King Tut's Mummy Mystery

Energy's up. Energy's up. I don't know if you want to bring it down or energy's up. Energy. No, I think it'll be up in this one. I think this is more of an up one because it's more historical anyway. All right, so we're going in the time machine. So gas that baby up. Didn't expect me to have some gas on me, did you? No, I really didn't. I was very surprised. Edward came prepared today. Welcome to Scary Mystery Surprise, where we talk about scary things that surprised us around the internet. I'm Edwin, I'm Michelle. All Right, here we go. I forgot your sound effects. Here we are in nineteen twenty two, d D dum in the middle of theres No, that's the third Edwin. You're the history person. Okay, Yeah, I am. I am, but thank god I am, because my god, we're in the depression. No, Edwin, it's nineteen. It's the Roaring twenties. We're having a great time during this time. Okay, because yeah, we're bringing up the energies. I'm like what Okay, So, Edwin, how do you feel about the Pharaoh's curse? The Pharaoh's curse? Yeah, in Egypt. Oh it's real. Duh, it's a real. Are you asking me if I think it's real or fake or just in general thoughts? I well, I'm just ak Yeah, your general thoughts on it. I think it's creepy in the Indiana Jones type of thing when you view it like that, because today we're talking about the curse the Pharaoh's curse of touton common or King Tut to the layman's or King tout to the King Toot, King Toot to the AI descriptor kept calling him King Toot, So I'm not going sure, Yeah, like t o t it was like King Doot in that sense, the Indiana Jones sense. Yeah, this is it's creepy like the Curse of Yeah, I remember being really creeped out by that movie and even that ride Universal Studios or whatever. Oh, yeah, of course I love that. Right, it's not a universe. It's at Disneyland. Yeah, it's I don't know what's going on with me today, but I don't know. You're with the time machine really messed you up somehow, the tit is a cast having gasoline here in the booth with me Edwin's high from the fumes but thank god we're in Egypt in nineteen twenty two. Now, Howard Carter was running out of time. You know, two desert music and like marrying. Yeah, yeah, yeah. He stepped into the Valley of the Kings. The sand whipped up in his face. Lord Carnarvon, his benefactor, had only given him funding for one more year. Fair because in the last seven years he turned up nothing in the Egyptian desert of archaeological value. A few odds and ends, scraps of linen, shards of pottery. Most of it wasn't much, but many of these items shared something strange and common. They had inscribed a single word, the name of an Egyptian pharaoh whose remains had never been located, toot in common. The clock was ticking. Howard Carter had been exploring the desert for a while, you know, he'd been interrupted by World War One. Totally valid, how are you going to find stuff during World War One? But Canarvon was over it. He'd called him to his castle in or his manor house in it's not castle but weird fact, weird sidebar fact. It is where Dowton Abby is filmed. So yeah, so like whatever it's called wait, yeah, Like so the Canarvans actually own that property that Dalton Abvi has filmed at. What Okay, so Lord Carnarvan lived there at the time, so and he was funding Howard Carter. Okay, so that is kind of a castle. It is kind of a castle. I mean it's like, yeah, I'd say one of the most well known manor houses in England because it's on that show. Wow. Yeah, so he lived there in the twenties. But the clock is ticking or Howard's been back in the Valley of the Kings for three days. His team was going over the old dig sites near the grounds of previously discovered tombs. He didn't know what he was going, you know, He's like, let's just start here. And one of Carter's men stumbled over a large piece of rock. Unlike the rest of the loose rocks, this particular chunk was partially buried beneath the sand of the mud. After some digging, it was discovered to be the top of a long staircase that disappeared beneath the ground. The tomb of Toot and Common or King Toot. According to AI generators. Can you imagine at some point it will just be Ai and they could just change it to King Toot and that could be it. Like no one will know. I'm pretty sure. I'm pretty sure you could. You could say that to somebody and they're just accept it, like yeah, it's like, oh okay, King Toot. So it spreads. That is how it all begins. Carter sent word for Lord Carnarvan, and once he arrived, they opened the tomb. When Carter removed the outer door and stepped past the threshold, he became the first human to do so in well over three thousand years. Wow. Yeah, it was the crowning achievement of Carter's career. So cool. I mean, I get excited when I go to my attic area and I'm like, wow, I haven't been here in two years. What will I discover? What will I discover today? I know, I put a random box of stuff up there, and I always wonder. I'm like, when am I going to go back up there? I'm