Valley of the Kings
Whoever put the mozz on King Tut’s Tomb should have done a refresher course in cursing, because something went horribly wrong with this one. While it’s true that a certain amount of untimely death followed the opening of the tomb, the only person who lived to a merry old age and died of natural causes was the one person who actually opened the crypt, one Howard Carter.

In 1922 the Egyptian town of Luxor was a pungent brew of spices, heat, and swaggering Indiana Jones tomb raiders, fighting over spoils from the newly-discovered pharaohs’ necropolis near the town. Carter, more fresh-faced administrator than maverick raider, was convinced that one more tomb remained undiscovered: that of the relatively unknown and minor Pharaoh, Tutankhamen.

Lord Carnavon, general philanthropist and personal ATM, was bankrolling the ‘Tut folly’ but after five years of fruitless searching even he was ready to call it a day. Carter talked the good Lord into an 11th hour reprieve and in the blistering heat of the well picked-over remains of the Valley of the Kings, Carter and his team hacked away at the limestone haystack of el Qorn looking for the needle of Tut’s tomb. Finally, on 4 November 1922, they unearthed a step cut into the rock, leading to the tomb of Tutankhamen and the birth of the curse legend.

When Carter and Carnavon stepped over the crypt’s threshold they passed beneath a curse engraved in the limestone. For years the myth persisted that the words were a lurid prediction – ‘Death Shall Come on Swift Wings To Him Who Disturbs the Peace of the King’. These words were later sourced to the acute salesmanship of a young newspaper reporter called Doyle, who later graduated into respected novelist Sir Arthur Conan. It is now believed the hieroglyphics contained a less gothic and less punitive message: ‘It is I who hinder the sand from choking the secret chamber. I am the protector of the deceased’.

Irrespective of the actual words, death and assorted accursedness did indeed come on swift wings. Several months later Lord Carnavon died from blood poisoning brought on by an insect bite. Legend has it that when he cashed in his chips all the lights in Cairo went out, while back in England his dog howled at the moon and then dropped dead.

The body count continued. Two more of Carnavon’s relatives, Carter’s personal secretary, Richard Bethell, and Bethell’s father, Lord Westbury, all shuffled off their mortal coils in less than natural circumstances. But the real clincher, as far as legend-hunters are concerned, was the death of Carter’s canary, ignominiously (but presciently) swallowed by a large cobra a few days after the tomb’s discovery but before it’s actual opening.

To Carter’s white-faced servant the connection was obvious: the cobra was the symbol of the pharaohs, the cobra ate the canary, ergo everyone was doomed. It’s almost enough to make you pine for the logic of the cheap horror films which cashed in on the curse phenomenon using nothing but plywood props, some old bed linen and an unfortunate actor required to zombie his way through a paper-thin plot.