Primed to Believe

The public was ready for this story long before Carter dug. Victorian Britain was gripped by Egyptomania — mummy-unwrapping parties, ghost stories, and stage shows about vengeful tombs.

Fiction had already drawn the blueprint. Bram Stoker's 1903 novel "The Jewel of Seven Stars" featured a reanimated queen and a deadly curse nearly two decades before the tomb opened. So when a real aristocrat died, audiences slotted it into a plot they already knew by heart.