfully the nearest of the museum’s attendants.
If I remember correctly one officer aboard the HMS Hampshire was said to carry a memento from the mummy when it sunk in the North Sea, killing all aboard (including Lord Kitchener).
The recent piece about Learmouth Garden brought back to me all those ideas about the occult powers of the ancient Egyptians and particularly how dangerous it is to disturb their dead. The so called ‘Tutankhamen’s Curse’ is the most famous but there’s another less known stories related by none other than Sir Ernest Wallis Budge, world-famous Egyptologist and British Museum Keeper which gave London perhaps the best collection of Middle Eastern antiquities in the world.
Not all Americans were so skeptical. The following was printed in the American Photography paper by the camera club of New York (Volume 4, 1910):
The curse of the malign mummy was not taken altogether seriously in some quarters: First there is the wonderful news, all freshly dished up, of that deadly mummy case in the British Museum. I have already written twice about it, and anyone who fancies chancing his luck by examining it will find it in the corner reached by turning sharp to the left on entering the last of the Egyptian rooms. By its side is the famous photograph of it. You will remember that the photographer, or his aunt or his cat, or somebody or something, died afterwards. This shows the rash folly of photographing anything. No one can dispute the statement that large numbers of people who have taken photographs have subsequently expired. We cannot be too careful. Anyone who exposes a plate on a mummy-case will certainly die after it.
Chapter 4
The Last Train Standing...
The history of the pharaoh’s curse in the Western world takes an altogether more modern twist in the late 18th century with the building of British Museum station in Bury Place, which then sat between Tottenham Court Road and Chancery Lane underground stations on the then Central London Railway (CLR), now the Central line. The family of Benjamin Brown, one of a number of labourers working on the building of the station and the underground tunnel system, contacted me after a talk I presented in London in 2008. They told me an incredible tale that had remained within the family ever since the incidents took place. This is the first time the story has been printed. It is hard to imagine the abysmal conditions for workers during construction of the underground railway network. The dust-filled air, lack of natural lighting and the foul smell from the unsanitary working environment was enough to make the hardiest of souls extremely ill. These were just a few of the issues facing this workforce on a daily basis. In late 1899, as the British Museum station was nearing completion, some of the labourers working there reported strange noises echoing through the tunnels, sounding like distressed humans, calling for help. Dismissing it as distorted natural sound from the surface, the men continued working. Within moments the sound grew louder, becoming clearer and turning into shrill, screeching screams. One of the men was so disturbed by the sound that he downed tools and walked into the darkness of a tunnel. The rest of his crew stopped work and stood waiting for their colleague to return. Once the man had entered the tunnel, the screaming stopped and all was quiet. Suddenly the platform and station area was filled with a cacophony of loud screams, which seemed to rush out of a tunnel as though pressure was being released. The five men clamped their hands over their ears in an attempt to silence the noise, which persisted for several minutes before suddenly stopping. Terrified, the men began shouting for their colleague, who was nowhere to be seen. Finally, after about fifteen minutes he emerged from the tunnel. His face was ashen and his eyes, wide open, stared directly in front of him. His hair had turned entirely white. The men sat him down, gave him water and tried to calm his frantic breathing. For a few moments the man could not speak, but he soon recovered sufficiently to describe what had happened in the tunnel.
The screaming had got louder the further into the tunnel he walked, until he saw a figure standing on the rail track in front of him. The image was blurred and appeared to be floating in mid-air! As he drew closer he saw it was a man wearing a golden headdress, which he described as being like a crown, but taller. The headdress seemed to be alive; it was coiled around the man’s head and was moving very much like a snake. The man moved towards him: he had no eyes, just dark holes where his eyes once were, and his face was pale and white. The worker was transfixed as the figure moved closer to him: its hands outstretched and its long, bony fingers curled. Behind it he saw a procession of ghost-like apparitions in long flowing gowns, some wearing gold jewellery. The men looked as though they were slaves. The first apparition stopped a few feet before him and turned to face its followers. It addressed them in a foreign tongue and they stopped and looked at the lead figure. Suddenly the figure raised its left hand and held aloft the head of a large black dog, with blood dripping from it. The followers fell to their knees and began to chant some kind of mystical incantation, which the worker felt to be a prayer.
Unable to move or speak, the man watched as the lead figure removed its headdress, which had turned into a writhing snake, before pulling the bloodied dog’s head over his own and snarling and roaring! Without warning a scream like that of a thousand cursed women began to fill the tunnel. The worker felt pain in his eardrums, which had started to bleed, but being unable to move he could do nothing to dampen the noise. The crowd of followers rose as one and disappeared before him, and the sound of the screaming moved past him and beyond towards the station platform area, leaving just him and the dog-headed being in the tunnel. The being moved slowly towards him until it was no more than a few inches from his face. He could smell the scent of death on its breath as it confronted him. Its eyes were black and like red-hot pokers searing into his own. Feeling he could move, he raised his hands to touch the head and try to remove it from the being, since part of him believed it was tomfoolery and he wanted to reveal the culprit. As he lifted his hands to the snout of the being, it snarled at him, its top lip revealing blood-stained teeth and fangs. The worker pulled at the head but it was fused to the human body it now sat upon. It moved forward, causing him to fall backwards, whereupon it sat on his chest. The hands, which had once been human, were now sharp claws. He knew he was about to die. As the figure looked down towards his heart he closed his eyes and began to pray for forgiveness for all of his sins. Moments later the figure was gone. It disappeared into thin air, allowing him to leave the tunnel and return to his colleagues. The man had no idea his hair had turned white, nor that he looked like a living corpse. He was taken to the surface and told to go home and rest.
