Were the deaths of those who entered King Tut’s tomb the result of a curse or of a number of natural causes that, when they are presented collectively, only appear to have been the result of supernatural powers?
Did those who died after enterting King Tut’ tomb suffer from an ancient curse? (Art by Wm. Michael Mott)
In 1932, 10 years after Tut-Ankh-Amon’s tomb had been opened, Jack Pierce, Universal Studios’ master movie monster maker, designed make-up for Boris Karloff, who played the reanimated mummy Im-Ho-Tep in The Mummy. The film became an instant classic horror film. One can only wonder, however, if the mummies would ever have invaded Hollywood without the legend of the Curse of King Tut.
I have written in previous books, such as Worlds before Our Own, of the mummified remains of men and women from a lost and unknown culture scattered throughout the United States. Some of these mysterious mummies are over seven feet tall and are estimated to be many thousands of years old.
And then there are those accounts of somewhat off-kilter doctors and scientists who have devised their own experiments in embalming and mummification.
Somewhere, right now, at a small country fair, a barker is chanting his old come-on and gullible small town folks are plunking down their hard-earned dollars to take a look at “The Marvelous Petrified Indian of Manitou Caverns.”
The mummified remains they are viewing may be petrified, if you’re willing to stretch a point a little, but by no stretch of the imagination is the shriveled package of skin and bones the remains of a Native American tribal member.
The Petrified Indian is Tom O’Neel, a rugged young Irish railroad worker who met an untimely death in a barroom brawl more than 100 years ago—and then his corpse became the victim of a bizarre experiment in frontier embalming and a pawn in a hoax that has carried his homeless remains across America ever since. A dime store wig gave Tom the needed long tribal warrior hair and an old tomahawk still rests in his mummified hands, but Tom O’Neel is no more Native American than General Custer.
The curious saga of Tom O’Neel began when his life ended during a wild shootout between railroad construction workers who poured into the suddenly booming town of Colorado City to lay track for the Colorado Midland Railroad in 1885.
The town coroner who pronounced Tom O’Neel dead was an amazing pioneer physician by the name of Dr. Isaac A. Davis, who had some theories about embalming and the preservation of bodies that had brought him a good deal of scientific note in medical circles of the day.
When attempts to locate relatives of the young railroad worker proved futile, Davis decided to use the body for some of his advanced embalming techniques and removed the corpse to a small stone shed in the city cemetery where he had housed chemicals and other instruments used for the normal preparation of the dead.
Dr. Davis believed that soaking a body in certain chemicals he had concocted, then drying the corpse in the mountain sunlight, could produce a cured body that would defy decay, much as the methods employed by Egyptian priests had preserved the remains of the ancient pharaohs.
For more than two years the frontier scientist alternately soaked and baked poor Tom O’Neel and injected chemical compounds into his lifeless veins.
Soon, the body began to take on the dark brown, leathery appearance of old cowhide and the once brawny figure of Tom O’Neel shrunk to a withered sack of skin and bones that weighed no more than 60 pounds.
It isn’t quite certain what ultimate use Dr. Davis hoped to make of what he learned by experimenting on the remains of the young construction man, but death came to claim the doctor himself, and relatives hastened to be rid of the macabre mummy.
The family made a mistake, however, in selecting two local ne’er-do-wells to take the mummy to the cemetery for a decent burial. Quickly assessing the money-making potential represented by the mummy, the pair found themselves a black wig, some old Indian buckskins, several strands of beads, and managed to dress O’Neel’s shrunken body. They found an old tomahawk to shove into the jar, and they headed off into the sunset to make their fortune as traveling showmen by exhibiting the remains of the “marvelous petrified Indian.”
The project almost went awry at once when the two took some of the early proceeds of their ill-gotten gains and got roaring drunk, leaving Tom lying about in a Wyoming railroad depot unclaimed for several days.
When suspicious railroad officials opened the casket-like packing crate and discovered the mummy, sheriff’s officers clapped the two budding showmen in irons for grave robbery.
Wires sent back to Colorado, however, turned up no incidents of grave robbing and the officials in Wyoming were happy to be rid of the grisly remains. No charges were filed.
The close brush with the law proved enough to discourage Tom’s owners, however, and when an opportunity to sell the new circus attraction arose, the two partners leaped at it. Tom O’Neel began a new traveling career, this time with a tent show that also featured a two-headed calf and a five-footed goat.
There is no record of how many times the sundried remains of Tom O’Neel changed hands in the years that followed, but old newspapers of the era containing advertisements of the “Wondrous Petrified Indian of Manitou Cavern” are a witness to the long journey across the country in which Tom suffered the continuing indignity of exhibition at countless country crossroads.
One story has it that an old resident of Colorado City, back east for a visit, encountered the show with which Tom was then traveling and attempted to buy the corpse and provide it with proper burial. The compassionate man was turned down by the low-budget Barnum in charge, who claimed he was making a fortune with the petrified Indian.
Just where poor Tom O’Neel is right now isn’t known, but chances are the long-dead Irish workman is still being displayed and represented as a relic from the mysterious path. His spirit must surely be horribly restless, and his Irish temper at full boil. We can only pity those sideshow tent gawkers if anyone accidentally breaks the jar and frees the Manitou Grand Canyon Mummy.
In the curious case of Tom O’Neel, a pioneering physician named Isaac A. Davis experimented with embalming fluids in an attempt to preserve the body of the man who died in an 1885 shoot out (art by Ryan Mott).
The marking of graves goes back into remote antiquity. The ancient Hebrews buried their dead and used stone pillars to mark the graves. The Greeks often placed gravestones and various kinds of ornate sculpture on their burial sites.
The Assyrians (c. 750–612 B.C.E.) dug huge excavations which sometimes reached a depth of 60 feet into which they cast the bodies of their dead, one upon the other. Even when they began to place their dead in coffins, the Assyrians continued to pile one above the other in great excavations.
The Iberians, the original people who inhabited the peninsula where modern day Portugal and Spain exist, buried their leaders with great pomp and ceremony in chambers made of huge stones, covered over with earth. The bodies were placed in these megalithic chambers in a sitting posture. The Aryans, an Indo-European people, burned their dead and placed