Page 38 - 08_Oct-2025

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 super-
natural 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.
Horus was showcased
inside a decommissioned
Edmonton transit
bus alongside various
graveyard paraphernalia
and taken on tour
across Alberta.
38 EDify. OCTOBER.25
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,