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  • 2 days ago
Strange But True S04E06
Transcript
00:00Good evening.
00:26Even the most level-headed among us can be prone to the occasional superstition.
00:32We touch wood for luck.
00:33We step into a busy road rather than walk under a ladder.
00:37And we get that slightly uneasy feeling on Friday the 13th.
00:41All very mild compared to the story we tell tonight of the terrible curse
00:46which some believe lay in wait for over 3,000 years.
00:49Is it all fevered imagination?
00:52Or has it left too many tragic events in its wake to write off as coincidence?
01:01Egypt is home to one of the Earth's most ancient civilizations.
01:06Surrounded by thousands of miles of desert sands, its lifeblood is the river Nile.
01:10The priceless treasures of King Tutankhamun.
01:20Filling his tomb and antechambers are objects of breathtaking beauty.
01:24The ancient Egyptians believed Tutankhamun would take them with him to the next world.
01:36But when they left these artifacts behind, did they also leave something darker?
01:41Something which would strike at those who dared to disturb what rightfully belonged to their king?
01:46It is 1922 and for more than 30 centuries, no one has set foot into this secret place hidden below the sun-baked, inhospitable desert.
01:51In the Valley of the Kings, for the sands of time are running out.
01:54It is 1922 and for more than 30 centuries, no one has set foot into this secret place hidden below the sun-baked, inhospitable desert in the Valley of the Kings.
02:17But the sands of time are running out.
02:22Thousands of miles away in Hampshire is Highclere Castle, family seat of the 5th Earl of Carnarvon.
02:28His meeting with Egyptologist Howard Carter will quite simply make history.
02:33Five thousand pounds and we don't have anything to show for it.
02:36But my Lord, the tomb is there and now we know where we should be concentrating our excavations.
02:42My Lord, I believe the area will prove most fruitful.
02:47But one cannot go on searching forever.
02:49I cannot fund some impossible gamble.
02:52But my Lord, think of the prize.
02:55And think how you would feel should it be another who makes the discovery which you now most surely have earned.
03:01If you would permit Mr. Bethel to show you the search area more precisely.
03:12The Valley of the Kings.
03:14Yes, my Lord.
03:16The East Valley.
03:18Very well, Carter, you have one more chance.
03:25My grandfather didn't suffer fools gladly.
03:28He was interested always in archaeology in this country.
03:32I think it was finding bits and pieces of funeral artifacts from Tutankhamen's grandfather that encouraged Carter to advise my grandfather that there were still one place which had never been dug at all.
03:51So in October, November 1922, they agree to have one final go at it.
03:56If it doesn't work this time, we'll never look again.
03:59The rest is history.
04:04I can only guess, but I imagine my grandfather was very excited when he received the telegram.
04:10From Carter.
04:11At last, have made wonderful discovery in Valley.
04:14A magnificent tomb with seals intact.
04:17Recovered same for your arrival.
04:19Congratulations, Howard Carter.
04:24We found it.
04:25It was the most important find in the history of archaeology.
04:28In my view.
04:29The most complete pharaonic tomb that had ever been discovered.
04:33A bit like the moonshot, you know, in the 1960s, it had that sort of media attention.
04:37Carnarvon, in common with a lot of the aristocracy in the 1920s, who'd come out of the First World War, was very interested in spiritualism and in the occult.
04:47Upstairs, in the East Anglia bedroom, there were said to be sort of seances and table wrapping and that sort of stuff.
04:56It was here during a seance that Lord Carnarvon was warned that should he go into the tomb, he would be in grave danger.
05:04There was another supposed warning to Lord Carnarvon and the rest of the expedition, when a famous novelist of the time, Mari Corelli, wrote to the Times in March 1923, claiming that the most dire punishment follows any rash intruder into a sealed tomb.
05:20Finish!
05:21Finish!
05:22Finish?
05:23Whatever the danger, no one would jib but this adventure.
05:26And what an adventure!
05:29A challenge to the psychic powers of the ages.
05:33I think his interest in the occult and his interest in Egyptology were two separate things in his life.
05:44And they were obsessed with finding the tomb, so I guess that's why, if there were warnings, they were ignored.
05:50Lord Carnarvon's 20-year-long quest finally ended on February 17th, 1923, when he and Carter found themselves at the entrance to the burial chamber itself.
06:03This is what we've been working for!
06:07Kisses!
06:12If he goes down in that spirit, I'll give him six weeks to live.
