Embalmed Alive and Other Tales of Egyptian Mummies

We are back in Egypt for the next Nezu Press release. Aside from being a rather big one (618 pages long!), it's also the first Nezu Press anthology.

As you probably know already, I am an Egyptophile, and this project has been a real labour of love for me. Of the thirty-two tales included, half of them were written by women, a third have not been republished since they first appeared in print, and of the rest a number have been republished only once before. Also, though many of us tend to think of the discovery of the tomb of Tutankhamun (death on swift wings, and all that) as the inspiration for lots of mummy curse stories being written, these tales were published between 1827 and 1939, and all but two of them appeared before Carter and Carnarvon made their famous find towards the end of 1922.

There is a 29-page introductory essay by yours truly: ‘Cure Me, Thrill Me, Kill Me! The Mummy: From Magical Cure to Murderous Curse’. And there are forty black-and-white illustrations too, some of which accompanied the tales when they were first published. The stories included are: 

The Mummy (excerpt, 1827) - Jane Webb Loudon

The Mummy’s Soul (1862) - Anonymous

After Three Thousand Years (1868) - Jane G. Austin

Lost in a Pyramid; Or, the Mummy’s Curse (1869) - Louisa May Alcott

The Egyptian Amulet (1881) - Mrs M. Sheffey Peters

The Paraschites (1889) - Mallard Herbertson (pseud. of Marie Hutcheson)

The Curse of Vasartas (1889) - Eva M. Henry

Embalmed Alive (1890) - Gustave Toudouze

Xartella (1891) - Florence Carpenter Dieudonné

Lot No. 249 (1892) - A. Conan Doyle

The Unseen Man’s Story (1893) - Julian Hawthorne

Robber of the Dead (1894) - Rev. W. S. Lach-Szyrma

At the Pyramid of the Sacred Bulls (1896) - Charles J. Mansford

Pharaoh’s Curse (1897) - Lucian Sorrel

The Story of Baelbrow (1898) - E. and H. Heron (pseud. of Kate and Hesketh Pritchard)

The Mummy Necklace (1899) - Arabella Romilly

The Spirit of Amenof (1899) - Countess De Sulmalla

The Mummy and the Moth (1900) - Agnes Warner McClelland

The Mummy Hand (1901) - Adeline Sergeant

The Skirts of Chance (1902) - Beatrice Heron-Maxwell

The Dead Hand (1904) - Hester White

A Professor of Egyptology (1904) - Guy Boothby

The Bulb (1906) - Clive Pemberton

The Soul of a Mummy (1908) - Blanche Bloor Schleppy

The Secret of Horeb-Ra-Men (1909) - Edwin Wooton

The Case of Professor Engelbach (1909) - Derek Vane (pseud. of Blanche Eaton Back)

The Necklace of Dreams (1910) - W. G. Peasgood

The Dead Face (1910) - Frederick Graves

Smith and the Pharaohs (1913) - H. Rider Haggard

The Mummy’s Foot (1914) - Jessie Adelaide Middleton

Black Coffee (1929) - Jeffery Farnol

The Mummy of Ret-Seh (1939) - A. Hyatt Verrill

ISBN-13: 978-1-917113-17-5

Hardback with dust jacket, 22.86cm x 15.24cm (6" x 9"), 618 pages

Published: 15 July 2026

The book is available to pre-order from the Nezu Press store (please click here); global shipping is available (with no tariffs for US customers). Alternatively, it will be available from the usual online retailers soon, and you can order it from bricks-and-mortar stores.

Now, I’ve had a good old chuckle at some of the real-life curse stories I’ve come across over the years. You know the sort of thing: reports of endless things going wrong when a person so much as looks at a mummy case sideways. But I have to admit that while putting together the cover for this book, and working with the image of the coffin of Lady Tadi-en-hent awy, I have never encountered so many problems during what is usually a straightforward process. In the end, it took five hours to assemble the jacket. Sections of artwork moved without anyone touching them (the text section on the back cover repeatedly moved closer to the coffin on the front), and the colours changed every time the final file was saved. After going back and starting from scratch, the shenanigans began all over again. The design software presets repeatedly unset themselves, spaces in the text disappeared, the titles changed colour, and I half expected the final jacket file to be rejected by the printer! Thankfully, everything worked out in the end.

