The curse of Tutankhamun's tomb
Lord Carnarvon died in Cairo on 5 April 1923 after an infected mosquito bite. Press stories then linked his death to a curse on the tomb of Tutankhamun.
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The Griffith Institute at Oxford says a mosquito bit Lord Carnarvon in March 1923. Infection set into the bite. He travelled to Cairo and developed erysipelas and blood-poisoning, then pneumonia. He rallied a few times, then died there on 5 April 1923, and his body went home to Highclere and was buried on the estate, up on Beacon Hill.
The idea of a curse followed his death. Wikipedia records that two weeks earlier Marie Corelli had written a letter, published in the New York World magazine, quoting a book that asserted dire punishment would follow anyone who entered a sealed tomb. Reports then spread of a curse discovered inside the king's tomb, a claim Wikipedia calls untrue.
Live Science quotes the writer Tylsdesley on the stories that grew around the death. In those stories, every light in Cairo went out at the moment Carnarvon died, and his dog Susie, at his English home, howled and died.
"Two weeks before Carnarvon died, Marie Corelli wrote an imaginative letter that was published in the New York World magazine, in which she quoted an obscure book that confidently asserted that "dire punishment" would follow any intrusion into a sealed tomb. A media frenzy followed, with reports that a curse had been found in the King's tomb, though this was untrue.[4] The superstitious Benito Mussolini, who had once accepted an Egyptian mummy as a gift, ordered its immediate removal from the Palazzo Chigi.[16]"
- Curse of King Tut's Tomb Turns 90, Live Science (2013)
- Lord Carnarvon, Griffith Institute, University of Oxford