# The Priestess of Death

> A painted coffin lid in the British Museum was blamed for deaths, ruin and even the Titanic, though its curse was largely made up in London drawing rooms.

Culture & Legends · Case file 041 · 2026-11-08  
Canonical: https://www.tenebrae-magazine.com/unlucky-mummy-british-museum-curse/  
Publisher: Tenebrae Magazine

![A glass photographic plate under red light showing a furious Egyptian woman’s face](https://www.tenebrae-magazine.com/images/unlucky-mummy-darkroom-plate-shows-a-living-face.webp)

*In the legend, a photographer found a living woman’s face on his plate instead of the coffin lid’s calm painted one.*

On 3 June 1904, the Daily Express put an Egyptian coffin lid on its front page. A priestess of Amen-Ra, it said, had punished everyone who handled her painted likeness, and the British Museum had her on public display. The lid is still there today, in Room 62.[1][3]

## A lid without a body

The object at the centre of the story is not a mummy at all. British Museum number EA 22542 is a mummy-board, a shaped wooden cover that lay directly on top of a wrapped body inside one or two outer coffins. It is about 168 centimetres long, coated in plaster and painted in red, blue and two shades of green, with a pair of hands carved in relief so that they stand out from the chest.[1]

The museum dates it to about 950 BC, in the Twenty-first Dynasty, and it almost certainly came from Thebes, the great temple city on the Nile at modern Luxor. Its decoration is conventional for the period: a broad collar across the shoulders, baboons worshipping the rising sun, figures of Osiris and protective gods, and the name of Amenhotep I, a long-dead king worshipped as a local god in Thebes.[1][2]

What it does not carry is a name. The short inscriptions on the board are religious formulas, because the outer coffins were where the dead person’s identity was written, and those coffins never reached London. The beardless face and open hands mark the owner as a woman, and the quality of the work suggests she was well off. Early museum publications called her a “priestess of Amen-Ra”, a reading of her status as one of the women who sang or played in the temple of Amun, and the title stuck.[1][2]

How a mummy-board came to be separated from its body is not recorded, but the trade that made it possible is well documented. By the 1860s the west bank at Luxor was one of the busiest antiquities markets in the world, supplied by villagers who dug in the Theban tombs and sold through local dealers and consular agents to travellers on the Nile. A painted lid was light, decorative and easy to ship, while a body was not. Twenty years later Walter Ingram, whose own curse story belongs in this one, paid £50 for a sarcophagus in the same town.[3][15]

Her body did not come to London either. The museum’s records show the board arriving in July 1889 as a gift from Mrs Warwick Hunt of Holland Park, presented on behalf of Arthur F. Wheeler. A 2012 account of Luckhurst’s research describes the donor as Wheeler’s sister, which would make her the married sister of the legend that grew up around the board. The board went on show in the First Egyptian Room soon afterwards and has been on display almost continuously ever since, apart from the two world wars, when it was taken out of its case for safety.[2][5]

## A gentleman on the Nile

The story of a curse begins not with the priestess but with an Englishman. Thomas Douglas Murray, born in 1841, was a wealthy amateur Egyptologist with a taste for the occult. The literary historian Roger Luckhurst, who reconstructed his life for his 2012 book The Mummy’s Curse, describes a London socialite whose parties in the 1870s brought together painters, actors and adventurers just back from Africa.[3][4][15]

In the version of events that Luckhurst was able to piece together, Murray bought a mummy case at Luxor in the mid-1860s. Soon afterwards, while out shooting, he slipped and his gun went off, shattering his arm, which had to be amputated. He survived, and lived to seventy with one arm, but the accident became the first misfortune in what would later be told as a chain of disasters.[3][4]

That telling has never been consistent. Some versions give the case to one of four young Englishmen on a holiday up the Nile, and in others it is Wheeler, not Murray, who wounds himself. In one variant a servant shoots a member of the party. The name in the museum’s acquisition record is Wheeler’s, and the museum’s online catalogue entry does not mention Murray at all, which is one reason the story’s early history has been so hard to fix.[1][2][5]

