As for the alleged curse, it seems likely any misfortunes befalling the mummified person’s many caretakers over the years had more to do with ordinary human frailty than supernatural vengeance.
He was, after all, a mere mortal himself. Someone deserving of a name and story. For now, let’s call him Horus.
Before Horus came to Edmonton, he’d been covered with a beautifully decorated shroud inscribed with hieroglyphs and images that may have depicted scenes from his life. But by the early 1970s, when the university first took possession, almost all of it had been destroyed by vandals. “It was very sad,” recalls Bernd Hildebrandt, an exhibit designer who helped the university put Horus on display for the first time in 1982. “The head was pinned back. He was disheveled.”
Hildebrandt remembers how a multidisciplinary team of researchers and a specialist from the Canadian Conservation Institute worked painstakingly to reconstruct what was left and restore some dignity to Horus. Sadly, the coffin’s inscriptions were too badly damaged for his actual name to be recovered. Somewhere along the way, he was nicknamed “Horus,” after the falcon-headed son of Isis and Osiris. Slowly, his story came together.
Here is what we know: Horus lived between 300 and 200 BCE, during Ancient Egypt’s Greek or Ptolemaic period. He was a lector priest and scribe in the temple of Ptah, the creator god and patron of craftsmen whose sprawling temple complex stood in the ancient city of Memphis. He was the son of a man who had held the same titles before him, and he died young — likely between 25 and 30 — from unknown causes. After death, he underwent a 70-day embalming process during which his body was ritually transformed into what author and Egyptologist Kara Cooney calls a “sacred container” designed to house his spiritual elements for eternity.
Mummification had been a venerable tradition for well over 2,000 years by Horus’s time. Depending on the era, the dead could be interred with a variety of items: protective amulets, canopic jars, shabti figures and all manner of practical goods. (For royalty, this could get quite elaborate: Tutankhamun’s tomb boasted six chariots.) Excerpts from funerary texts like the Egyptian Book of the Dead, which offered guidance through the underworld, or so-called “Books of Breathing,” which ensured the deceased could live in the afterlife, were written on papyri or linen wrappings or inscribed on sarcophagi or tomb walls. There are indications that Horus may once have worn a funerary mask (likely removed and sold), and he was originally wrapped in an elaborate shroud, of which only the section covering his footboard survives. As befitting his elite status as a priest and scribe, his coffin was made of imported Lebanon cedar, the head of which depicts the four sons of Horus (the deity, not the lector priest) as well as a table laden with food and other items needed in the afterlife.
Thus equipped, our Horus was likely laid to rest in one of Memphis’s major necropolises, where he abided for more than two millennia. Empires rose and fell. The arrival of Christianity and then Islam permanently transformed Egyptian society. Meanwhile, Europe toiled through the Dark Ages, the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, which brought an emerging fascination with Ancient Egypt that eventually exploded into full-blown Egyptomania following Napoleon Bonaparte’s 1798 expedition. For the next century or so, countless mummies were looted and sold by Egyptian street vendors to wealthy European tourists, who treated them as curiosities and coveted them for their private collections.
It’s hard to imagine it now, but in Victorian Britain, owning a mummy was like driving a Rolls Royce — a mark of refinement and prestige. “Unwrapping parties” were fashionable social events, while “mummy brown” — a pigment made from actual ground-up mummies — was a much sought-after colour for the fine arts. Fortunately for Horus, the latter was not his fate.
The earliest whisperings of a curse may trace back to 1942, when Horus came under the custodianship of one George Woodrow of Stanmore, England. Woodrow had obtained the mummy from the widow of a friend who had purchased it from a failing antiques shop — and then died of a heart attack. The man’s widow, wanting nothing to do with the supposedly cursed thing, gave Horus to Woodrow. When Mrs. Woodrow refused to have a mummy in the house, Mr. Woodrow moved Horus to a shed on his father’s property, where he was stored, alone but intact, for around 25 years. At some point during that time, the Woodrows emigrated to St. Albert, leaving just a few things behind.
In 1967, Woodrow’s father travelled to visit his family members in Alberta, where he discovered that he’d developed a cancerous tumour — and died. He reportedly expressed a wish for Horus to be donated to the U of A. We couldn’t find a written record of this bequest, but whatever the case, Woodrow returned to England to settle his father’s estate, and Horus was Alberta bound.
This is where things start to get weird. Well, weirder. Because instead of donating Horus to the university, Woodrow, for reasons that remain unclear, elected to loan him to a singular Edmonton character by the name of Wilson Arthur Stewart.