Many of those who heard the story dismissed it as the product of exhaustion. Long hours in claustrophobic conditions could have caused the worker’s mind to wander and his imagination to run riot. A few days later he was found dead in his East London home: he had hanged himself. He left a note explaining that he felt cursed by the souls of those murdered and left in the desert sands. No one understood the true meaning of the suicide note, and no one could explain why five other men had heard the screaming voices, nor why the man’s hair had turned white, other than through fright! A ring found in the tunnel was thought to be the worker’s and was taken to him before his suicide, by Benjamin Brown. However, he declared it wasn’t his and appeared terrified by it. The ring was in the shape of a coiled serpent, a snakelike creature. The man told Brown that he had seen it on the hand of the mysterious figure before it morphed into a wild human dog-like creature. He told Brown to take the ring back to the tunnel and throw it as far inside as he could. Brown told no one about it, and did as he was asked. Over the weeks that followed, Brown left London and claimed to be possessed by an evil spirit that urged him to act in sinful manner. He would scream at invisible visions that he claimed stood before him and haunted his every living moment. He declared the worst of these to be a large black dog-headed man, menacingly holding a knife that dripped w
ith blood.
Although this is an anecdote, the descriptions of the mysterious figure certainly resemble Anubis, the Egyptian god of the dead. When the British Museum station opened on 30 July 1900, only the handful of workers who had been employed there knew of the dark secret that existed within the tunnel. It remained that way until other sinister and unaccountable happenings began to occur there. Reports of black figures being seen in the station seemingly continued for several decades, right up until the station was officially closed on 24 September 1933. One CLR worker told me of countless incidents when, late at night, people would see movements in the shadows that followed them through the station, which only stopped when they exited completely or alighted a train departing from the station. One woman, who was standing on the station platform, described being approached by a foreign man who asked if she could help him find a ring he had dropped. He persuaded her to move to the platform edge. There she felt something pushing her from behind, forcing her onto the tracks. She screamed and the figure disappeared; all she could hear was a horrible wailing sound that filled the entire station platform. Realising she was alone, she felt in danger and ran back to the main concourse where she told the guard. Thinking her drunk or mad, he did nothing, until other travellers spoke of similar encounters.
On another occasion, a man who was alone on the platform was actually pushed onto the track. Looking up he saw a figure wearing an ornate headdress, sandals and a loincloth. He asked for help to climb out, but the figure stood with its arms folded, blocking his way. Running along the line he eventually managed to scramble back up onto the platform before any train arrived, and he left the station on the next train.
In 1912 three women came rushing into the main concourse hysterical; they had been terrified by what they saw. A man wearing a black dog’s head had walked along the platform towards them. Thinking it was someone wearing fancy dress they laughed, but the creature snarled at them and tried to claw at one of women’s coats, tearing it. The women said the creature’s breath smelt foul, like the smell of rotting flesh and death.
By 1913, for logistical reasons, CLR planned to close the British Museum station. Nearby Holborn station (opened in 1906) had made the British Museum station virtually redundant. The outbreak of the First World War delayed the closure and the station remained open. The vast majority of apparitions or incidents at the station relate to a dog-headed man, and almost all reports mention accompanying laughter or cackling sounds and female screams like that of a banshee. It wasn’t long before supposition and imagination turned the incidents into something connected to the British Museum itself. It was suggested that the station was haunted by the wandering and restless spirit of Amen-Ra, whose mummy board was in the Egyptian Room. Talk of an underground tunnel that led from the station to the museum was popular. So numerous were the stories circulating about the cursed underground station, that The Times newspaper offered a reward to anyone who would spend the night alone in the station. There were no takers!
The London Underground has always denied any reports or suggestions that anything sinister ever happened at British Museum station. ‘There are no ghosts, no dead Egyptian mummies, or weird dog-headed men roaming about the London underground, nothing other than our commuters.’ Despite the denials, many people still claim to see and hear strange noises and sounds that are similar to the early reports, although now the sounds are being reported as being heard at Holborn station. I personally have obtained a number of reports of what can only be described as ‘Anubis-like’ creatures being seen in the tunnels at Holborn and banshee-like screaming being heard. Today’s London is a multicultural society with all manner of clothing on display, so sightings of dog-headed men or Egyptian god figures are not as outlandish as they might once have been, although some do fit into the ‘unexplained phenomenon’ category. I asked the Metropolitan Police for any official reports into such incidents, historical or otherwise. They declined to comment, which does not help our research.