just so excited. So I can't imagine what this guy felt. I mean, this guy, I mean this like immortalized him among archaeologists, like this is one of the most important finds like Pompeii, the Rosetta stone, not your pich Machu pichu, those stone soldiers in China. Huh. It's famous. It's a famous thing. Also in the nineteen twenties, it kicked off this big fashion craze too. I mean this is kind of a sidebark, but like fashion, yeah, fashion, Like there's a bunch of antique jewelry from that time, Like it influenced the way people were dressing because they all became kind of obsessed with Egypt and the desert and pharaohs and stuff. So that's just kind of a sidebards. Honestly, I remember that because I'd be at like an antique ball and you'd see all this weird Egyptian jewelry. But it's like all from the twenties. It's not actual Egyptian jewelry. It's from the twenties. It's like knockoffs from the twenties. So that influential. That's really cool. So the tomb itself was packed almost bursting with five thousand priceless artifacts, including a dismantled chariot, finally carved figurines, priceless jewelry, ancient weapons, and one standard issue Egyptian mummy with three sarcophaguses in kind of a nested It was like a sarcophagus nested within a sarcophagus, nested within the sarcophagus. The three sarcophaguses, one which was made out of solid gold. Wow, I know, And so this became a worldwide sensation. But what's really funny is Tuton Common wasn't important at all in his own time. I mean, like, as pharaohs go, it would be I wrote this thing that said, joke, this would be like if people only remember William Henry Harrison, who was our ninth president and died after just thirty one days after his inauguration at eighteen forty one, what like if that became our most famous president. I mean, because Tuton Common arguably is the most famous pharaoh now. And it's just because they not because they built the pyramids, not because he did anything during his reign. He died when he was nineteen. He did nothing. In fact, I wasn't important, And imagine the ones that were. They probably all I know, I know, and in fact I was doing research and there's like comparisons because so like his tomb was not disturbed, Like that's what makes it so spectacular but it's a cramped little tomb, and then a lot of the artifacts have his like his mom or his dad's name on it instead, because Tute in Common apparently died so suddenly that they didn't have time to do burial like a correct burial. Apparently he's like his mummy's missing, like his heart, which is really actually a really important organ that they would have left intact. Like there's a bunch of things that are not right about this, that feel very rush, like they just threw a bunch of stuff together. They're just like, yeah, like they just threw a bunch of stuff because he just died so young. Also, he was I wrote, he suffered from a curse of his own crippling small gene pool because he was very inbred, because his parents were brother and sister and what the pharaohs like to keep it in the family. So he was like born with a club foot. He had a bunch of well, like physical deformities and like possible mental stuff as well, Like they just it wasn't great. It wasn't great. Obviously he was cursed. He was cursed in his own way. Yes, he was cursed. He was. I feel bad for him. The oh geez, bring the energy down. Okay, but now we have to get to the dark side, the dark side of opening the two woo, which is why it's on the show. I'm not just here to give you Howard Carter's Here are the presidents of the United States. Here are the presidents and talk about Howard Carter. Was it like spider webs? By the way, when they're opening this up, is it like spider webs? And like, you know, I imagine a lot of dust, but I don't. The thing is is like a lot of One of the speculative things about the Curse is that it would be mold. But it's not like a damp area, is it. Like I don't think it's a it's the desert, like it's so there's not going to be a lot of mold there. So but yeah, that is one of those series. But I like to imagine it with like a eternal flame in there too. Is just like, of course, like you open it and for some reason they just light up, kind of like The Mummy, kind of like Brendan Fraser's The Mummy, which everyone should just go and rewatch just because it's that enjoyable. Multiple times. It's a really good times. It's so good. There's our SEO word. Brendan Fraser, Fraser, Fraser whatever. Okay, all right, back to the cars, because from the moment they stepped inside the pharaoh's tomb, rumors began to spread that the Carter while the Carters. Why did I read that the heav Carter? The Carters is Beyonce And sorry, I'm just thinking of the president. Now, which one, Oh, Jimmy Carter. Now, Jimmy Carter opened the tomb. And now it's luckily at this taping, Jimmy Carter's still alive, so he's still fair game. Okay, okay. Rumors began to spread that Howard Carter's actions had unleashed a terrible curse from