“Downton Abbey” is a popular period drama set in Edwardian England that details the life of the Crawley family, their motley crew of servants and of course Dame Maggie Smith playing the ever witty and sharp tongued granny. Love her. But Downton, with its iconic Gothic facade, is a real place. It’s actually called Highclere Castle and, did you know the real story of its inhabitants is truly stranger than fiction? Let’s fix that. 

 

Hello I’m Shea LaFountaine and you’re listening to History Fix where I discuss lesser known true stories from history you won’t be able to stop thinking about. Last week’s episode about the Trail of Tears was heavy and dark. So I’m hoping this will be a bit of a lighter story for you. I mean, there will be multiple deaths but, yeah, still way lighter.

 

In this episode, we’re traveling to Highclere Castle in the county of Hampshire, England which is about 70 miles west of London. You may recognize it from the show Downton Abbey which shares only a few similarities with the real story of Highclere. 

 

So, I’m a fan of the show, if you can’t tell, but if you’ve never seen it, it’s all good. You’ll still find this episode super interesting, I promise… like ancient curses and mysterious deaths interesting. Also, I promise not to give away any Downton spoilers so no worries there if you’re hoping to watch it someday.

 

Downton Abbey was mostly filmed at Highclere Castle. If you watch the show, you’ll see the castle grounds, library, dining room, sitting room, grand staircase, and upstairs bedrooms featured regularly. The kitchen and servants quarters were filmed at a recording studio though. The actual kitchen at Highclere is modern, with stainless steel appliances. It would never have worked for the filming of Downton which takes place between 1912 and 1926.

 

The show is based on the fictional Crawley family. Robert, the dad, is the 7th Earl of Grantham. He married a wealthy American heiress named Cora, the mom, to save the estate from ruin at some point before the show begins. They have 3 daughters - Mary, Edith, and Sybil. 3 daughters. So, that’s a problem right cause daughters can’t be Earls. So there’s an heir problem right off the bat. 

 

Downton is mostly completely made up but it does borrow some details from reality. Lord Grantham is very loosely modeled after the 5th Earl of Carnarvon. Which, I feel like that name should actually be pronounced “Canavon” like how British people don’t really say r’s. Carnarvon or Carnerven or whatever is just too harsh sounding. I’m gonna say Conarvon. Lord Carnarvon’s name was… ready? George Edward Stanhope Molyneux Herbert 5th Earl of Carnarvon. Everyone in this story has a crazy long name for some reason. 

 

So Grantham and Carnarvon don’t have much in common except that they lived at and were Earls of Downton slash Highclere at the same time - early 1900’s AKA the Edwardian period in England. Another thing - they both married rich heiresses to get  out of debt and basically save their estates from ruin. 

 

Lord Grantham married Cora who becomes Lady Grantham.  Lord Carnarvon married… another long name, get ready… Almina Victoria Maria Alexandra Wombwell. We’ll call her Almina. She was the daughter of Marie Boyer who was married to a guy named Frederick Charles Wombwell. But, they don’t really matter because the Wombwell guy wasn’t actually her father.  She was actually the illegitimate child of Alfred de Rothschild. Yes, you might recognize the name. The Rothschilds are a family of Jewish bankers, originally from Frankfurt, Germany and they’re crazy rich. Like still. They’re still crazy rich with an estimated net worth of 400 billion dollars. So Alfred was loaded and unmarried except he had this daughter Almina. He makes Almina his heiress and basically just gives her whatever she wants. 

 

Lord Carnarvon is in debt. He has this grand manor house , this castle, that’s falling apart around him and he can’t afford repairs. So Lady Almina, the uber rich heiress, is looking pretty darn good to him. But he’s kind of a catch for her too. She’s super rich but she doesn’t really have the respect of London high society because of the whole being born out of wedlock thing. Lord Carnarvon has a title. He’s an Earl. If she marries him she’ll be a Countess and that’s certainly a step up for her. They get married in 1895 and she takes over Highclere and really brings it up to the modern age… like, 1895 modern I mean, so, not modern, but you get it. 