06:15Arthur Weigel was an ex-Egyptologist employed by the Daily Mail, so he started producing various stories, amongst which the story that Carnarvon went into the tomb with a broad grin on his face,
06:27and Weigel said, if he has that attitude, I doubt whether he'll last six weeks.
06:32This isn't really working for me!
06:34Yes!
06:35Yes!
06:36Yes!
06:37Yes!
06:38Come, come, come, come, come, come!
06:41Huh?
06:42Can you see anything?
06:44Wonderful things!
06:49And when they realised the seals weren't broken...
06:51Wonderful things!
06:52...the doors of the shrine were sealed with touch seal.
06:55That was the moment they knew there was something inside.
06:58Carnarvon must have been fantastically excited.
07:00Almost blew a fuse.
07:02Oh, my Lord!
07:05When the news of the dig reached the papers, and it was the first peacetime mass media event of the 20th century, someone wrote to the papers and said that when Carter first found the tomb, there was a curse in hieroglyphics.
07:21Fabulous stuff.
07:25Death comes on swift wings to he who disturbs the pharaoh's rest.
07:40There's no doubt there was a curse on nearly all the pharaoh's tombs. As far as this particular tomb was concerned, it would have been the same.
07:53Carter had a pet canary in the Valley of the Kings, and the day the tomb was opened, a cobra got into his house, and somehow managed to get into the cage, and the poor canary was eaten.
08:08The cobra on King Tutankhamen's crown was a symbol of power.
08:13The sacred cobra in the tomb would spit fire at people who tried to disturb the rest of the pharaoh.
08:19So the cobra eating the canary took on this huge symbolic significance.
08:23After the opening of the burial chamber, Carnarvon suffered a mosquito bite, which at the time seemed nothing more than a minor irritation.
08:32It was said by some that Carnarvon was bitten on the left cheek at the exact spot where there's an indentation on the cheek of the Boy King Tut.
08:41Lord Carnarvon thought nothing more of the bite until some days later.
08:47At some stage, my grandfather, he cut himself shaving, cut the mosquito bite, and it became infected, and he got septicemia.
09:00And his temperature starts going up. It's about 102, 104 by this stage. He's getting feverish.
09:06My father heard of my grandfather being very unwell as a soldier in India in the seventh of hours, and he got permission to travel as fast as possible.
09:27Do you remember how those Italians ran like rabbits in Piaga?
09:34Oh, yes. Dear Papa, they did. They did.
09:40We should have shelled them and shot them like rabbits.
09:46Yes. I'm sure you're right.
09:50Immediately, of course, all hell breaks loose. Various things happen simultaneously.
09:55The strangest thing of the lot was the lights going out in Cairo at the time my grandfather died.
10:02There was no answer to it, and therefore, it's still a mystery, unsolved.
10:15My grandfather, Jack Russell, which he'd taken with him on all his other visits, this time he'd left here at Highclere.
10:23At the same time, allowing for time change, let out a howl in the housekeeper's room and died.
10:35Was it King Tutankhamun announcing his revenge?
10:39I think the incident with the dog is suggestive, because, of course, the Egyptians worshipped a god in the form of a dog, Anubis, the jackal god.
10:51And Anubis was a god of embalming, and he was also a god that guarded the corpse.
10:57There's a magnificent statue of Anubis that was found in the tomb.
11:03Isn't it a strange coincidence that a dog dies at the same time as Lord Carnarvon,
11:09when there's a dog in the tomb of Tutankhamun keeping guard?
11:14When my grandfather died, they tried to speak to him across the river, as one might say.
11:24During a seance shortly after Lord Carnarvon's death, his son received a warning from him never to go into the tomb of Tutankhamun.
11:32Lord Carnarvon was laid to rest here at Beacon Hill, overlooking his beloved Highclere Castle, and his Jack Russell Terrier was buried with him.
11:42The fifth earl's son never went into the tomb, and was reported as saying that he would not accept a million pounds to do so.
11:49The current Lord Carnarvon has also stayed well away, despite several invitations.
11:57If the evil curse really exists, surely there'd be more victims.
12:11After all, Lord Carnarvon wasn't the only person responsible for raiding King Tutankhamun's treasures.
12:20The discovery of King Tutankhamun's tomb was the most significant find in archaeological history.
12:26But there were those who believed that an ancient curse would strike at those responsible for raiding its treasures.
12:37After the death of Lord Carnarvon, worldwide attention focused on the curse.
12:42Even the normally restrained times blamed the ancient Egyptian god of death, Osiris.