Even the date drifts. Luckhurst and his reviewers place the purchase in 1865, while Stead, writing in 1909, put it more than thirty years in the past, which would mean the 1870s. The museum’s curators split the difference and say the travellers were on the Nile in the 1860s or 1870s. The gap matters, because a quarter of a century separated the purchase from the gift to the museum, and almost nothing is known about where the board was for most of that time.[1][4][6]

Murray went on to a quieter kind of fame. In 1902 he published an edition of the trial records of Joan of Arc, with an introduction by Mark Twain. He was also a Spiritualist and a member of the Ghost Club, the society of gentlemen who met to discuss hauntings and psychic phenomena, and that was the world in which his Egyptian souvenir acquired its reputation.[4][12]

![A young Victorian traveller falling as his shotgun fires by the Nile at dusk](https://www.tenebrae-magazine.com/images/unlucky-mummy-douglas-murray-gun-bursts-on-the-nile.webp)

*Douglas Murray lost his arm in a shooting accident in Egypt in the 1860s, soon after buying a mummy case at Luxor.*

## A house where nothing went right

By the time the story reached print, the troubles had moved from the Nile to a house near London. The case, according to the most detailed early accounts, passed to the married sister of one of the travellers, and from the moment it entered her house the family met illness, accidents and bad luck. A clairvoyant visiting the house, named in a 1909 magazine article as Madame Helena Blavatsky, the founder of Theosophy, is said to have sensed a powerful and malignant influence and urged that the case be got rid of at once.[1][6]

The most famous detail involves a camera. A photographer, the story goes, was asked to record the painted face, and when he developed his plate he found not the calm features on the lid but the face of a living Egyptian woman staring out with open malevolence. In some tellings he died soon after, and in others he killed himself. The lady of the house took the hint and arranged for the case to go to the British Museum.[6]

Even the delivery was said to have gone wrong. In the version W. T. Stead gave in 1909, the man who took the case to the museum died within a week, and the man who helped him carry it in suffered a serious accident. Later still, a museum photographer was said to have smashed his camera and cut his face, and one of his children narrowly escaped drowning.[6]

None of these incidents has ever been tied to a named person, a date or a record. The British Museum’s own catalogue entry treats the whole sequence as folklore, and says plainly that the stories have no basis in fact. Its curators note the Blavatsky episode only as something the clairvoyant is alleged to have done.[1]

![A woman in a Victorian drawing room recoiling from a painted mummy case](https://www.tenebrae-magazine.com/images/unlucky-mummy-clairvoyant-recoils-from-the-case-in-a-london-drawing-room.webp)

*A 1909 magazine story said Madame Blavatsky sensed an evil influence in the case and urged that it be sent away.*

## Front page, June 1904

The man who turned this drawing-room gossip into news was Bertram Fletcher Robinson. Born in Liverpool in 1870, he had made his name as the Daily Express’s chief war correspondent in South Africa and then worked as an editor on the paper from 1900 until May 1904. He was also a close friend of Arthur Conan Doyle, and had shown Doyle the Dartmoor legends that helped produce The Hound of the Baskervilles.[7]

On 3 June 1904, a month after leaving his editorial post, Robinson published “A Priestess of Death: Weird Story of an Egyptian Coffin” on the front page of the Express. He told the story of the case and its victims, and he claimed to hold proof of the identity of everyone who had suffered, adding that he had been asked to suppress their names for the sake of their families.[3][13]

The story travelled quickly. By 19 June it had reached the Atlanta Constitution, under a headline about a priestess dead for centuries who was still able to slay and afflict. The Express had found something that would sell papers for decades, a curse that did not belong to a distant tomb but sat in a glass case in Bloomsbury, where anyone could go and look at it.[2][3]

![A crowd at a London newsstand reading a paper with a coffin lid on it](https://www.tenebrae-magazine.com/images/unlucky-mummy-daily-express-priestess-of-death-at-a-london-newsstand.webp)

*On 3 June 1904, Bertram Fletcher Robinson’s “A Priestess of Death” put the British Museum lid on the Express front page.*

Robinson died on 21 January 1907 at his home in Eaton Terrace, Belgravia, aged thirty-six. His death certificate gave enteric fever and peritonitis, and his friend Max Pemberton believed he had picked up typhoid from contaminated water during a visit to the Paris Motor Show the previous month. It was an ordinary death for the period, but it came three years after the article, and Robinson’s friends in occult circles soon connected the two.[7]