 

So let’s talk about the actual building for a minute, Highclere Castle. The property dates back to the year 749 when an anglo-saxon king gifted it to the Bishops of Winchester, which is like a church guy. I don’t know, it’s like a position in the church and whoever currently had that position got to live at Highclere, I guess. But it wasn’t really Highclere yet it was just like an ancient medieval castle deal. I don’t know, doesn’t really matter cause it got totally rebuilt in 1679 by a guy named Sir Robert Sawyer who was an ancestor of the Earls of Carnarvon. He called it Highclere Place House and it looked totally different then, just kind of like a big house. It didn’t have the towery things on the corners and in the middle like it does now and it was much less ornate, pretty plain. I have some before and after drawings on my instagram @historyfixpodcast, actually if you want to see how the building evolved. 

 

In 1793, King George III made up the title Earl of Carnarvon and gave it to a politician named Henry Herbert. So I guess that’s how it works. The king can just make up titles and hand them out however it pleases him. Herbert was a politician so I’m sure ol’ George was getting something out of it too. So the king makes Herbert the first Earl of Carnarvon and is like “oh yeah you can have that house that your family built too. I’ll let you go ahead and keep your own family's house. You're welcome.” 

 

Herbert, the first Lord Carnarvon is like “the house is pretty okay, but the yard sucks.” So he moves the entire town of Highclere. He’s like “yeah this is my yard now, all 6,000 acres.”  He has the grounds designed by a legendary landscape architect named Capability Brown. Which I just love that name, Capability Brown. It’s just a cool name. His name was actually Lancelot Brown cause, you know Capability isn’t actually a name, it was just a nickname. But I vote we start legit naming babies Capability. It’s a cool name. 

 

In 1843 the third Earl of Carnarvon, so that first guy’s grandson, also named Henry Herbert. Let me just tell you this: there have been 8 Earls of Carnarvon and 6 of them have been named Henry Herbert. So confusing. The other 2 were George Herbert. I’m just realizing, this is why they have such long names so you can tell them apart from all the others. I don’t know that actually just makes it way more confusing. Anyway in 1843 the third Henry Herbert hires an architect named Sir Charles Berry to completely redesign Highclere House into the Highclere Castle we know today. Berry was the architect in charge of designing the British Parliament building, like the one next to Big Ben, and you can really see the similarities. Berry had a very distinct style for sure.

 

The 4th Earl of Carnarvon, another Henry Herbert, drafted the British North America Act of 1867 with Canada's first Prime Minister at Highclere Castle. They presented it to Parliament and this led to, essentially the birth of Canada. So, one could say that Canada was born at Highclere Castle. 

 

So back to 1895. Almina marries the 5th Lord Carnarvon, who was one of the 2 Georges by the way, and moves into Highclere Castle and brings the equivalent of 21 million dollars with her. Almina was tiny. She was called a “pocket Venus,” which is apparently a complement. She’s in charge of this huge 200 plus room house with all these servants. It’s not just a house though it’s like a whole farming estate. So they have farmers who rent the land from them to farm it, I guess. Actually, oats for the late Queen Elizabeth II’s horses come from Highclere Castle. So it’s a big operation, a lot to manage, I’m sure. 

 

Lord Carnarvon and Lady Almina have 2 children - a daughter named Evelyn and a son named yeah, of course, Henry who is to become the 6th Earl of Carnarvon. So they don’t actually have an heir problem like in the show. 

 

Now, Lord Carnarvon loved cars, or automobiles as they were called then. He loved racing automobiles but he got into a bad car accident in Germany in 1901. Now I promised no Downton spoilers so I’m not gonna say anything about that except that this real life automobile accident left Lord Carnarvon in quote “poor health.” Which, I don’t know, I mean I see how he could have been badly injured, like broken bones, concussion, and stuff. I don’t really get how a car accident just leaves you sickly overall. But, whatever it was made the cold, wet British winters pretty unbearable for Carnarvon in his poor health. So he started spending winters in Egypt. 

 

Now, at this time, people are pretty Egypt crazy. They’re super into ancient Egypt - the pyramids, the pharaohs, the  mummies. It’s trending. To explain why, I have to take you back to 1798 when French dictator Napoleon Bonaparte invaded Egypt. Some of his soldiers were repairing an ancient fort near the city of Rosetta and they discovered a stone tablet inscribed with writing in Greek, Demotic, and Hieroglyphics. Yes, this is the Rosetta Stone. So before this discovery, no one understood Egyptian hieroglyphics, they had no idea what any of it meant. But now, on the Rosetta Stone, we have the same text written in all 3 languages. Demotic is like a newer type of Egyptian writing. It’s a bit more of like a handwriting, like script whereas the older hieroglyphics were like little pictures. But anyway, we understand Greek. I mean, I don’t, but people do. So the Rosetta Stone was like a key that could be used to decode the hieroglyphics.