Lady Tadi-en-hent awy’s coffin resides in Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery, and I used to visit the museum regularly when I was a child; in fact, that is where my interest in ancient Egypt was born (along with my love of Pre-Raphaelite art). It’s one of two Egyptian coffins in the museum’s collection, and the other, that of Namenkhetamun, still contains the mummy (the name is that of a lady, but the mummy inside is apparently male). Anyway, I hope that Lady Tadi-en-hent awy approves of the cover. It was important to the ancient Egyptians that they were remembered after death, so I think she'll be pleased about you all knowing her name.

In the Dwellings of the Wilderness ~ C. Bryson Taylor

I have a thing for Egypt. I think I've mentioned that before. I've had one ever since I was knee-high to a grasshopper, when I took part in a school play about the discovery of Tutankhamen's tomb. I've also mentioned before that one of my favourite films is Hammer's The Mummy (1959). I also have a fondness for vampires (not the sparkly ones). So, you can imagine how over the moon and beside myself with joy I was when I first read Charlotte Bryson Taylor's In the Dwellings of the Wilderness... which contains a vampiric mummy! Did all of my Christmases come at once, or what!

Anyway, this wonderful book is the next Nezu Press offering, and it will be out on 8 June. The Independent (New York) described it as ‘A story with a new kind of thrill', and warned 'all who have nerves and nightmares against reading this book.' Current Literature was 'strongly reminded of some of Edgar Allan Poe’s work.' According to the San Francisco Chronicle, it is ‘Weird, almost grewsome, with an incongruity of modern practical life which serves to throw its other characteristics into all the stronger light.’

When Deane, Merritt, and Holloway uncover the entrance to a previously undisturbed tomb while digging in Egypt, they ignore the warning inscribed above its entrance to ‘wake not the soul that sleeps within’. They unblock the doorway marked ‘forbidden’ and uncover the mummy of an ancient Egyptian princess who was buried alive for her sins. And in opening the tomb, they release the devil that dwells within. 

First published in 1904, this new edition of In the Dwellings of the Wilderness includes a 20-page biographical essay by yours truly, “Charlotte Bryson Taylor: ‘Clever Writer of Fiction’ and ‘Angel’ of Washington Fire Department”, which contains a large amount of new information about the author of this atmospheric tale of the mummy’s curse.

ISBN-13: 978-1-917113-16-8

Case laminate hardback, 22.86cm x 15.24cm (6" x 9"), 114 pages

Published: 8 June 2026

The book is available to pre-order from the Nezu Press store (please click here); global shipping is available (with no tariffs for US customers). Alternatively, it will be available from the usual online retailers soon, and you can order it from bricks-and-mortar stores.

Sir Alexander Seton's Troublesome Bone... Again

After writing my last blog post, I began wondering about the original owner of that cursed bone. I didn't expect to find anything out about her, but Alexander's various reports of his visit to the tomb included specific information that turned out to be extremely helpful, 

According to his memoir, Alexander and Zeyla Seton stayed at the Mena House Hotel in Cairo, where ‘the great Pyramid towers over the hotel’. The guide, Abdul, told Alexander that new tombs had recently been discovered ‘behind the Pyramid’. They were not of any great importance, Abdul explained, but one of the tombs was going to be examined the following day, and he could arrange for the Setons to see inside it.

The tomb was ‘pre-mummy era’ and ‘had at one time been filled by the mud of the Nile’. The Setons descended about thirty stone steps to reach the burial chamber and there saw the remains of a skeleton lying on a stone slab. The skull and leg bones were clearly visible, and the spine was almost intact, but few of the ribs remained; ‘water and mud had removed most.’ There was no inscription present to identify the tomb’s occupant, but she was described by the guide as ‘a high-class girl’.

After looking at plans of the area around the great pyramid, I concluded that the tombs ‘behind the Pyramid’ (in relation to the position of the Setons' hotel) and ‘not of any great historical value’ must be the mastabas¹ of the Central Field, many of which were excavated by Selim Hassan² (see photo right) between 1929 and 1939. His findings were recorded in his ten-volume work Excavations at Giza. The excavations of 1936 were covered in The Mastabas of the Seventh Season and Their Description.

The seventh season began on 1 October 1935, and reaching the tombs turned out to be ‘strenuous and exhausting’ as the workmen had to clear large mounds of debris several metres high; chippings, debris, and rubbish had formed a solid mass, cemented together by mud-laden storm water.

In one unplundered tomb, entrance to which was gained via a sloping passage, the sarcophagus was ‘entirely filled with mud’; it had seeped through holes and cracks in the mortar of the chamber and had to be extracted from the sarcophagus ‘flake by flake’ to reveal the skeleton of a woman. Though there was no inscription to identify the occupant of the tomb, its position, between those of two members of the fourth dynasty Khafra family, suggested the deceased female was a member of that royal family.

