The Secret in the Titanic's Hold: the curse of the Doomed Sarcophagus
On April 15, 1912, a great tragedy occurred. The Titanic, the grand ocean liner dubbed "unsinkable," struck an iceberg and sank. A legend of an ancient curse surrounds this tragedy.
The story begins in 1910 with Douglas Murray, an English Egyptologist. One day, he was approached on the street by a deranged American who kept raving about a sarcophagus. The American wanted to sell Murray the sarcophagus of an important princess of high rank, discovered in the Temple of Amun-Ra and thought to have lived around 1600 BCE in Thebes.
Murray couldn’t refuse the offer. However, the payment was never completed because the American died a few days later. Murray, being rational and materialistic, dismissed superstitions and strange occurrences—until he experienced them firsthand. The sarcophagus seemed to leave a trail of unexplained deaths and sudden accidents, one of which cost Murray his arm.
Overcome with horror, Murray decided to donate the artifact to the British Museum. However, the curses did not end there. After a photographer died shortly after taking a picture of the mummy and an Egyptologist was found dead in his bed, the museum decided to rid itself of the relic. It was sent to a museum in New York under the condition that it traveled on a "safe" means of transport: the Titanic.
Was it an accident? Or something more sinister?
