So disappointing.

From the Wikipedia: Curse of the Pharaohs.

I like a good spooky story even if I think it’s probably hokum, and for whatever reason — some sixth grade history teacher, Scooby Doo, who knows — I really believed that just about everyone who ever opened a mummy’s tomb was dead within a few weeks.

Not the case, it turns out. The Curse of the Pharaohs refers to the legend that any person who disturbs an Ancient Egyptian tomb will be forever hexed by the mummy within.

Stories of the curse really took hold, it seems, when Sir Arthur Conan Doyle — the Sherlock Holmes dude — started perpetuating them and trying to explain them around the time a team of 58 explorers opened the tomb of King Tutankhamun in 1922.

The only problem is that precisely one of those 58 people suffered an even mildly mysterious death anytime soon after the opening — a George Herbert, the fifth Earl of Carnarvon, who died from an infected mosquito bite he cut open while shaving.

Another, George Jay Gould — of the New York Goulds, the railroad people — contracted a fever and died of pneumonia within a year.

But, you know, it was 1922, and people still randomly just got fevers and died of pneumonia back then. All told, only eight of the 58 people present at the opening of the tomb were dead within a dozen years, and I’m willing to guess that if you took any random cross section of 58 adults in 1922, it’d be a pretty safe bet that eight would be dead in twelve years. People still got Typhoid and Scarlet Fever and stuff in 1922.

The Wikipedia — clearly grasping at straws — alternately claims that Howard Carter, the archaeologist in who led the team, either did or didn’t fall victim to the curse when he DIED OF CANCER 16 YEARS LATER. I’m gonna go with “not the curse” on that one. In fact, I’d say it’d be a lot more mysterious if Howard Carter, born in 1874, hadn’t died by now.

Both the Curse of the Pharaohs and its accompanying Wikipedia page are total crap. They are, as Egyptologist Donald Redford once said, “unadulterated clap trap.”

In fact, that phrase coupled with the revelation that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle had a totally kickass mustache are the only cool things to come out of this Wikipedia endeavor.

I’m certainly open to the mysterious and unexplainable, but the Curse of the Pharaohs is not that. Come back when you’re bovine excision, Curse of the Pharaohs.