Hassan designated the tomb ‘The Mastaba of the Princess, Daughter of Khafra’; it is now referred to as G8250. A report of the tomb's discovery in the Illustrated London News (11 April 1936) included a photograph of the portrait head found in the tomb (see below), and described the position of the skeleton when it was uncovered: ‘extended on its back with head to the north’.

There were various other items found in the tomb—jewellery, beads, pottery, the bones of a sacrificial ox, etc—but by the time the Setons visited it these would have been removed, leaving only the skeleton for them to see.

I could be wrong (though my husband insists that this is never a possibility!), but Alexander's description of the tomb, its location, the timing, and the skeleton's muddy condition strongly suggest to me the one discovered by Selim Hassan. And given the amount of coverage the discoveries in Egypt got, and the detail included in reports, I'm surprised nobody saw the connection between the troublesome bone and the mud-covered occupant of G8250 at the time. 

For more information about the various excavations in Egypt, there's The Giza Project at Harvard University. In addition to plans and the such like, you can read the various volumes of Selim Hassan's Excavations at Giza.

__________
1 Mastaba: a type of ancient Egyptian tomb; a flat-roofed, rectangular structure with sloping sides.
2 The Egyptologist Selim Hassan was the first native Egyptian to be appointed Professor of Egyptology at the University of Cairo.

Sir Alexander Seton's Troublesome Bone

I have a liking for tales of cursed Egyptian objects; that's one of the reasons I am so fond of Out of the Ages by Devereux Pryce. There's something very appealing about the idea that a person who has the cheek to remove a relic from an Egyptian tomb will end up haunted or, better still, dead under mysterious circumstances. After the discovery of Tutankhamen's tomb, tales of curses and death coming on swift wings to those who entered tombs and removed relics were very popular, and yet people (well, well off ones anyway) still took souvenirs from burial sites. That's what Sir Alexander Seton and his wife did, and—if you believe his account of what followed—their souvenir gave them nothing but trouble.

According to his account in the Daily News (2 April 1937), Alexander and his wife, Zeyla, visited Egypt in 1936 and stayed for a time in Cairo. Having received permission from 'someone high in Egyptian Ministerial circles', they visited the excavations at Giza, which at the time were not open to the public. They were shown a newly-opened tomb, and then, noticing numerous bones lying about the place, Zeyla 'expressed a great desire' to have one (because taking a bone home as a souvenir when you visit a grave is a perfectly normal thing to do). A local was persuaded to crawl into a hole to retrieve a bone, and the Setons were very pleased with their relic, which they 'treated as a joke'. At least, this was the account given to the various newspapers at the time. According to Alexander's version of events in his unpublished memoir, Zeyla went back alone to the tomb to swipe a bone without his knowledge.

However the bone came into her possession, an Egyptian guide begged Zeyla to return it to its tomb, but she refused, and it remained with the Setons throughout the remainder of their holiday. It then travelled with them when they returned home to 15 Learmonth Gardens in Edinburgh (Alexander making the journey a month before his wife, who is shown with the troublesome bone in the image below), and that was when their troubles began.

According to the Daily News report, both Alexander and Zeyla became quite ill, but they did not at first suspect the bone, which was kept in a glass case in their drawing room, of being the cause. Some time later, a young nephew, who had been told nothing of the bone, was frightened one night when he saw 'a figure walk across the landing into the drawing-room.' Then another visitor to the house saw the same figure, and the Setons began to associate their troubles with their Egyptian relic.

In January 1937, a friend of the Setons warned them, during a card reading, that 'there was some curious influence in the house', and a short time after this Alexander became ill again. Towards the end of the same month, Zeyla fell ill, followed by their child, their nurse, and their maid, and Alexander experienced a feeling which he described as 'merely dread of knowing one was not alone.' Alexander took the bone to an eminent surgeon and was told that it was a female sacrum (a triangular bone in the lower back). Like the Egyptian guide, the surgeon suggested that the bone should be returned to Egypt.

In March 1937, Alexander went into his drawing room one afternoon to find, to his amazement, that the glass case which contained the bone had been completely shattered, despite the fact that the room had been empty. Alexander insisted that he was 'not a frightened housewife', and not in the habit of smashing his own glassware, and suggested that 'the old story that the Egyptians particularly had powers of cursing anyone who disturbed their earthly remains had something in it.'