## Stead and the séance

The second great promoter of the story was William Thomas Stead, the most famous campaigning journalist of the age. Stead had exposed child prostitution in London in the 1880s and served a prison sentence for the way he did it. By the 1890s he was also a committed Spiritualist, and he co-edited Borderland, a quarterly devoted to psychic research, which made him an obvious ally for Douglas Murray.[4]

Together, according to later accounts, Murray and Stead went to look at the board in the museum and decided that its painted face was that of a soul in torment. They asked the museum for permission to hold a séance in the Egyptian galleries to relieve the priestess’s suffering. The museum refused. The idea that her spirit was angry about being displayed, and that something might be done to calm her, then became part of the legend.[8]

In August 1909 Stead set the whole story out for American readers in Hearst’s San Francisco Examiner, under a headline announcing that the ghost of the mummy was haunting the British Museum and must go. He told of four young gentlemen who had brought the case back from the Nile more than thirty years earlier, and he listed the shooting, the ruin, the photographs and the accidents at the museum. He added that Robinson, “an old acquaintance”, had written the story for the Express and died within a few weeks, which was an exaggeration: Robinson had died nearly three years later.[6]

The same summer, Pearson’s Magazine ran “The Mysterious Mummy” by G. St. Russell. The magazine belonged to the same owner as the Daily Express, and its version added the clairvoyant’s visit and the malevolent face on the photographic plate. Between them, the two 1909 accounts fixed most of the details that are still repeated today.[2][6]

Stead’s article had a news hook. That summer, he claimed, the museum was so troubled by accidents among visitors to the Egyptian Room that it planned to take the lid off display. It did nothing of the kind, but Stead used the occasion to warn that moving her would bring disaster, a prediction that The Times would remember twelve years later.[2][6]

![Two Edwardian men studying a painted coffin lid in a museum gallery](https://www.tenebrae-magazine.com/images/unlucky-mummy-stead-and-murray-study-the-painted-face-in-the-egyptian-room.webp)

*Stead and Douglas Murray decided the painted face showed a soul in torment, and asked to hold a séance in the museum.*

## A story told at sea

Douglas Murray did not live to see the legend’s most famous chapter. He died at his home at Iver in Buckinghamshire on 1 November 1911, aged seventy, leaving about £28,000 and a will that a New Zealand newspaper found worth reporting at length. He asked for his body to be watched for four days with a bell tied to his wrist, for a surgeon to sever his spinal cord once decomposition began, and for his ashes to be scattered on the Wiltshire downs near Stonehenge.[11]

Five months later, W. T. Stead sailed on the Titanic, on his way to speak at a peace congress in New York. On the evening of 12 April 1912, the third night out, a group of first-class passengers began telling ghost stories in the smoking room, and Stead told them about the haunted mummy case in the British Museum. The Titanic historian George Behe, who reconstructed the evening for the Titanic Commutator in 1995, says Stead warned that anyone who retold the story would meet a dire end.[9]

One of his listeners survived. Frederic Seward, a New York lawyer who sat next to Stead at the saloon table and later escaped in lifeboat 7, told a reporter after the sinking that Stead had talked a great deal about Spiritualism, thought transference and the occult. He said Stead had described a mummy case that brought calamity on anyone who wrote its story, and had added that he would never write it himself. Stead had in fact published it in 1909.[5][10]

Seward also became cautious. When a New York reporter later asked him to repeat the story in full, he declined, and Behe reads that refusal as a sign that even a sceptical lawyer did not want to tempt fate. Newspapers did the retelling for him. In May 1912 the St Louis Post-Dispatch ran a feature titled “The Ghost of the Titanic”, built around Stead’s supper-table tale.[6][9]

![A bearded man telling a story to listeners in a ship's panelled smoking room](https://www.tenebrae-magazine.com/images/unlucky-mummy-stead-tells-the-story-in-the-titanic-smoking-room.webp)

*On 12 April 1912, three nights out, Stead told Titanic passengers the story of the British Museum’s haunted mummy case.*