 

And that is exactly what French scholar Jean-Francois Champollion did in 1822. He used the Greek text to translate the hieroglyphics and now suddenly we understand all this ancient Egyptian writing that’s all over everything. Explorers and archaeologists and just rich dudes who could hire archaeologists start excavating and looking for treasure and finding it because now they can read the treasure maps, pretty much. In the mid 1800s the field of Egyptology is born. It’s its own field of study. It’s a big deal. 

 

So Lord Carnarvon is going to Egypt for his health cause it’s all warm and dry there even in the winter and he’s getting sucked into the Egyptology craze. He starts excavating in Thebes but after 6 weeks he only finds one mummified cat. He is not pleased. He wants to get himself an archaeologist and start finding some real treasure. So he’s like “Almina, please buy me an archaeologist.” and she’s like “okay, whatever.” 

 

That archaeologist’s name is Howard Carter, but we have to back it up a little bit to understand how Carter and Carnarvon found each other. Carter was British too. He was actually an artist. He got his start drawing recreations of ancient Egyptian paintings. So he got to join archaeologists at their dig sites so he could draw the paintings and they were like “oh you're a really good artist, do you want to be an archaeologist too?” and I’m sure it was actually more complicated than that but he becomes an archaeologist and also chief inspector for northern Egypt and he starts working in the Valley of the Kings. He’s actually pretty good at it. He pioneered a grid system for mapping the location of tombs and he’s finding all kinds of stuff. 

 

In 1905, Carter is working with an American Egyptologist named Theodore Davis. Davis was actually a lawyer and a businessman but, I don’t know, I guess anyone could just be an archaeologist back then. You just had to have the money to fund it and they were like, “sure, go dig up some mummies, everyone else is doing it. Why not?” During one of their digs, Carter and Davis find a little pile of funerary items that looked to be hidden away by graverobbers a long time ago. And in this pile is a cup with an inscription on the bottom that read Tutankhamun. Now, Carter knew the name of every pharaoh ever discovered but he had never heard of one named Tutankhamun. He’s like “Who is this Tutankhamun guy? Is this a pharaoh that hasn’t been dug up yet?” and Davis is like “Nah, probably nobody.” But Carter still has a suspicion that this Tutankhamun guy is out there somewhere. 

 

But then, disaster strikes. A group of rowdy, drunk French tourists rolls up demanding to be let into some tombs but they didn’t have tickets. Carter’s like “don’t let them in, they don’t have tickets.” The drunk French guys start throwing punches at the Egyptian guards. It turns into this huge fist fight, this brawl. They go crying to the French ambassador who demanded an apology on behalf of the annoying, drunk French tourists. Carter refuses to apologize for doing his job and is forced to resign from his post in 1905. He has a hard time finding another job and starts making art again and selling watercolors on the streets of Cairo. So, he’s totally fallen from grace by no fault of his own.

 

But not really because in 1907 Lord Carnarvon is looking for an archaeologist. They’re basically all booked up except Carter who, remember, is selling paintings on the street at this point. He’s super qualified but, because of the French tourist scandal, out of work. But Carnarvon doesn’t care about the French tourists. He hires Carter and they start finding actual tombs in Thebes. 

 

Now, Thebes is great, but they really want to get into the Valley of the Kings. That’s where Carter found that cup with the mysterious name on the bottom. He still thinks this Tutankhamun guy might be out there somewhere. But Davis, the American lawyer slash businessman slash Egyptologist, that guy who was with Carter when he found the cup - he has exclusive access to the Valley of the Kings and he is all “you can’t sit with us.” 

 

So Carter and Carnarvon are just waiting for Davis to retire and trying to build up their resume in Thebes. They find the tomb of Amenhotep I and a fancy scarab amulet. This is good. They become sort of Egypt’s top archaeologists and when Davis retires, they get the Valley of the Kings. 

 

But then, just when they're about to delve into the Valley of the Kings, World War I breaks out. Everything stops for 3 years. You can’t be playing archaeologist in Egypt when there’s a World War going on. Carnarvon goes back to Highclere, which Almina has turned into a WWI hospital for soldiers. That also happens in Downton Abbey so there’s another similarity there. 