beyond the grave that would be dished out to all that disturbed the long dead Pharaoh. The first life snuffed out by this curse of touton Common was taken on the very same day that the tomb was discovered, Howard Carter's canary. It was stationed in a bird cage hanging outside of his door, and its entire demise served as an appropriate warning of danger about things to come. His canary was attacked by a king, Cobra and a messenger boy stumbled upon the scene. But you know, the cobra had the canary in its mouth and there was nothing they could do. It died. But weirdly enough, one of the symbols of Pharaoh's is a cobra, and in the tomb itself or statues of Teuton common wearing a crown with a cobra in the center. Wow, so I don't know, it's like omen one oh one. It's like bad omen one oh one. That's an omen. Yeah, that's an omen for suh it's like And also the fact that a canary is like a you know, like we're usually a symbol for something going wrong, like when the canary and the coal mine, that kind of symbolism. Mm hmm. You're going to die, You're running out of oxygen. Get there, get out of there. That's the message. Oh my god. Okay, yeah, it's pretty obvious. But of course Carter and his men were made of sterner stuff. You don't you don't make money grave digging in Egypt by being superstitious. So that's just a fact, very true, very true. But while a few whispered about a possible curse, most were certain. It was just an unfortunate coincidence, and it may have been we know where this is going. It didn't save Lord Canarvin because it started with nothing more than a mosquito bite on the cheek and something that's kind of annoying. You know, you're scratching it. It's a summer evening. It's annoying, no big deal, which is probably what Lord Carnarvan thought at the time. But then he nicked it with his razor and that gave him blood poisoning and he was dead within a few days. What, yeah, you can die from that one poisoning. Yeah, he was dead within two weeks of blood poisoning. And that was just four months after they opened the tomb. So it was another spooky coincidence. And when they did an autopsy on King tutan Common's body, they found that there was a strange lesion on his face in the place where Lord Carnarvan had cut his cheek. What okay, so the cobra, Yeah, the cobra the cheek. Yeah. And Lord Carnarvan wasn't old. He was just fifty six years old, you know, like he wasn't like super elderly. But with the Cobra and Lord Carnarvan. Rumors went nuts the headlines and newspapers. I mean, obviously the world is already nuts about King Tu anyway, so they're a curse. It's happening, yeah, But then the death just kept coming. In May nineteen twenty three, George J. Gold succumb to He was a financier of the project. He succumbed to a fever that he contracted while he was in Egypt. He began to show symptoms not long after visiting the tomb of Tooting. Oh, God of King Toot. I know, but I always imagined it like I always imagine of like King Tutankhaman, you know, or something like that. Yeah, of course, of course you have to command it. And instead it's like King Toot, King Tut, which seems we're fitting. We're gonna get cursed. Michelle, you gotta watch out for this. I know we are going to get cursed. Well, we'll see, we'll see. I'll get to that. Another man who had worked on the expedition died of arsenic poisoning, which was really random. And then Carter, his personal secretary, died a year after that, being smothered in his sleep at a posh club in Mayfair and the assailant was never caught. I'm sorry to laugh, but it's just like that's so random where he's smothered to death. What I don't know. I feel like there's more to that story and there's not. They're not discussing, know why. I'm imagining like something else going on. Yeah, like you can't not like there's some There's obviously more to the story, but it's the curse that got him clearly. So. As those who were connected to Carter and his excavation continue to drop like flies, people began to speculate as to what was behind the death, and the papers spoke of a written curse sprawled across the wall. Tooton commons too, even Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who wrote Sherlock Holmes do you know him? Huh? He speculated he had his own theory, and he speculated that the tomb had had invisible elemental guards, which I love that he threw elementals in there as a paranormal person that were left to defend the long dead pharaoh, which I love. I love it as a theory. I'm just like, please, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle is the best. It did seem like Carter and his team were being targeted by something. So the question is what became of the man himself, Howard Carter, Because I mean, if this curse were real, he's the one that like stepped in there, did it first, disturbed it first, became very famous off of it. What happened to him? I mean, he's the one that's responsible for disturbing the piece. So he died of Hodgkins lymphoma at the age of sixty four, sixteen