The Mammoth Encyclopedia of Unsolved Mysteries (19 page)

Carnarvon was never to see it. That April he fell ill. At breakfast one morning he had a temperature of 104, and it continued for twelve days; his doctors suspected that he had opened an old wound with his razor while shaving, but the fever suggested a mosquito-bite. Howard Carter was sent for. Carnarvon died just before two in the morning. As the family came to his bedside, summoned by a nurse, all the lights suddenly went out, and they were forced to light candles. Later they went on again. It was a power failure that affected all Cairo. Some accounts of Lord Carnarvon’s death state that the failure has never been
explained, but none of them mention whether any inquiry was actually addressed to the Cairo Electricity Board.

According to Lord Carnarvon’s son, another peculiar event took place that night; back in England, Carnarvon’s favourite fox terrier began to howl, then died.

The newspapers quickly began printing stories about the “curse of the pharaohs”. This was partly Carnarvon’s own fault; he had sold exclusive rights in the Tutankhamon story to the London
Times
, and other newspapers had to print any stories they could unearth or concoct. But the curse story hardly needed any journalistic retouching. Arthur Mace, the American archaeologist who had helped unseal the tomb, began to complain of exhaustion soon after Carnarvon’s death; he fell into a coma and died in the same hotel – the Continental – not long after Carnarvon. George Jay Gould, son of the famous American financier, came to Egypt when he heard of Carnarvon’s death, and Carter took him to see the tomb. The next day he had fever; by evening he was dead. Joel Wool, a British industrialist who visited the grave site, died of fever on his way back to England. Archibald Douglas Reid, a radiologist who X-rayed Tutankhamon’s mummy, sufferèd attacks of feebleness and died on his return to England in 1924. Over the next few years thirteen people who had helped open the grave also died, and by 1929 the figure had risen to twenty-two. In 1929 Lady Carnarvon died of an “insect bite”, and Carter’s secretary Richard Bethell was found dead in bed of a circulatory collapse. Professor Douglas Derry, one of two scientists who performed the autopsy on Tutankhamon’s mummy, had died of circulatory collapse in 1925; the other scientist, Alfred Lucas, died of a heart attack at about the same time.

In his book
The Curse of the Pharaohs
, Philip Vandenburg not only lists the deaths associated with Tutankhamon, but goes on to mention many other archaeologists associated with Egypt who have died prematurely. He points out how frequently these deaths seem to involve a curious exhaustion – Carter himself suffered from this, as well as from fits of depression – and speculates whether the ancient priests of Egypt knew of poisons or fungoid growths that would retain their power down the centuries. Among the premature deaths he mentions François Champollion, who decoded the Rosetta Stone, the great Egyptologist Belzoni, the Swabian doctor Theodore Bilharz (after whom the disease bilharzia was named), the archaeologist Georg Möller, and Carter’s close associate Professor James Henry Breasted. It was James Breasted who reported that Carter became sick and feeble after excavating the tomb, that he seemed at times “not all there”, and that he had difficulty making decisions. Carter died at sixty-six.

Vandenberg begins his book by citing a conversation he had with Dr Gamal Mehrez, director-general of the Antiquities Department of the Cairo Museum. Mehrez, who was fifty-two, expressed disbelief in the idea of a curse. “Look at me. I’ve been involved with tombs and mummies of pharaohs all my life. I’m living proof that it was all coincidence”. Four weeks later Mehrez had died of circulatory collapse . . .

Yet although Vandenberg himself seems to discount the coincidence theory, his attempts to explain the “curse” scientifically are unconvincing – he even considers the possibility that the shape of the pyramid can cause it to absorb certain cosmic energies capable of affecting human health, and that the Egyptians “knew how to influence radioactive decay”.