According to a report in the Weekly Dispatch (28 March 1937), as a result of the sacred bone's presence there were two fires at the Setons' home, guests complained of seeing a robed figure, and no maids would remain in the house; it was also claimed that the maid of the surgeon who examined the relic broke her leg when she fell down some stairs while fleeing 'a robed figure'. By the end of March, Alexander (pictured right) had announced that his wife intended to travel to Egypt to return the bone to its tomb (Daily Mirror, 29 March 1937).

On 9 April, Alexander gave an account of the strange events surrounding the Egyptian relic at a meeting at Edinburgh Psychic College. Shortly after he finished speaking, Mrs Bateman, a well-known clairvoyant from London, took to the stage and foretold that if the bone was not returned to Egypt within six weeks 'blindness will come upon those who touch it' (The Scotsman, 10 April 1937). As far as I am aware, nobody did go blind, but the table upon which the bone rested was said to have been 'lifted by an unknown agency, carried to the middle of the floor, and overturned.'

A couple of months after the bone's case was destroyed, The Scotsman reported on 20 May that Alexander had found the bone and its new case smashed to pieces the previous day, and that he intended to give both a decent burial. Following the bone's destruction, all was quiet for a while (Chelmsford Chronicle, 11 June 1937).

But in August, the troublesome bone was in the news again when the Sunday Post reported that Zeyla was planning to go to America to take part in a radio dramatisation of the Setons' story, as suggested by Robert E. Ripley of 'Believe It or Not' fame. Coincidentally, the bone fragments, which had given the Setons no trouble for months, suddenly set themselves on fire inside a drawer; Alexander had extinguished them with a soda syphon. Zeyla expressed her willingness to take part in the dramatisation 'for the fun of the thing', and Alexander was planning to take part in a similar broadcast in this country.

In his unpublished memoir, Alexander's version of the burning of the bone is very different from that given to the newspapers. Having decided that something had to be done about the troublesome relic, he enlisted the help of his uncle, Father Benedict of St Benedict’s Abbey at Fort Augustus. Following an exorcism, the bone was burned, and Alexander made sure that not a single fragment of it survived.

By the beginning of 1938, both dramatisation projects had fallen through, and Alexander announced again that the bone was being returned to Egypt, this time by a friend whom he would not name in case an attempt was made to steal the relic (Dundee Evening Telegraph, 10 January 1938). According to the newspaper report, what remained of the bone was being kept in a cupboard at Learmonth Gardens. It is difficult to understand, though, what could be kept in a cupboard or returned to Egypt as the bone had been completely destroyed by this time.

Anyway, interest in the Egyptian bone was very much on the wane by this time. Luckily, the Setons had another relic waiting in the wings. In June 1938, the Daily Record reported that, while at his club, Alexander had received a mysterious note about a buddha figure that had been given to his father by a friend who'd been present during the looting of Lhasa. It was the buddha, the note claimed, that was responsible for the Setons' misfortunes. It went on to say that Alexander would find the figure lying on the drawing room floor with a damaged arm when he returned to Learmonth Gardens. Sure enough, the buddha was exactly where the mysterious note said it would be when Alexander got home, and its arm was indeed damaged. Alexander claimed to have no belief in magic, but he was 'beginning to wonder'.

The Setons divorced in 1939. Both remarried and attempted to move on, but Zeyla wasn't terribly happy, suffered from ill health, and died in 1963 at the young age of fifty-nine. Alexander remained firmly convinced that taking a relic from an Egyptian tomb brought bad luck, and that the bone he and his wife had brought back from Giza had had an evil influence upon his life. He died nine and a half months before Zeyla at the age of fifty-eight.

Book News ~ Out of the Ages by Devereux Pryce

We're fast approaching the end of the year, and it's time to announce the first Nezu Press title of 2025, which will be Out of the Ages by Devereux Pryce, an extremely rare novel that hasn't been republished since it first appeared in 1923. Devereux Pryce was the nom de plume of Sir Gerard Albert Muntz, and Out of the Ages was his only published work of fiction.

I know, it's unusual for Nezu Press to publish a chap. But the first book of last year was by a fellow, and I think we may make January the month of exceptions.