With trains no longer running into the station, in 1935 it became the setting for a comedy thriller feature film, Bulldog Jack, which used the basis of the legend and curse as its storyline, including the invention of a secret tunnel from the station directly to the Egyptian Room in the British Museum! The film opened in April 1935, and on the night of its première performance sinister goings-on were repeated. Two women disappeared at Holborn Station and were never found or seen again. The Metropolitan Police made no comment about such an incident, so there is no concrete evidence for the story. However, there does exist a story of a couple (Mr and Mrs Taylor) who witnessed the disappearance.
The Taylors had seen the women on the platform close to the tunnel entrance and had taken no real notice of them until they heard a scream from that direction. When they turned to see what had spooked the women, they were no longer there. Mr Taylor walked down to where the women had stood but saw nothing, so later told a guard what had happened. A search party was sent out into the tunnels and, at the nowclosed British Museum station, strange scratch marks were found on the station walls. These appeared to be claw-like marks, but of a size that was as large as a human hand.
After the official closure of the British Museum station, the infrastructure remained in use until the 1960s as a military administrative office and emergency command post. During this period more strange goings-on occurred, with screams, shouting foreign voices and visions being witnessed by many of those working there. A civilian worker complained so frequently of the screaming women that he was forced to leave his employment. Another man who scoffed and dismissed talk of the station being cursed, and denied Egyptian curses, soon fell ill and died from the effects of tuberculosis.
The surface station was eventually demolished in 1989, completely preventing access to the station from street level. By this time, all the station platforms had been removed and the eastbound tunnel was used for storage by track engineers. The British Museum station is still mentioned or used as a backdrop in films, plays and novels, and was featured in the 1972 horror film Death Line, the Keith Lowe book Tunnel Vision and in the stage play Pornography. It is possibly London’s most infamous underground station.
Chapter 5
The Curse of Cleopatra’s Needle
The history of Cleopatra’s Needle is indeed a magical one and deserves to be told and recounted in this volume. Some 700 miles beyond Cairo on the Nile, on the frontiers of Nubia, is the town of Syene or Assouan. In this area are the famed quarries of red granite called Syenite or Syenitic stone. About fifteen centuries before the Christian era, in the reign of Thutmose III, the obelisk now in London and a companion stone were quarried at Syene then placed on a huge raft and floated down the Nile to the sacred city of Heliopolis (referred to in the Bible as On). This was a city of temples dedicated to the worship of the sun. It is also regarded as a celebrated seat of learning and such exalted figures as Moses, Pythagoras and Plato and many Greek philosophers were students here.
On their arrival at Heliopolis the two obelisks were erected in front of the great temple of the sun, where they remained for fourteen centuries. These wonderful objects would have been gazed upon by Moses, Plato and many other historical figures. In later years the Roman emperor Augustus Caesar had the two obelisks taken down and moved from Heliopolis to Alexandria. During the journey, the road beneath the cart carrying the obelisk supposedly collapsed, revealing a hidden prehistoric tomb. Dozens of men are said to have died in the collapse. At Alexandria, the needles stood in front of the Caesarium (the Palace of the Caesars). They were put there seven years after the death of Cleopatra and, interestingly, their move to Alexandria had nothing to do with her. It seems most likely that the needles were named in memory of her.
The obelisks remained in Alexandria for a further fifteen centuries. Eventually, around 400 years ago, due to the ravages of time and natural elements, one of the obelisks fell to the ground and remained there, gradually becoming buried in the sands. During the 1798 ‘Battle of
the Nile’ Lord Nelson’s fleet ambushed and defeated Napoleon’s fleet while anchored off the coast of Alexandria. The fallen monument was viewed as a trophy to commemorate the victory and efforts were made to recover it to England, although the army lacked the resources to transport it. So it remained in Alexandria until the early part of the 19th century, when discussions were again held about recovering the monument from Egypt. By 1820, on the accession to the throne of King George IV, the monument was again offered to the British by the Egyptian ruler Mehemet Ali. Sadly, the gift was rejected. Later, in 1831, Mehemet Ali renewed his offer, this time to William IV. He promised to ship the monolith from Egypt to England without charge. Again the undoubted compliment and offer was declined! In 1849 politicians again discussed the opportunity to collect the obelisk and have it transported to London, although the opposition party warned ‘That the obelisk was too much defaced to be worth renewal’. So it remained in Alexandria. In 1851 the topic was discussed once more; the outlay of £7,000 for transportation costs was deemed unacceptable to the public purse.
Eventually, the decision was made to collect the monolith, but government officials left the task to Sir William James Erasmus Wilson, who would subsidise the project. In 1877, Wilson paid a bond for the sum of £10,000 to Mr John Dixon, CE for the transportation and delivery of the monolith. A specially-designed craft was engineered to carry the obelisk at sea. The needle was encased in a watertight iron pontoon-type vessel, often referred to as ‘cigar-shaped’. It was named Cleopatra and measured almost 100 feet in length. It had a vertical stem and stern, a rudder, two bilge keels, a mast for balancing sails, and a deck house. It was designed to be towed behind another vessel, the steam tug Olga (with Captain Booth at the helm), with Captain Carter and crew members aboard the Cleopatra. Both vessels set sail from Alexandria Harbour on 21 September 1877 bound for London.
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