Disclaimer: This article is based on actual news from the real world – honestly! However, it has been sprinkled with a healthy dose of satire.
In news that will devastate every Scooby-Doo villain and History Channel intern, it turns out the infamous “Curse of King Tut” article that hit the news cycle last week is less supernatural wrath and more ancient mildew with a really good press agent.
Here lies a clever PR stunt. (Lynn Greyling/Public Domain)
According to scientific sleuth Rebecca Watson, the curse is about as real as your uncle’s pyramid scheme, but it has been instrumental in selling a story about a recent, albeit legitimate, breakthrough in cancer research.
The story begins with a fungus which researchers now say might help fight leukemia. But no one cared until some plucky PR intern asked, “What if we tell people it was the same fungus responsible for King Tut’s Curse?” And suddenly, headlines like “King Tut Mold Might Murder Cancer” were everywhere, distracting us from the fact that the actual science is… neat, but only scary if you’re a leukemia cell with trust issues.
To be clear, the fungus didn’t kill anyone involved in discovering King Tut’s tomb. Neither did a curse. Lord Carnarvon, one of the early tomb explorers, allegedly fell victim to the mummy’s “revenge”. And by “revenge” we mean “mosquito bite plus chronic illness plus highly sketchy Victorian medical care.” The real curse was an itchy shave and no access to penicillin. The only ancient horror involved in his death was the pre-antibiotic British Empire.
Look out for that mosquito!!! (Library of Congress/Public Domain)
Watson, whose idea of a good time is spelunking through JSTOR and digging through Cold War-era footnotes like it’s her version of an Indiana Jones movie, traced the whole cursed mold narrative back to a misread paper and a Polish guy named Bolesław Smyk. Smyk, after experiencing tomb-induced wooziness, did what any brave scientist would do: he cultured ancient spores, hallucinated for five years, and became a minor Wikipedia footnote, paving the way for conspiracy TikToks with millions of views.
“The Curse of the Pharaoh Hypothesis” isn’t a warning etched in ancient stone. It’s a microbiological thought experiment that got wildly misinterpreted by people who read the title and skipped the part with math. It was originally meant to explore how a long-dormant pathogen might evolve to be more deadly if sealed away for centuries, like if black mold got tenure and developed some very antisocial tendencies. It had nothing to do with King Tut, Lord Carnarvon, or ghost microbes guarding cursed swag. But once the phrase escaped the Petri dish of academia, it took on a life of its own, fueled by spooky headlines and the collective inability of the internet to resist a good mummy story. Watson dug through the actual papers and found zero evidence that anyone involved with Tut’s tomb was killed by anything more mysterious than mosquitoes and 1920s state-of-the-art medical advice like “rub dirt on it and drink gin.”
Despite all this, the fungus is interesting and may one day lead to new cancer treatments. But don’t expect the paper titled “Heptacyclic fungal RiPPs with benzofuranoindolines” to go viral unless it involves a mummy, a conspiracy, and possibly a crime-solving cartoon dog.
So hats off to Rebecca Watson for walking straight into the curse, decoding 200 years of moldy misinformation, and emerging with the truth: the curse isn’t real, but damned if it doesn’t slap as clickbait.
This story is based on fully factual news, but if we got it wrong, blame these guys, we’re just here to make it funny.