12:48Meanwhile, it seemed more victims were being claimed.
12:51There was a young man by the name of Richard Bethel.
12:54Now, he was a protege of Carnarvon's.
12:58He was secretary to the expedition, worked very closely with Carter.
13:02He was the son of Lord Westbury.
13:04Many of the artifacts from this tomb and others ended up in his house.
13:10Now, his house was the scene of unexplained bangs, fires were started.
13:18A family servant later says that he started the fires because he was freaked out by the atmosphere.
13:24In November 1929, Richard Bethel, apparently a fit and healthy 46-year-old,
13:30was relaxing at his London club when he had a sudden seizure.
13:35Bethel himself is found dead in a chair in a club for no apparent reason.
13:43Lord Westbury was very upset by his son's death, obviously, and he attributed it to the curse.
13:55Lord Westbury was alleged to have gone around muttering,
13:58it is the curse, the curse has undone us.
14:02He committed suicide, you know, he wasn't killed by a mummy,
14:06but something got to him very badly, and we just don't know quite how.
14:13Lord Westbury jumped to his death.
14:17On the way to Lord Westbury's funeral, the hearse runs over a small boy,
14:23who is also killed.
14:25He had nothing to do with the expedition,
14:28but he was linked to it by this chain of causality and this chain of tragedy.
14:36If the curse really existed, wouldn't it also have hit Howard Carter?
14:52After all, he'd actually discovered the tomb.
14:57He, in fact, lived on for many healthy and happy years,
15:00and died a natural death.
15:02Now, of course, one of the main things that the skeptics always say
15:07when you bring up the subject of the curse is,
15:10oh, well, Carter was in charge of the expedition.
15:14He lived until 1939 for another 16 years.
15:19But I didn't think he came off scot-free.
15:22He did not have the sort of career of success and professional esteem
15:28that you would expect from someone who had made
15:31the greatest archaeological discovery of the 20th century.
15:35Very few people turned up to his funeral.
15:38He was buried in a very small grave.
15:41Just because a dog doesn't bite everybody,
15:44it doesn't say it doesn't bite somebody.
15:47One coincidence, fine. Two coincidences, fine.
15:50But what we have in this case is a whole group of different sets
15:57of coincidences that all seem to cluster around this one tomb
16:03and this one excavation.
16:05And then, of course, Lord Carnarvon's family
16:07was struck by a tragedy as well.
16:10His half-brother, Aubrey, died in a fit of insanity.
16:15His half-sister was bitten rather coincidentally by an insect
16:22and that became infected and she died.
16:25And then there was Lady Carnarvon, Almina,
16:28who was a Rothschilds heiress, a rich woman, you would think.
16:34But she dies penniless in a bedsitter.
16:38Numerous film and television companies have made dramas
16:42and documentaries about King Tutankhamun.
16:45Almost all have been riddled with disaster.
16:47If somebody offered me a million pounds,
16:49I would not go back to Egypt ever again.
16:51There was too many things going wrong and it was really freaky.
16:54Everything went wrong.
16:55Trevor Smith trains animals for film productions
16:58around the world, including a drama shot this year
17:01set around the Tutankhamun story.
17:04If everything went wrong, it possibly could do.
17:06We had to take some saika falcons and fly them in the desert.
17:09And even on the day, they took three days finding the location
17:12and on the day, my man went violently sick
17:15so we couldn't film her.
17:16When we eventually did find the location,
17:18terrific sandstorms blew up and we couldn't film.
17:21So at the end of the day, it was just a total nightmare.
17:24Even Professor Christopher Frayling,
17:26who is sceptical about the curse,
17:28suffered a series of bizarre events
17:30which he finds difficult to explain away.
17:32When we were filming The Face of Tutankhamun in Spring 92,
17:36one or two things happened while we were filming that were quite strange.
17:39Well, I was standing over the sarcophagus in the tomb
17:43and talking all about the curse, actually.
17:46And just as I started talking, all the lights went out.
17:51The famous international hotel in Cairo.
17:54I got into the lift on the 26th floor with the producer.
18:01And there was a loud crack, followed by...
18:04And we started shooting down the lift shaft.
18:07And some sort of braking system was pushing outwards.
18:10And eventually, we got stuck lodged in the shaft,
18:13just below the lower basement.
18:15And I realized at that moment we had fallen down the lift shaft.
18:18I didn't look up to see if King Tut was there with a hacksaw.
18:21And I threw up, actually, all over the car.
18:23I suddenly realized, Christ, I've nearly died.
