A Story Worth Believing

The 1920s press ran on drama, and a pharaoh's revenge outsold sober archaeology. Editors stretched a handful of deaths into a pattern and ignored the survivors.

The theory even won a famous champion. Arthur Conan Doyle — the creator of Sherlock Holmes, a man synonymous with cold logic — was by then a devoted spiritualist. Asked about Carnarvon, he told reporters an "evil elemental" might have struck him down. Coming from Sherlock's author, that quote gave the curse credibility it never earned.