years after the opening the two Did he kill everybody? Has anybody thought of that? I mean, that's a good question. Is he a serial killer? Yeah? Because what if they found a lot of my in there or some secret that only he wanted to know. I mean, they definitely found a lot of money in there, And I mean how hard could it be to just send a mosquito to bite somebody? He trained mosquitoes and cobras, yeah, and cobras, and he sacrificed his own canary. And that's how deep this goes. This is like the deepest conspiracy that we're outing right to smother somebody random, It's so random. Yeah, there's also a story and I didn't write this in there, but there's someone like once the Mummy got to the museum, there was like someone who was like I don't know, organizing the exhibit and went out and got hit by a car or something like that too, like got hit by a butt. Like there's like, so's there's like weird deaths. There's a weird death. But Howard Carter was untouched by whatever the curse angle. You know, it just seems like if there was a real curse, you'd get him. But which kind of throws the whole Mummy's Cursed thing into doubt anyway, because in fact, of all the fifty eight people known to have been present at the Tone when it was first open, only eight died within the next twelve years. So it's not real. It's not real. And then a paranormal skeptic James Randy, he's like a well known skeptic, actually did the math and was like average everyone around that just average, Like if you average all their ages and like when they died, the average age of death was seventy three. Well that's awesome. Yeah, So like people actually did well, Like maybe maybe it was a longevity. I always believe that it was true, like it was a curse because of you know, the strange deaths that you hear. Oh yeah, of course. Now it's like, okay, if only eight people died, Yeah, only eight people died, and granted some of that was strange, but I think that would happen at any You could probably make that statement about anything, you know, like, at any event, a certain amount of people are going to die after it. But here's some theories about where the curse might have come from. The idea of the curse. This is probably it is so Lord Canarvin needed to recoup money from investing in fucking Howard Carter for seven to eight years and getting nothing but pottery shards. So when they finally found it, when they finally found the tomb, he sold the rights to reporting about the story and like taking photos of it to The Times London and so they were the only newspaper allowed on the dig site, allowed to photograph document give them any information. So that left all the other newspapers in England making up shit. Huh. Okay, yeah, that makes sense, that makes a lot of sense. Yeah, okay, yeah, so they just decided to like especially like if anybody died like just anything. They just blew it up. Historically, while some Egyptian tombs did indeed have curses scribbled on the walls, King Tutts did not have one scribbled on the walls. There was nothing there. And actually the legend of the pharaoh's curse actually predates when we're able to read hieroglyphs. It was before we found the Rosetta Stone. People would start, like Louisa may Elcott wrote a story about mummies in a curse, so like, that's before we found the Rosetta Stone. I have to do something about the Rosetta Stone that it's interesting. Yeah, the Rosetta Stone had some weird deaths around it too, so like that's interesting. But also this is just a weird fact. Pharaoh's tombs were guarded, so why would they need a curse. Tombs that had curses written on the walls, and there were some were of lower gentry of people that didn't have guards. Twenty four to seven didn't have This is the next best thing, say we should do that instead of security cameras. Yeah, I'll just do a graffiti curse on the wall here and it'll protect my body for the rest of eternity. Yeah, instead of like, you know, you don't need to protect yourself, don't carry fire her arms. Just here's a curse. There you go. You know, I thought of a like a way to protect the houses. To put this creepy like doll in the front Oh you imagine just something in the front yard that would just creep someone out, like a ghost. That would work in some places. I think, Oh yeah, I think so. I think so. I mean, yeah, make it look as creepy as possible, although you might attract the people who are like, oh that place is like run down, I'm going to break in or something like that. Like you get the doll I know keeps my sister when she visits. It keeps out of this studio area because so it works. Well, I mean it's good. I guess my cousin doesn't come in here because of that too. Oh all right, well, I mean interesting strange. I mean, those people don't sound like they're hindrances to your life, but I mean it's good that you keep them out of your space. I'm not trying to right right, right, right right, Okay, So that makes sense. Instead of guards, by the way, for guards like hired until