 

By 1917 they’re finally able to start digging. Five years go by without any significant discoveries. It seems like everything has already been found. They’re getting really discouraged. Carnarvon brings Carter to Highclere in 1922 and tells him he’s, well, Almina, is only going to fund one more season of digging and then they’re calling it quits. And then he gives Carter a golden canary. I don’t know why, just to be extra, I guess. Like, you’re doing a terrible job, here’s a canary. 

 

So it’s November of 1922. It’s now or never. This whole time Carter still wants to find this mysterious Tutankhamun but they’ve already looked everywhere. Everywhere except for this one spot where they had found some old worker huts. So it’s like a poor area, right? Worker huts? A king isn’t going to be buried near worker huts. So hopes are low. But they’re like, “it’s the only place we haven’t fully looked.” They’re checking it out when a guy carrying water trips on something, falls, spills the water, whatever. I mean I guess that’s a big deal when you’re in the desert. Everyone’s like “aw come on!” but Carter is like “wait a sec… what did he trip on?” He goes to look and realizes it’s a step, like, the top step of a staircase. 

 

They start digging and they uncover 12 total steps, a whole staircase, leading down into the sand and the top part of a mud sealed entrance to what is presumably a tomb. But they don’t see a name over the door so they don’t know who this is. 

 

Carter stops and goes to send Carnarvon a telegram ASAP. But, when he gets back to wherever he’s staying a servant meets him at the door and tells him that a cobra had eaten his canary, the one Carnarvon gave him as some sort of weird pre-severance package. Now this is apparently a terrible omen and it definitely evokes the whole canary in a coal mine don’t go in there if the canary dies thing. But, to be honest, I’m not sure that this part of the story is true. I mean, it’s possible, there are cobras in Egypt. But it also sounds like something newspapers made up to fuel their 1920s version of clickbait news. We’ll get into that soon. 

 

Carnarvon gets Carter’s telegram and immediately heads to Egypt with his daughter Evelyn. They uncover the full doorway and finally see the name carved above: Tutankhamun. Carter had to have been like jumping up and down when he saw that. Finally, he found this mysterious pharoah no one else believed was out there. Carter’s like “I told you guys!” 

 

So, before I take you in the tomb, let’s talk about Tutankhamun for a minute, good ol’ King Tut. Why had no one ever heard of him? Ancient Egyptians kept really good records. They wrote everything down. And once Champollion translated the Rosetta Stone and everyone figured out how to read hieroglyphics, none of it was really a mystery anymore. They knew all the pharaohs and even where many of them were buried. But, no one had ever heard of a pharaoh named Tutankhamun. Why?

 

Well, Tut was essentially erased from history. His father, Akhenaten made a lot of unpopular changes during his reign. When he died, Tut took the throne. He was 9 years old when he became king. So yeah, he’s a child. He actually tried to reverse some of the changes that his father had made, make the people happy again. But, he had a lot of health problems, many of them genetic. His parents were brother and sister, so that’s a problem genetically speaking. But it wasn’t uncommon at the time. Tut died when he was 17, 18, 19ish from a bone infection in his leg, likely related to a genetic bone condition. 

 

The next pharaoh, Haremheb takes over and erases all traces of Tut and his father Akhenaten from the records. He was not a fan of the changes Akhenaten had made and he didn’t want it repeated so anything written down about them gets destroyed. It’s not like that info is backed up anywhere right? So if you smash this stone tablet with their names on it, they’re just gone. So after a few generations, no one knows Tutankhamun was ever king or where he was buried. 

 

Today, when we think about Egyptian pharaohs, Tut is probably the first one that comes to mind, his gilded death mask inlaid with blue lapis lazuli stripes. In reality, he was unremarkable. He was a child who reigned for less than a decade and then was forgotten about for thousands of years. But, he’s become the quintessential pharoah and that is because of Carter and Carnarvon’s discovery. 

 

So let’s get back to the discovery, the tomb with Tutankhamun’s name over the door. They could tell that the tomb had been opened at least twice but whatever, they’re still stoked. They start unsealing the door which is a process, I’m sure. A crack opens up, a hole in the door as they unsealing it. I’m picturing like a little puff of ancient dust coming out and they can finally peek inside. Carter looks into the antechamber which is the first room, before you get to the actual tomb. Here’s what Carter wrote in his memoirs about that moment: “at first I could see nothing, the hot air escaping from the chamber, causing the candle flame to flicker. But, presently, as my eyes grew accustomed to the light, details of the room within emerged slowly from the mist. Strange animals, statues, gold. Everywhere the glint of gold.” 

