Hauntings of Ancient Egypt

The ancient Egyptians were so obsessed with the Cult of the Dead that they turned the fruitful valley of the Nile into a Valley of Death. A soul could not enter the blessed region of Osiris unless the body remained intact in the place where he lived on earth. To violate a tomb or remove a mummy from its coffin was a terrible act of desecration. So the solemn ceremonies of the entombment included some awful curses, inscribed upon the walls of the death chambers. This also was the case in the 14th century B.C. with the splendid funeral of Tutenkhamen, an unimportant sovereign who died when he was eighteen.

The Hand of an Egyptian Princess

Tutenkhamen was the son-in-law and successor of Akhnaton, a very remarkable Pharaoh. He abandoned not only Thebe, the magnificent city of the god Ammon, but also all the ancient gods. And he transferred the religious centre to Al Amarna, where he worshipped the sun-god Aton. In the background, the old priesthood worked relentlessly against this "inspired intellectual" or "enlightened prophet".

Akhnaton was married to the beautiful Nefertiti, who gave him no son, but six daughters. Writing poems to Aton, he neglected his country and lost a considerable part of his empire in Syria. In an attempt to combat his many enemies, he married his eldest daughter to Tutenkhamen, whom he appointed co-regent at the age of twelve.

Queen Nefertiti fell into disfavour and one of Akhnaton's daughters also turned violently against her father because of matters of religion. Akhnaton is said to have her raped and killed. His priests cut off her right hand and buried it in a secret place in the Valley of the Kings, under a curse that it was never to be reunited with her body. Because the princess wasn't intact at her burial, according to the old beliefs she would not be able to enter the blessed region of Osiris.

For more than 3000 years princess Maketaten (but it could also have been Beketaten who led the revolt against her father) waited at the gates of Osiris... And then she was in some way or another "released" by Count LouisHamon, a famous occultist of the late 19th and early 20th century. Using the name "Cheiro", which is Greek for "hand", he predicted a number of first rank world events. In 1925 he published Cheiro's Book of World Predictionswith many startling and uncanny prophecies for the 20th century.

In the 1890s, Cheiro was in Luxor where he became friendly with a sheikh - or according to other sources: an Arab mystic. When Cheiro cured this man from malaria, the sheikh expressed his gratitude by presenting to him the mummified hand of the daughter of Akhnaton. Cheiro added the hand of the Egyptian princess to the treasures and curiosities he collected during his world travels in search for the unknown and the unexplained.

In 1922, when he was living with his wife in England, he noticed that the hand that had been in a perfect stone-like preservation for many centuries, suddenly softened. To his amazement blood appeared in the veins under the skin. The hand became pliable and even began to "bleed".

On Halloween night, Cheiro and his wife decided to give the hand of the princess a proper funeral. When he burned it in the fireplace, reading prayers from the Egyptian Book of the Dead, the doors burst open with a sudden uprising of wind... and in the doorway stood the spectre of Nefertiti's daughter. She made a splendid appearance in her ancient royal apparel, with the serpent of the House of the Pharaohs glittering on her head-dress.

As she went over to the fire, Cheiro noticed that her right arm ended at the wrist. The phantom bent over the fire and was gone... And so was the mummified hand that had been in the fire...

The Curse of Tutankhamen

This happened on the last day of October, 1922. In the days that followed, Cheiro became increasingly agitated. He sensed something dreadful would happen soon somewhere in Egypt.

On 4 November, Howard Carter, the archaeologist whose expedition in the Nile Valley was financed by Lord Carnarvon, discovered the tomb of Tutankhamen. As Frank Usher relates it in his article Ghosts of Ancient Egypt: "A story had been told for centuries that Akhnaton had chosen Tutankhamen to succeed him because he possessed some kind of supernatural powers, and that these powers had protected his sacred tomb throughout the ages."

When he heard of the imminent opening of the tomb, Cheiro wrote urgently to Lord Carnarvon, recounting his fantastic experience with the hand of Tutankhamen's sister-in-law. He begged him not to defy the curse and enter the forbidden tomb. Cheiro even send him a telegraph, saying that Lord Carnarvon would suffer sickness and would not recover if he entered the tomb: "Death will claim him in Egypt!"

Carnarvon was impressed, but Carter would not listen. He had no intention of giving up years of hard labour because of an ancient curse that had to frighten the superstitious and the ignorant. On 22 February, 1923,Carnarvon first entered the tomb, followed by Carter. They found Tutenkhamen in a splendid sarcophagus of blue and gold; the mummy case was inlaid with gold and lapis lazuli.

Carter immersed himself in the fascinating excavations which occupied him until 1924, completely undisturbed by the curse. He died in 1939 at the age of 66.

Lord Carnarvon however, was bitten by a mosquito and died in Cairo on 5 April, 1923. A few years later his brother committed suicide and his stepmother diead after another mysterious insect bite...

More Hauntings of Ancient Egypt: A Titanic Mummy's Curse