At this stage the link was only an association: the man who told the story had died, and the story said that tellers were punished. Over the next four years it hardened into something more specific. By 1916, people were saying that the mummy itself had been on board, that it had been sold by the museum to an American collector and that its curse had sunk the ship.[9]

Other versions put the case on the Empress of Ireland, which sank in the St Lawrence in May 1914, or on the Lusitania, torpedoed a year later. Each disaster at sea seemed to find room for it. What none of these versions explains is how a lid that was on show in Bloomsbury throughout those years could have been on the ocean floor at the same time.[4]

## Margaret Murray’s joke

The British Museum’s Keeper of Egyptian and Assyrian Antiquities, Sir Ernest Wallis Budge, was asked about the Titanic version in 1916. He told the journalist Marion Ryan of the Weekly Dispatch, in an interview published on 27 August, that no such mummy existed in the museum and that it had never sold any object to an American millionaire for shipment on the Titanic. He suggested that the legend had grown out of stories about two or three other mummies, among them one that had belonged to Walter Ingram.[9]

Budge’s explanation was more interesting than a flat denial. Ingram’s mummy, he said, had itself been on exhibition at the British Museum for a time before its owner sold it on to Lady Meux. Two Egyptian burials with curse stories attached had passed through the same building within a few years, and in his view the public had simply run them together.[9]

Weeks later, on 30 September 1916, the Spiritualist weekly Light printed a letter from a Miss E. Bates, who said that Douglas Murray had told her much the same account of the case’s misfortunes. Murray’s version reached print again in 1928, when the society palmist Cheiro, whose real name was William John Warner, described his own conversations with Murray in his memoirs.[9]

The most surprising claim about the Titanic version came from inside the profession. Margaret Murray, no relation of Douglas, was an Egyptologist at University College London and later a notorious writer on witchcraft. She lived to be a hundred, and in old age she told the ghost-hunter Peter Underwood that she had invented the Titanic story herself.[9]

She was no stranger to the theatre of Egyptology. In 1908 she had led the public unwrapping of two Middle Kingdom mummies at the Manchester Museum in front of an audience of several hundred people, a scene recorded in a photograph that Behe reproduces. She knew exactly how much the public wanted from a mummy, and how little it took to supply it.[9]

According to Underwood, a distinguished woman scientist with a taste for the occult once asked Murray for the real story of the haunted case. Murray, in a playful mood, made one up. The museum, she said, had quietly swapped the case for a replica and sold the original to an American, who shipped it on the Titanic. After the sinking it was salvaged, sent back on the Empress of Ireland, which also sank, and finally given to the Kaiser just before the First World War broke out.[9]

Murray told Underwood she was amused to hear the tale repeated as fact, and that she used to warn students that anyone who believed in the occult should keep out of the room. Behe concludes that she probably invented the Titanic version some time between 1912 and 1916. That date is his inference, and the whole account comes to us second-hand, through Underwood’s memory of a conversation with a very old woman.[9]

![A small woman telling a story in a museum gallery, ships in shadow behind](https://www.tenebrae-magazine.com/images/unlucky-mummy-margaret-murray-invents-the-titanic-tale.webp)

*Margaret Murray later claimed she invented the Titanic version of the story to tease a credulous scientist.*

## The keeper’s patience

Budge had been dealing with the priestess for years. Readers sent money so that lilies could be placed by her case, and he quietly put it towards the museum’s general upkeep. During air raids in the First World War the board went down to the basement with other valuable objects, but it never left the museum’s care.[8]

By 1921, the museum was reorganising its Egyptian galleries. On 28 March The Times reported the changes, noting that the “Lady of the College of Amen-Ra” was the so-called unlucky mummy and that Stead had predicted that any attempt to move her again would probably destroy the whole room. She had since been moved within her wall-case, the paper said, and none of the predicted disasters had followed.[2]

Two years later the legend got its biggest lift. Lord Carnarvon died in Cairo on 5 April 1923, weeks after the opening of the burial chamber of Tutankhamun, and the press reached for a curse. Conan Doyle was in New York at the start of a Spiritualist lecture tour, and when reporters asked him about Carnarvon he brought up his old friend Robinson. The Daily Express printed his remarks on 7 April. He said Robinson had died of typhoid, but that the elementals guarding the mummy might have worked through such an illness, and that he had warned Robinson against concerning himself with the mummy at the British Museum.[2][7]