 

So yeah this was big. Many pharoah’s tombs had already been excavated but all of them had already been wiped out by grave robbers over the millenia, most valuables stolen, artifacts destroyed, mummies left exposed to the elements to decompose. Tut was different. No one knew he was there so he wasn’t a target like the other pharaohs. 

 

They get the door open and the room is piled from floor to ceiling, 16 foot tall ceilings, with gold boxes, couches, chairs, parts of dismantled chariots and along one wall, flanking a doorway, 2 life size statues of King Tut. One door leading off of the antechamber has already been opened and was never resealed. The room is sort of in shambles but there's still stuff in there, just kind of scattered everywhere. Grave robbers have obviously been here, that’s presumably how that cup had found its way into that pile of hidden treasure Carter found. But, I don’t know they must have been really terrible grave robbers because it’s mostly undisturbed and there doesn’t seem to be much of anything missing. Maybe it’s because they didn’t know who Tutankhamun was, they didn’t think he was important enough to rob. Maybe something happened to them before they could finish the job, I don’t know. They blew it. These aren’t’ like contemporary grave robbers, these are ancient Egyptian grave robbers. Most of the pharaoh’s tombs were raided not long after they were buried in them. So we’re still talking about the last humans entering that tomb thousands of years ago. 

 

Before they can explore further, they have to document and remove everything in the antechamber which took 7 weeks. They took a photo of every object in its natural state, exactly as it was found. I have some of these photos, actually, on my Instagram @historyfixpodcast. It’s pretty cool, check it out. And then they removed them from the tomb, attempting to keep them away from all the journalists and tourists that were, no doubt, flocking at this point. They packed them in crates and sent them to Cairo to be preserved, studied, and eventually displayed. 

 

So this is painstaking work. The whole time they must be eyeing this door between the two statues of Tut, like what is in there? But they have to clear the antechamber first. So the day finally comes in February of 1923, 3 months after the initial discovery of the tomb. They open the door between the 2 statues and reveal another chamber with a massive gilded shrine in the middle. This thing was 16 feet long, 10 feet tall, 9 feet wide. Inside that was another smaller shrine, and then another, and then another. So it’s like a box within a box within a box within a box. And in the very center is a sarcophagus, a golden coffin type situation that’s shaped like Tut. And then there are 3 more coffins inside that, all of them shaped like Tut. These are made of wood but they’re decorated with gold and precious gems. So we’re at like 8 boxes inside of boxes at this point to get to the man’s body. Egyptians were not messing around. And all of this had to be photographed, cataloged, and preserved. 

 

This was huge, this was the first mostly intact pharaoh's tomb that had ever been found. It was mostly completely undisturbed and preserved. 

 

After everything is cleared out of the tomb, Carter goes to Cairo to supervise the preservation of all the artifacts and Carnarvon goes on vacation in Aswan which is still in Egypt. While he’s there he gets a mosquito bite on his face. Not unusual, Aswan is on the Nile River. It’s hot and wet so… mosquitos. But then he accidentally nicks the bite, cuts it open while shaving and it gets infected. The infection spreads and Carnarvon gets super sick. He’s moved to a hotel in Cairo and he ends up dying there on April 5, 1923 of pneumonia and septicemia which is the fancy name for blood poisoning. He had a blood infection from the infected mosquito bite.  

 

Now this is a huge bummer obviously, to die of an infected mosquito bite right after the find of a lifetime like that. Almina continues to fund the whole thing, Carter keeps overseeing the preservation of the artifacts. Everything carries on without Carnarvon. But the press takes the story and runs with it. Newspaper articles start coming out about an ancient curse on Tut’s tomb being the actual cause of Carnarvon’s death. I’m also assuming the journalists were the ones who shortened Tutankhamun to Tut cause I just can’t picture Carter or Carnarvon being like “oh there ya are Tut!” 

 

So the papers claim that Carter had found a tablet in the tomb inscribed with the message “death shall come on swift wings to him who disturbs the peace of the king.” And Carter is like “No, that did not happen.” But they don’t care, they keep pushing this story. Fake news is not a new thing y’all. They also bring up the whole cobra eating the canary thing and point to the fact that the lights in Cairo went out for the 5 minutes leading up to Carnarvon’s death and then they came back on as soon as he died. And apparently there was some sort of power outage right before he died, but was it a curse? Or was it just spotty electricity? I mean this is Egypt in 1923, I can’t imagine the grid was failproof. Also, Carnarvon’s dog, Susie, back in England. Supposedly she let out a mournful howl and then died at the moment of her master’s death. Yes a dog dies in this story, sorry, I should have given a trigger warning for that one. This was apparently reported by Carnarvon’s son who witnessed it, although in reality it was a few hours after his death, not the exact moment. That detail got a little skewed because of the time difference. 