It’s hard to summarize Stewart succinctly, but let’s try: he was a cross between P.T. Barnum, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and John de Ruiter. In addition to being president and sole administrator of the Limestone Cemetery and Genealogical Society, Stewart ran twice for Edmonton alderman, campaigning for, among other things, greater reverence for gravestone epitaphs. Other resume highlights include: anti-fluoridation activism, beekeeping, stamp and coin collecting, ufology, and publishing vital statistics in his monthly newsletter, The Guardian Mercury.
Presumably — and with no discernible sense of irony — Stewart viewed custodianship of Horus as naturally aligned with the goals of his genealogical society and cemetery obsession, and perhaps a fundraising opportunity.
Horus was showcased inside a decommissioned Edmonton Transit bus alongside various graveyard paraphernalia and taken on tour across Alberta. Along the way, Stewart concocted a biography for Horus: he was a 4,500-year-old physician (false); from Egypt’s Third Dynasty (false); and first “discovered” in Lower Egypt in the 1880s (maybe, but probably also false).
Funds did not materialize. Meanwhile, Edmonton wanted its loaner bus back and was threatening repossession. Never one to give up, Stewart petitioned city council for the use of some vacant city-owned store fronts to display “his” mummy and host a genealogical conference, promising to repay the rent with money raised from these schemes. The city declined.
Undaunted, Stewart took a second run at city council in 1970, this time recruiting Horus as his unwitting campaign manager. Stewart’s public appearances were bizarre spectacles where Horus was displayed in an open casket while Stewart spoke at length about cemetery policies, public transit and “the rights of the individual in a complex society.” This brazen exploitation of an Egyptian ancestor might’ve remained a colourful bit of local political history, were it not for what happened next: shorty after Stewart’s unsuccessful campaign, he was hospitalized for a rare blood disorder and died at the age of 53. Whispers of a curse grew louder.
Archaeologist and U of A professor emeritus Dr. Nancy Lovell studied Horus for decades. In 2018, she wrote an unofficial history of Horus’s postmortem adventures in a newsletter for the Society for the Study of Egyptian Antiquities. According to Lovell’s account, as Stewart’s health was failing, Horus overwintered in an abandoned shed. It was there that, in May 1971, Horus was discovered by a couple of teenage boys who — echoing the macabre curiosity of their Victorian predecessors — unwisely attempted to unwrap him. Horus was regrettably damaged in the process, and his head became detached from his body.
At this point, authorities were notified and Alberta’s Chief Coroner became involved. Horus was officially pronounced dead and sent to the Royal Alexandra Hospital, where foul play was ruled out and x-rays confirmed that he was, in fact, an Egyptian mummy. Thus, a sadly disheveled Horus — along with his badly damaged coffin and what remained of his shroud — was transferred to the U of A Department of Anthropology. The Woodrow family was soon notified of these developments, and Horus remained at the university on loan, until George Woodrow’s death in 1979, whereupon Horus became part of the university’s permanent collection.
Once this was all settled, Horus’s fortunes improved dramatically. By 1981, the U of A had recruited a multidisciplinary team of scientists, medical specialists, Egyptologists and conservation experts to oversee Horus’s study, restoration and eventual exhibition. Radiocarbon dating placed him firmly in the Ptolemaic period; infrared imaging revealed his lineage and titles; x-ray and CT scans showed his young age at death (he was initially misdiagnosed with cancer, later revised). Finally, Horus’s linen wrappings were tidied and put back in order, and his head was carefully reattached.
Next, as part of the university’s 75th anniversary in 1982, a newly-rehabilitated Horus made his debut as the dramatic centrepiece of an immersive exhibit titled O! Osiris, Live Forever, hosted on campus at the now-demolished Ring House gallery. Bernd Hildebrant remembers the exhibit as a success, which is no surprise. Egyptomania, then and now, is very much alive and well. Perhaps inevitably, all this renewed attention on Horus triggered a wave of still-circulating campus lore that includes breathless reports of disembodied voices and falling ceiling fixtures, à la Phantom of the Opera. Rumours of a curse only grew when the state-of-the-art CT scanner used to examine Horus “died” the following day, and when one of the project’s x-ray technicians quit after developing unexplained health issues.
All of this was gleefully echoed in the press of the time. One Edmonton Journal feature story, “The curse of the headless mummy,” recounted Horus’s improbable backstory alongside a campy illustration resembling a still from a low-budget horror film.