The New York Times ran a long feature the same day, headlined “Weird Misfortunes Blamed on Mummy”. It repeated the photographer, the servant who lost his arm and the American who was supposed to have taken the case aboard the Titanic, but it also quoted Budge, who called the legend a series of misunderstandings and pointed out that the museum had never parted with the lid.[8]

![Timeline: purchase about 1865; museum gift July 1889; Express story 3 June 1904; Robinson dies 1907; Stead and Pearson’s 1909; Titanic 1912; Budge denial 1916; Times 1921; Doyle 1923; Budge disclaimer 1934; first loan abroad 1990](https://www.tenebrae-magazine.com/images/unlucky-mummy-curse-legend-timeline-1865-1990.svg)

*From a Nile purchase to a front page and a shipwreck, the curse was assembled over half a century in London.*

Budge wrote a final disclaimer, published in 1934, the year he died. By then he had spent decades watching a coffin lid in his own galleries acquire a body count, and the myth went on growing after his death.[2]

It never stopped. Alan Moore’s graphic novel From Hell, set in 1888, sends the royal physician Sir William Gull to stand in front of the board, and Moore’s notes call it one of the great cursed mummy cases. Guides, ghost walks and websites still repeat the photographer, the carrier and the Titanic, often in a single breath.[2]

## Ingram and the elephant

Budge’s mention of Walter Ingram points to the other Victorian curse story that Luckhurst traces, and in some ways it is the more dramatic. Ingram, born in 1855, was a son of Herbert Ingram, the founder of the Illustrated London News, and had fought in the Zulu War and in the Sudan campaign to relieve General Gordon. In the mid-1880s, in Egypt, he bought a mummy and its painted coffin as a souvenir, reportedly for £50. The mummy was a priest named Nesmin.[4][14][15]

On 6 April 1888, on an elephant hunt near Berbera in Somaliland, Ingram wounded an elephant with a gun too light to stop it, and the animal trampled him to death. His coffin passed to Lady Meux, who kept a private museum of Egyptian antiquities at Theobalds Park in Hertfordshire, and it is now at the Rhode Island School of Design. The story that it had carried a terrible inscription promising death to whoever disturbed it was invented afterwards, and the curse was reshaped to fit whoever met misfortune next.[4][14]

Luckhurst argues that these two stories, Murray’s and Ingram’s, prepared the ground for the far greater sensation of 1923. Both involved English gentlemen who bought mummy material on the grey market of the antiquities trade, and both were told and retold in the same newspapers, drawing rooms and Spiritualist circles that later turned on Carnarvon.[3][4]

## Why London wanted a curse

Egyptologists often point out that ancient Egyptian culture had very little idea of a curse in the modern sense, and certainly no tradition of mummies avenging themselves on museum visitors. The curse is a British invention, and Luckhurst sets out to explain why it appeared when it did.[3][4]

His answer begins with London itself. For most of the nineteenth century Egypt arrived in the capital as a spectacle, in the Egyptian Hall in Piccadilly, at the Crystal Palace and in public unwrappings of mummies. By the late Victorian period the mood had darkened. Britain occupied Egypt from 1882, and the steady flow of bodies and coffins into private houses and imperial museums began to look less like learning and more like plunder. In Luckhurst’s reading, curse stories were a disguised way of working through those anxieties.[4]

The 22542 story also suited its moment in more particular ways. Spiritualism was at its height, and many people believed that photographs could capture what the eye could not, which is why a plate showing a living face was so persuasive. The press barons who owned the Express and Pearson’s had learned that a serial supernatural story could sell for years. A coffin lid that could not be identified, could not speak and could not leave its case was the perfect subject, because nothing about it could ever contradict what was said.[3][4][6]

![Edwardian visitors gathered at a museum case with lilies laid below it](https://www.tenebrae-magazine.com/images/unlucky-mummy-lilies-before-the-case-in-the-egyptian-room.webp)

*Readers sent money for lilies to be placed by the case, and Budge quietly spent it on the museum’s upkeep.*