The ancients themselves would have dismissed such theories as absurd. For them a curse was the result of a ritual to evoke a guardian “demon” or spirit. Such beliefs have survived down to modern times. The psychical researcher Guy Lyon Playfair has described the years he spent in Brazil, and how he investigated “poltergeist” hauntings which appeared to be the result of a curse – that is to say, of “black magic”. Most investigators of the paranormal are inclined to believe that the poltergeist – “noisy ghost” – is some kind of unconscious manifestation of the mind of a “disturbed” teenager, and that when objects suddenly fly around the room, this is due to “spontaneous psychokinesis”. Playfair, while accepting this explanation in some cases, nevertheless came to believe that most poltergeists are in fact disembodied “spirits”. Such spirits can be persuaded, by means of rituals, to “haunt” certain individuals, or to cause disturbances in houses. When this happens another
candomblé
specialist (
candomblé
is an African-influenced cult) is called in to dispel the malign influence. In fact, traditional magic through the ages has been based upon this belief in the use of spirits for magical purposes.

Another modern investigator, Max Freedom Long, studied the Huna religion in Hawaii, and became convinced that the Huna priests – known as kahunas – were able to cause death by means of the “death prayer”. He writes:

The kahunas, Long says, believe that man has three “selves” or souls, known as the low self, the middle self and the high self. The low self corresponds roughly to what Freud called the unconscious; it controls man’s vital forces, and seems to be predominantly emotional. The middle self is man’s “ordinary consciousness”, his everyday self. The “high self” might be called the superconscious mind; it has powers that are unknown to the everyday self. These three selves inhabit the body, and are separated from it after death. But sometimes a “low self” may become detached from the other two. It becomes an “earthbound spirit” of the sort that causes poltergeist disturbances. The low self, according to the kahunas, possesses memory, while the middle self does not. So a disembodied “middle self”, separated from the other two, is a wandering wraith without memory – what we would regard as a ghost.

According to Long, the “death prayer” involves disembodied “low spirits”, who are highly susceptible to suggestion, and can easily be persuaded to obey. The victim of the death prayer experiences an increasing numbness as the spirits drain his vital energies.

Long obtained much of his information about the kahunas (recorded in his book
The Secret Science Behind Miracles
) from a doctor, William Tufts Brigham, who had studied them for many years. Brigham told him a typical story of the death prayer. He had hired a party of Hawaians to climb a mountain, and a fifteen-year-old boy became ill, experiencing a numbness that rose from his feet. He told Brigham that he was a victim of the death prayer. The kahuna in his local village hated the influence of the white men, and declared that any Hawaian who worked for the whites would become a victim of the death prayer. When the boy accepted the job with Brigham the kahuna knew it by clairvoyance, and had invoked the death prayer.

The Hawaians, who also believed that Brigham was a magician, asked him to try to save the boy. Brigham decided to try. Acting upon the assumption that the lad was being attacked by highly suggestible “lower spirits”, he stood over him and addressed the attackers, flattering them and arguing that the boy was an innocent victim, and telling them that it was the witch doctor who sent them who ought to be destroyed. He kept his mind concentrated on this idea for another hour, when suddenly the tension seemed to vanish and he experienced a sense of relief. The boy declared that he could now feel his legs again. When Brigham visited the boy’s village he learned that the kahuna had died, after telling the villagers that the “white magician” had redirected the spirits to attack him. Within hours of this he was dead. Brigham thought he had gone to
sleep early, and awoke to find himself under attack, by which time it was too late.

Long believes that the kahunas originated in Africa, possibly in Egypt. “Their journey commenced at the ‘Red Sea of Kane’, which fits neatly into the idea that they came from Egypt by way of the Red Sea”.

The Egyptians also believed that man is a multiple being, a body animated by several spirits, the main ones being the
ka
or double (corresponding roughly to what is sometimes called the “astral body”), the
ba
, or heart-soul, and the
khu
, or spiritual soul. There was also the
ab
(heart-soul),
khaibit
(shadow),
sekhem
(or vital force) and the
ren
, the man’s name.

