Ötzi the Iceman

The body of a man found in the ice on the Austria-Italy border by two German hikers in September 1991. German and Italian media later wrote of a curse on people linked to the find.

On 19 September 1991, Erika and Helmut Simon, German holidaymakers, found a human body while hiking at 3,210 m by Tisenjoch/Giogo di Tisa, within Schnalstal/Val Senales, according to the South Tyrol Museum of Archaeology in Bolzano. Only the upper body showed above the ice. The Simons told the Similaun refuge's landlord. Because the spot lay on the border between Austria and Italy, he called both the Austrian police and the Italian carabinieri. At first the man was taken for a climber killed in an accident.

Lay and specialist media took up the find quickly. German Wikipedia says some of them spun a story of a curse of Ötzi, cast as a modern version of the Tutankhamun curse, and that seven people who had dealt with the body are said to have died, Helmut Simon among them. Italian Wikipedia makes the same Tutankhamun comparison for the run of misfortunes among those who found and studied the body. In 2005 la Repubblica wrote of renewed talk of a curse that would punish whoever had woken the man from 5,000 years in the Similaun ice. Its headline reported the death of the archaeologist who had studied him.

Süddeutsche Zeitung gave ordinary causes for two of the deaths. It wrote that Helmut Simon, a pensioner from Nuremberg who with his wife had long fought to be recognised as the finder, died aged 67 in an accident while hiking in the Austrian Alps. Shortly after his funeral, the head of the rescue team that had searched for him died of a heart attack, which the Salzburg mountain rescue service confirmed to the paper.