In 1922, Englishman Howard Carter found the tomb of an Egyptian king named Tutankhamen. Some reports say that above the entrance to the tomb, a curse was written: "Death shall come on swift wings to him who disturbs the peace of the king." Carter ignored the curse. He and his friend Lord Carnarvon broke into the tomb. They found amazing collection of treasure and three mummies.
A few months later, Lord Carnarvon, aged 57, got sick and died. The doctor didn't know the exact cause of his death, but said perhaps it was from an infection started by an insect bite. Some say that when he died, there was a short power outage and all of the lights throughout Cairo went out. At his home back in England, his favorite dog howled and dropped dead.
Even more strange, when the mummy of Tutankhamen was unwrapped in 1925, it was found to have a wound on the left cheek in exactly the same position as the insect bite on Carnarvon that led to his death.
Reporters quickly developed the story. By 1935, they claimed that 21 deaths were due to the "Mummy's Curse" However, according to Herbert E.Winlock, the director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, by 1934, only eight people directly connected to the tomb had died. Indeed, Howard Carter, the man who actually opened the tomb., lived to almost 65 before dying of natural causes.
But perhaps some connection did exist. In 1999, a German scientist suggested that the deaths were possibly caused by mold - extremely small, dangerous growths that can survive for thousands of years, even in a dark, dry tomb. For this reason, archeologists now wear special masks and gloves when unwrapping a mummy.