The Curse of Tutankhamun
After the opening of tomb KV62 in the Valley of the Kings in 1922–23, and Lord Carnarvon's sudden death from blood poisoning following a mosquito bite, the newspapers announced the pharaoh's curse and attributed to it every death with any connection to the excavation. There is no curse inscription in the tomb. As early as 1934 the Egyptologist Herbert Winlock counted: of the twenty-six people present at the opening, six died within ten years. In 2002 Mark Nelson of Monash University published a study in the British Medical Journal of forty-four westerners who were in Egypt: the survival of those who entered the tomb and those who did not was the same. Howard Carter lived seventeen years after the dig.
Margery and the Scientific American Prize
Mina Crandon, the wife of a Boston surgeon and known as Margery, was the leading claimant for the $2,500 Scientific American had offered for a genuine mediumistic phenomenon. Harry Houdini sat on the committee; he built a wooden cabinet that closed around her to the shoulders, and after the sittings stated that she produced everything with her head and a foot, ringing the bell box with her knee. Her dead brother Walter left a thumbprint in wax, and that was held to be conclusive — until 1932, when the print was identified as that of the Crandons' living dentist, Frederick Caldwell, who had once shown her how an impression is taken. The prize was never awarded.
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