 

So, some weird stuff for sure - the mosquito bite on Carnarvon’s face was in the exact place that the gold of Tut’s death mask was the thinnest, the power outage, the dog dying. I’m ruling out the inscribed tablet and the cobra eating the canary because those appear to be completely made up. The other stuff is weird though. 

 

And it doesn’t stop there. In May, an American railroad executive named George J. Gould died of pneumonia after visiting the tomb. Then in July, Philip Livingston Poe, a relative of Edgar Allan Poe also died of pneumonia after visiting the tomb. So 3 men in 3 months have now died of pneumonia after entering Tut’s tomb. Carnarvon mostly died of the blood infection but he did have pneumonia too.  

 

So the newspapers are going wild with this curse theory and Carter’s not happy about it, he feels like it detracts from the historical significance of the discovery. But you have to admit, there are enough strange occurrences and coincidences at play here, the curse must have been pretty convincing. And it’s another reason Tutankhamun gets launched to international pharoah celeb status despite being relatively insignificant and unknown as a king of Egypt. 

 

So what the what is going on? The journalists are obviously just trying to sell newspapers, but people are actually dying so what is up? 

 

Well some experts do think entering the tomb led to their deaths. But not because of a curse. It was more likely some sort of airborne contaminant that affected their health and led to pneumonia and eventually death. There was all sorts of weird stuff in the tomb used to preserve the body - formaldehyde, ammonia, hydrogen sulfide - plus old moldy food that had been left as offerings, bat droppings - these could have caused respiratory problems, especially if someone was already in poor health, like Carnarvon. 

 

Biologists point to the possibility of toxic black mold that may have been able to survive in the tomb for thousands of years. In 1999 a German microbiologist analyzed 40 mummies and found potentially dangerous mold spores on all of them so this theory is plausible. Maybe when they unsealed the tomb, the fresh air rushing inside blew mold spores up into the air and then they’re all breathing it in. And anyone with a weakened immune system is at risk of developing health issues from that kind of exposure. So that could definitely lead to pneumonia. 

 

So it’s much more likely that the deaths had a natural cause as opposed to a supernatural curse but it does make for a fun story and the newspaper execs are certainly padding their pockets with it. 

 

So with George, the 5th Earl of Carnarvon dead from his infected mosquito bite, his son Henry becomes the 6th Earl of Carnarvon. During World War II Highclere Castle opens its doors to children fleeing the bombing in London, kind of like in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. So that’s pretty cool. The 7th Earl of Carnarvon, Henry, helped train Queen Elizabeth II race horses and they were like BFFS. Now his son, the 8th Earl of Carnarvon, the other George, he lives at Highclere Castle now. You can actually go visit. They do tours, champagne picnics, afternoon tea. It’s fancy. Oh and there’s an Egyptian exhibit in the basement so you can actually check out some of the things the 5th Lord Carnarvon found during his many trips to Egypt. And there is a bit of an Egypt Easter egg in Downton Abbey, in the show, as well. All of Lord Grantham’s dogs have Egyptian names - Pharoah, Isis, Tiaa. So that’s a sneaky little homage to the real Lord of Highclere and a hint at the truly bizarre story of his life and death.

 

Thank you all so very much for listening to History Fix. I hope you found this story interesting and maybe you even learned something new. Be sure to follow my instagram @historyfixpodcast to see some images that go along with this episode and to stay on top of new episodes as they drop. I’d also really appreciate it if you’d rate and follow this podcast on whatever app you’re using to listen, that’ll make it much easier to get your next fix. 

 

Information used in the episode was sourced from a Stuff You Missed in History Class podcast episode titled “The Cursed Tomb of King Tut,” an Unexplained Mysteries podcast episode titled “Curse of the Pharaohs - King Tut’s Tomb,” a Los Angeles Times article, a Reader's Digest Canada article, a Veranda magazine article, an Elle magazine article, a 1923 newspaper article about Carnarvon’s death from an Australian newspaper called The Argus, an article from the Guardian and another from the Mirror (both UK based newspapers), newworldencyclopedia.org, and unmuseum.org. Links to these sources can be found through my instagram @historyfixpodcast.