they die or like, what's the deal. Yeah, isn't that weird? Yeah, of course, well, because so I was looking this up because I was like, I don't know, this stuff is kind of interesting. But yeah, the guards would be you know, it would be like tasked to them, like generationally tasked, so like you'd be like your son would be a guard as well. And then when a pharaoh dies, they're actually speaking to the gods on your behalf, so it's like an incentive. Like they're still like working for their people once they die, so they're doing their work. So they would be kind of an incentive to, okay, take care of them, like it'd be an honor I think. I think, like in theory, when we can see that, I can see that. Oh and just even a little more debunking. Lord Carnarvan was arguably the most unusual death right like because he died of blood poisoning from a mosquito bite. But he wasn't in the best health. He'd been in a car accident in nineteen oh three and he'd never really regained his physical health after that. So and in fact, why he was interested in Egyptian tombs and how Howard Carter got his money from him. Is that a doctor had been like, don't spend winters in England, go to a warm country. And so Lord Carnarvon had gone to Egypt and gotten all amateur archaeologist, which is what old rich people did back then, is go become an archaeologist, just like it's like today's golf I guess, yeah, but they just went to Egypt and stole artifacts and mummies. Narvin was killed by a mosquito bite simply because his immune system was weak and he couldn't fight off an infection. That sucks. That's a really bad way to die, man, Like, oh yeah, right. And what's really kind of funny is that, you know how they said that toot and Common had the mark on his face where Lord Carnarvon had died. Nobody actually remembers what side Lord Carnarvin got bit on. And by the time they had found, like done the autopsy on King Tut, they Lord Carnarvon had been dead for months. So they're not going to dig him up and just look at his bite and look at his face, look at his yeah, and so nobody knows. There's no way to actually know if that's true or not. So dying from shaving Man. Yeah, man, I mean it wasn't exactly clean back then, wouldn't be. They're not exactly in a pristine environment. It's just sad. It's just a sad way to die, man, it is, it is. But honestly, the only victim of this curse I think that truly exists. The only real victim was the canary. Yeah, like that was the biggest omen on the whole planet. Like that was just that. A cobra eating a canary. That is just like, poor thing. It was just there. It didn't deserve it. It didn't deserve it, poor canary. That guy could have been named Toot. That fits him. Tooth. Yeah, king Toot, King Toot killed that canary, and you can tell he did that. I think it's pretty obvious he did that. But everything else I don't think so. And also there's like a weird fact that like he's kind of like jammed into into these sca like he's jammed into the solid gold sarcophagus, which is pretty rare too, Like he's like it's just weird. It's just weird, Like he wasn't meant like these. It feels like historically these might not have been meant for him handvyed doubt from like his older brother or something. Yeah, that's it's like it seems like that, like its just it doesn't There are things that just don't steep right. And like in the aptopsies, they can't tell what killed him. But obviously he wouldn't live. He wouldn't have lived very long because he had all these things wrong with him anyway, but they it just seems like he might have died so suddenly, like in an accident. It's a poor guy, man, poor guy, poor guy. But he is one of the most famous people on earth, now, I mean kink chu. Yeah, so he's got that going for him. More famous than any other Yeah, I mean, I think more so than the people that like built the pyramids, like Ramses. The second, I don't know which one. There's so many Ramses. I don't know which ones which poor guy. That's what can we do? That means I mean his curse only works on birds. I mean disappointing. Yeah cool, this kind of sucks so that the curse is not real like that's yeah. I did find a story about an actual curse tomb, and it was some tomb in Poland. It was a king in Poland, and they people disturbed his tomb, and then like twelve people disturbed his tomb, and ten of them died, oh wow, like pretty quickly, like four of them were dead within like days. And but it turned out it was a mold There was a moldy fog in his tomb, and when they cracked it, it released all the spores. Okay, I was gonna say that met definitely met the cursed threshold ten out of twelve. But also what a great curse to be, Like, let's put these spores in here, so like if anybody disturbs the well, they wouldn't know what spores were, but they'd be like, let's put these plants in here. Anybody disturbs the tomb, it'll be like, so, what are we going to talk about next week, Shelle, I don't know, but I think it'll be a surprise, right, yes, Okay, Bye,