Long writes: ‘In Egypt, as we might expect . . . there are definite traces of the kahuna system to be found”, and he goes on to describe the Egyptian beliefs in some detail. He believes that the kahunas came to Hawaii by way of Egypt, and also left traces of their system in the Hindu religion.

The strange debilitating effects experienced by some of the archaeologists including Carter sound in many ways like the effects of the death prayer as described by Brigham and Long. But it is unnecessary to establish some direct connection between the kahunas of Hawaii and the religion of ancient Egypt.
If
Long and Playfair are correct, and poltergeists or “low spirits” can be used for magical purposes, then it is logical to believe that they were used by the priests of ancient Egypt as the “guardians of the tomb”.

In
A Search in Secret Egypt
the English occultist Paul Brunton describes a night spent in the King’s Chamber in the Great Pyramid. He speaks of “a strange feeling that I was not alone”, which developed into a feeling of being surrounded by “antagonistic beings”. “Monstrous elemental creations, evil horrors of the underworld, forms of grotesque, insane, uncouth and fiendish aspect gathered around me . . . The end came with startling suddenness. The malevolent ghostly invaders disappeared . . .” After this Brunton experienced a feeling that a benevolent being was present in the chamber, then thought that he saw two high priests.

Vandenberg, who quotes this, admits that it may all have been Brunton’s imagination. But he goes on to describe how when he was visiting the pyramid in 1972 a woman screamed, then collapsed and was unable to move. She said to Vandenberg later: “It was as if something had suddenly hit me”. The guide told Vandenberg that such attacks were not unusual.

If these odd effects are merely the result of imagination, then it is also arguable that the same applies to the curse of the pharaohs. After all, Carnarvon died of something that resembled a mosquito bite, others of heart attacks, others of circulatory failure – nothing that sounds like the creeping numbness of the death curse. In a BBC programme on the curse of the pharaohs, Henry Lincoln, investigator of the mystery of Rennes-le-Château (
q.v.
), stated emphatically: “There never was a curse of the pharaohs”. It is certainly more comfortable to think so.

12

The Devil’s Footprints

The winter of 1855 was an exceptionally severe one, even in the southwest of England, where winters are usually mild. On the morning of 8 February Albert Brailsford, the principal of the village school in Topsham, Devon, walked out of his front door to find that it had snowed in the night. And he was intrigued to notice a line of footprints – or rather hoofprints – that ran down the village street. At first glance they looked like the ordinary hoofprints of a shod horse; but a closer look showed that this was impossible, for the prints ran in a continuous line, one in front of the other. If it was a horse, then it must have had only one leg, and hopped along the street. And if the unknown creature had two legs, then it must have placed one carefully in front of the other, as if walking along a tightrope. What was odder still was that the prints – each about four inches long – were only about eight inches apart. And each print was very clear, as if it had been branded into the frozen snow with a hot iron.

The villagers of Topsham were soon following the track southward through the snow. And they halted in astonishment when the hoofprints came to a halt at a brick wall. They were more baffled than ever when someone discovered that they continued on the other side of the wall, and that the snow on top of the wall was undisturbed. The tracks approached a haystack, and continued on the other side of it, although the hay showed no sign that a heavy creature had clambered over it. The prints passed under gooseberry bushes, and were even seen on rooftops. It began to look as if some insane practical joker had decided to set the village an insoluble puzzle.

But it was soon clear that this explanation was also out of the question. Excited investigators tracked the prints for mile after mile over the Devon countryside. They seemed to wander erratically through a number of small towns and villages – Lympstone, Exmouth,
Teignmouth, Dawlish, as far as Totnes, about halfway to Plymouth. If it was a practical joker, he would have had to cover forty miles, much of it through deep snow. Moreover, such a joker would surely have hurried forward to cover the greatest distance possible; in fact, the steps often approached front doors, then changed their mind and went away again. At some point the creature had crossed the estuary of the river Exe – it looked as if the crossing was between Lympstone and Powderham. Yet there were also footprints in Exmouth, farther south, as if it had turned back on its tracks. There was no logic in its meandering course.