18:26Peter Graham Scott was the producer
18:28of The Curse of King Tutankhamun's Tomb,
18:31a film which was supposed to star Ian McShane
18:34and was made in 1979 and 80
18:36as part of a lavish co-production to be shown in America.
18:40When we started filming, we had some very simple shots to do
18:45of Ian McShane as Carter.
18:48We were going to do a shot where he drives up.
18:50He was pressing the accelerator instead of the brake.
18:52It shot him over the cliff.
18:54The car hit the ground and he trapped his leg
18:56and it broke pretty badly.
18:58But then we had the terrible problem of who is going to play the lead,
19:01because Ian was going to be out of action for four months.
19:04It might well have been something connected with the fact...
19:08You should not disturb the dead.
19:12Here at St Mark's Graveyard
19:14in the Oxfordshire village of Blackburton
19:16are buried two members from 99 Squadron
19:19based at RAF Brys Norton.
19:21It was their job to fly Tutankhamun's treasures
19:24to an exhibition at the British Museum in London.
19:27In January 1972, I was the loadmaster
19:31on a flight from Brys Norton to Cairo
19:34to collect the relics of Tutankhamun.
19:36I was the senior technical officer of the trip.
19:39The captain held a secret envelope
19:42and was told to open it up at a certain time over the Mediterranean.
19:46Pick up Tutankhamun artifacts, as detailed below, from Cairo Airport.
19:51Maintain absolute security at all times.
19:54I was the co-pilot.
19:56My memory of the load was a pile of tea chests
20:01sitting on the ground outside the aircraft
20:04with one solitary Egyptian soldier sitting on top of them
20:08with a .303 rifle and a cigarette in his mouth.
20:11Didn't seem all that important. Not to them, anyway.
20:14The value of the cargo we had on board this time
20:17was certainly the greatest that I've ever had on board.
20:20At 150 to 200 million pounds, you'd have to go a long way to beat it.
20:24There was a few cryptic remarks, of course, about the curse,
20:27which was bound to happen, but nobody really kind of took any serious
20:30and nobody certainly was worried about it.
20:32The relics on board included Tutankhamun's 22-carat gold death mask
20:38and his coffin.
20:39Four or five of us were playing cards.
20:42And the reason we played cards, because we were totally bored.
20:45That was all it was.
20:47And we lost complete the fact that we were sat on the gold mask.
20:51That had no longer any relevance anymore.
20:53It was a box for us to play cards on.
20:56We all stood up, had enough.
20:58And that's when I stood up and kicked the box.
21:01And said a stupid childish remark.
21:04I've just kicked the most expensive thing in the world.
21:08I do remember kicking a box for my left foot.
21:14And, of course, a couple of years later...
21:22I fell to the ground.
21:25Cursed myself for doing it.
21:27And I happened to look down to pick myself up
21:29and I noticed that my left foot was turned round facing me.
21:33The next day I found out that I had an actual fat broken 37 bones.
21:38It was the same leg with which Ian had kicked the crate containing the death mask.
21:43The RAF medical people have surveyed me again.
21:54And I've got an 80% disability due to the injury alone.
21:58The future isn't exactly rosy for me, but at least I'm sort of round.
22:02Crew member Jim Webb's house was destroyed by fire.
22:06And Captain Rick Laurie died a year later.
22:13Also on board was Ian Lansdowne's best pal in the RAF,
22:16Flight Engineer Ken Parkinson.
22:18Ken was a very good friend of mine and he died Friday the 13th of August 1978.
22:29Ken and myself were probably the closest friend I've ever had in my life.
22:33He was quite a fit man.
22:34He played rugby for the Air Force.
22:36Ken and Rick were in their early 40s.
22:40So naturally we were all surprised to hear two comparatively healthy people,
22:47both play sport very heavily, die so early.
22:52I think people are beginning to realise there is a possibility
22:55that there could be a curse,
22:57purely because of the number of people who have been involved in it.
23:02Archaeologists are still searching for other tombs in the Egyptian valleys.
23:07Bearing in mind the experiences of those who have come into contact with Tutankhamun's tomb,
23:12perhaps it would be wiser to leave the pharaoh's rest undisturbed.
23:26Just for the record, shortly after we began production on this particular programme,
23:30our researcher was struck down by a sudden and inexplicable illness.
23:34It was the first time he'd had to see a doctor in 20 years.
23:36All he needed was to take a few pills and keep away from ancient tombs.
23:42I think I'll go home now. Good night.