The truth is decidedly less dramatic, but more comforting: After the O! Osiris exhibit, Horus was moved to a new home in a high-security, climate-controlled room, where he has remained ever since. Access is strictly controlled, with trained staff conducting routine checks a few times a week to monitor storage conditions. He has been removed for study or display only a handful of times since: for medical imaging in 1996 and 2016, and for public display in Enterprise Square in 2015. According to a radiology webinar available from the Ontario Association of Medical Radiation Sciences, the most recent set of scans in 2016 saw Horus attended to by a museum employee who was quite protective of him and made sure he was handled with the utmost care.
So, what to do with Horus now? At the moment our priest’s future is complicated by the fact that, in Alberta, protocols governing the ethical treatment and study of human remains are focused primarily on consultation with Indigenous communities, many of whom — both in Canada and abroad — have fought for decades to stop their own ancestors from becoming museum attractions.
The situation is a bit different in Horus’s homeland, where many contemporary Egyptians take pride in exhibitions of mummified persons. In 2021, President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi held a “Pharaoh’s Golden Parade,” in which the mummies of 22 New Kingdom kings and queens received a glittering military escort from the ageing Egyptian Museum to the newly opened National Museum of Egyptian Civilization. Others find such displays offensive, including former president Anwar Sadat, who famously closed the Royal Mummy Room in 1980, arguing that exhibition of human remains was distasteful and sacrilegious.
Should Horus be returned to Egypt? Egyptian authorities are reportedly aware of his existence (which seems to have come to their attention following Dr. Lovell’s 2018 article), but they have not yet requested his repatriation. (Conciatori says her predecessor returned the Egyptian consulate’s phone call and left a voicemail, but nothing has happened since.)
The global movement toward repatriation of culturally sensitive artifacts — not to mention human remains — is generally recognized as desirable (the Egyptians would like their Rosetta Stone back, thank you very much). Still, it doesn’t always line up with the reality on the ground. “It’s not my job to judge,” says Conciatori. “My job is to make sure we are ethically caring for our collections, including this person, because it is a person.”
Conciatori is on the board of directors for the Canadian chapter of the International Council of Museums and was involved in helping revise the council’s code of ethics. “The field is in constant evolution and adapting to changing mentalities,” she says. Still, she admits that she doesn’t always have a clear answer when asked why members of the public cannot see Horus. There’s a fundamental tension between knowledge creation and human dignity in the museum world. On one hand, studies of mummified persons have yielded valuable knowledge. On the other hand, says Conciatori, we must remember that Horus never gave consent to anyone to dig him up and cart him around Alberta. “We have to ask: ‘what is the goal?’” Over the last few decades Horus has been hauled up and down fire escapes, diagnosed and un-diagnosed with cancer, loaded in and out of minivans in parkades, poked and prodded with every kind of (non-invasive) medical imaging imaginable. But to what end — and to whose benefit?
And what of the curse? A mummy is, first and foremost, a dead human being — and that triggers complicated, often unsettling emotions. On one hand, we feel a natural urge to protect and respect the dead and their humanity (“mummy brown” paint notwithstanding). On the other, there’s a deep and entirely understandable fascination with the dead. That tension is uncomfortable. To rationalize our objectification of a dead body and absolve our own guilt, we must dehumanize and sometimes even villainize it. From this angle, the “cursed mummy” trope is textbook psychological projection: I feel uneasy about my attraction to this dead guy. But I’m not the bad person here – he is!
For her part, Conciatori doesn’t think much of the curse, but she acknowledges that untimely coincidences can give some people pause.
When Jocelyn Hendrickson finally started looking into the mummy lore, she was pleasantly surprised by what she found. The university had indeed been handed an eerie, disturbing touchstone that had been maimed and mistreated. But there was no conspiracy. In fact, there have been — and continue to be — many people over the years who have thought deeply about Horus, how he should be cared for, and whether he should be subject to scientific inquiry or ethical display.
For now, at least, Conciatori thinks it’s time to give him his rest. “Yes, we have a mummy,” she says. “But it’s not an object. It’s a human being deserving of dignity.”
Why did she come to the New World, this mummy, this subject of spectacle
sleeping in her full ornament of gray gauze,
an imaginary life in a museum display case?
I think mummification is contrary to immortality
because a preserved corpse will never be a part of a rose.
The mummy did not choose migration, but those who waited in long lines
at consulates and built houses in other countries
still dream of returning when they become corpses.
—You have to take us there!
This is what they instruct in wills they hang around their children’s necks
as if death is an unfinished identity
that matures only in the family burial plot.
Iman Mersal is a renowned Egyptian–Canadian poet and professor of Arabic literature at the University of Alberta.
This article appears in the October 2025 issue of Edify