## Where the story stands

As of November 2026, the mummy-board EA 22542 is on display in Room 62 of the British Museum, in case 21. It has left the building only for touring exhibitions: to Australia in 1990, to Japan in 2003–04, to South Korea, China, Taiwan and Hong Kong between 2005 and 2007, and to Singapore in 2015–16. It has never been to America, and it was not on the Titanic.[1]

The museum’s own catalogue entry now describes the board as best known for its “strange folkloric history”, before turning to its collar, its baboons and its gods. That is a fair summary of how most visitors meet it, though the history is a modern British one, not an Egyptian one.[1]

The core of the legend is not in doubt. A painted coffin lid of a Theban woman came to the museum in 1889 through the Wheeler family, Douglas Murray did lose an arm in Egypt in the 1860s, and Robinson, Stead and Conan Doyle did write and talk about a curse. Every death and accident attributed to the board, though, comes from stories told by those men and their friends, with names withheld and no dates attached.[1][2][3]

The open questions are about the telling, not the curse. Robinson’s 1904 article, Stead’s Borderland circle, the Pearson’s feature and the museum’s own correspondence files would show more exactly who added which detail and when. Margaret Murray’s claim deserves a firmer source than Underwood’s recollection. The woman whose face is painted on the lid, meanwhile, remains without a name, three thousand years after someone took care to give her a good one.[1][9]

## Sources

Numbers in square brackets in the text refer to these sources.

1. [Mummy-board (EA22542), ‘The Unlucky Mummy’](https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/object/Y_EA22542) · British Museum collection online
2. [Unlucky Mummy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unlucky_Mummy) · Wikipedia
3. [Downton Abbey and the Curse of King Tut](https://jeremyblevins.com/2012/06/21/downton-abbey-and-the-curse-of-king-tut/) · Roger Luckhurst · 2012-06-21
4. [The Mummy’s Curse: The True History of a Dark Fantasy (review)](https://tomruffles.blogspot.com/2013/02/the-mummys-curse-true-history-of-dark.html) · Tom Ruffles · 2013-02-11
5. [The Mummy’s Curse: The Truth Behind an Edwardian Rumour](https://blogs.ucl.ac.uk/events/2012/05/29/the-mummys-curse-the-truth-behind-an-edwardian-rumour) · Katherine Aitchison, UCL Events blog · 2012-05-29
6. [No. 22,542; Or, The Curse of Amen Ra](https://www.patheos.com/blogs/marginalia/2025/02/no-22-542-or-the-curse-of-amen-ra/) · Marginalia (Patheos blog) · 2025-02-07
7. [Bertram Fletcher Robinson](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bertram_Fletcher_Robinson) · Wikipedia
8. [Weird Misfortunes Blamed on Mummy (New York Times, 7 April 1923)](https://www.encyclopedia-titanica.org/weird-misfortunes-blamed-mummy.html) · Encyclopedia Titanica transcription
9. [The Titanic Mummy: A Mystery Solved](https://wormstedt.com/georgebehe/page19.htm) · George Behe (Titanic Commutator 19:1, 1995, updated)
10. [Frederic Kimber Seward](https://www.encyclopedia-titanica.org/biography/262/) · Encyclopedia Titanica
11. [Bell on Dead Man’s Wrist](https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/newspapers/GIST19120228.2.64) · Gisborne Times (Papers Past) · 1912-02-28
12. [Mark Twain’s geography: 15 August 1899](https://twainsgeography.com/node/21436) · Twain’s Geography
13. [Why the ‘Pharaoh’s Curse’ is a myth: how a 1904 media report gave rise to a legend](https://www.thenationalnews.com/lifestyle/why-the-pharaoh-s-curse-is-a-myth-how-a-1904-media-report-gave-rise-to-a-legend-1.1204491) · The National
14. [Lieutenant Walter Herbert Ingram BA](https://www.britishempire.co.uk/forces/middlesexyeomaningram.htm) · britishempire.co.uk
15. [Necrophiliac Striptease](https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v36/n03/thomas-jones/necrophiliac-striptease) · Thomas Jones, London Review of Books 36:3 · 2014-02