A mummy's curse doomed the Titanic.

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by gabezion5

by gabezion5

THE 'UNLUCKY MUMMY', FROM 945 BC, DISPLAYED BY THE BRITISH MUSEUM IN 2007

One of the passengers who went down with the Titanic was William Stead, a British editor who subscribed to early 20th-century spiritualism and had spent the past several years claiming a cursed mummy was causing mysterious destruction and disaster in London. As with other myths about “Egyptian curses” and “Native American burial grounds,” this myth played off of colonialists’ anxiety about the people whose land they had plundered.

On board the Titanic, Stead happily repeated his tale of the mummy’s curse to other passengers. After the ship sank, a survivor recounted Stead’s story to the New York World, and the media picked it up. The next month, The Washington Post ran this headline: “Ghost of the Titanic: Vengeance of Hoodoo Mummy Followed Man Who Wrote Its History.”

Burns says some people linked the “mummy’s curse” to Egyptian artifacts that survivor (and hero) Margaret Brown really did take with her on the Titanic to deliver to a museum in Denver. In other versions of the story, the mummy was actually aboard the Titanic because the British Museum had sold it to an American who was shipping it home, Snopes reports.

But the truth is the so-called “unlucky mummy” is still at the British Museum, and no mummy was ever loaded onto the ship. It was an iceberg, not a curse, that sank the Titanic.