So, shall I tell you what it's about then? Well, I did write a blog post about it a while back, so you can read my review by clicking here. And here's the blurb:

Thira Colquhoun is a rich, beautiful, married woman who is very used to having her way; Jack Winthrop is the man she wants to have her way with, and Janet Baxter is the woman unfortunate enough to stand in her way. When Jack takes a job in Purnam, on the other side of the world, Thira is determined to follow him. So she and her unsuspecting husband, along with a group of friends, embark on a long voyage east, heading across the Mediterranean to Egypt, then sailing down the Red Sea and along the African coast to Purnam. While cruising along the Nile, the Colquhouns encounter a French archaeologist who invites them to visit a recently excavated tomb. It contains the remains of King Amenhotep’s favourite, a priestess who was suffocated to death by a group of priests. And one of the Colquhoun party does exactly what you should never do when you visit the final resting place of a murdered Egyptian… she removes an ancient cylinder from the tomb as a keepsake… with inevitably disastrous results. 

This new edition includes a biographical essay by me: ‘Gerard Albert Muntz: The Renowned Metallurgist Who Had Never Been to Egypt’

Published: 25 January 2025.
ISBN: 978-1-917113-06-9.
Hardback with dust jacket, 22.86cm x 15.24cm (6" x 9"), 284 pages.

I have a thing for Egypt; I have had ever since I visited the Egyptian department of Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery (I must have been about nine years old at the time). I was fascinated by the museum's model of Abu Simbel and one of their sarcophagi (there was a little corner missing at the foot, and I was always trying to see inside). Anyway, I've gone off at a tangent there.  If you think the image on the cover seems familiar, that's because it probably is; it's by David Roberts.

The book is available to pre-order from the Nezu Press store (please click here). Alternatively, it will be available from the usual online retailers, and you can order it from bricks-and-mortar stores. It is already at Amazon UK (please click here) and US (please click here).

Out of the Ages ~ Devereux Pryce

Out of the Ages by Devereux Pryce was published by Leonard Parsons in 1923, less than a year after the discovery of the tomb of Tutankhamun when the world had gone mad with Tut-mania.

We modern folks know, mainly due to all that Tut-mania, that there are certain rules pertaining to Egypt—in particular to its tombs and mummies—that, when followed without fail, aid in our safe journey through this life. One of them is... never remove things from the tombs of murdered Egyptian priestesses! 

Unfortunately for the characters in this novel, nobody told them about this.

I love a good mummy or cursed artefact story. I've been fascinated by ancient Egypt since I was knee-high to a grasshopper, and one of my favourite films when I was a tiddler was Hammer's The Mummy (1959), which starred Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee. So, I was chuffed to come across a copy of Out of the Ages.

So, what's the novel about? Well, for the first ten chapters (there are thirty-four in total) it concerns the relationship between three people: Thira Colquhoun, a rich and beautiful married woman who's used to getting what she wants; Jack Winthrop, the handsome fellow who Thira is determined to get her paws on; and Janet Baxter, the only woman whose paws Jack has any genuine interest in. Janet is innocent, Thira is manipulative, and Jack is often uncomfortable.

For reasons I won't go into, because it would give too much away, Jack ends up overseas, and Thira gets into something of a state. Her husband suggests a long cruise, and Thira's all for it—ostensibly for the sake of improving her health, though in truth as a means of following Jack—so off they go, with a group of friends for company. During their travels, the Colquhouns and their chums sail up the Nile and meet Professor Tremaine and his group, and the archaeologist invites them to visit a recently excavated tomb. As I mentioned above, nobody warned them about Egyptian mummies, curses, and all that wonderful stuff, so one of them does exactly what she should never have done... she removes an ancient cylinder as a keepsake.

Obviously, strange things happen... strange, bad things.

Thira is a thoroughly horrid creature. For the life of me, I can't understand what anyone would see in her. Why are chaps so darned thick where women are concerned? The novel is restrained, not at all sensational and full of blood—in fact, there isn't any really, just a few dribbles—but I found myself praying it would make an exception in her case. 

So, what did I think of it? Well, for a start, I found the pace to be just right. I also felt that the conjuring of oppressive atmosphere within the excavated tomb was excellent. As someone who's claustrophobic, that airless, lightless underground complex gave me the heebies (at the same time, oh, to be there when these tombs were first opened... seeing those 'wonderful things!'). Anyway, it all appealed to me. And if you're a fan of Hammer-type mummy doings, it will appeal to you too.

Unfortunately, it's an extremely rare book. When I stumbled across my copy, there wasn't another for sale online, and I couldn't find any record of one having been for sale recently. So, I can't say what the likely cost would be, but we'd be talking hundreds rather than ten of pounds/dollars.

UPDATE:

Nezu Press will publish a new edition of Out of the Ages on 25 January 2025 (see cover image on the left). You can read more about it on this blog by clicking here, and order it from the Nezu Press site by clicking here.