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Few modern people fear the power of ancient curses in hexes.

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There are others who believe a deadly curse has been released on the world as recently as the 1920s.

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A curse that could make even skeptics think twice.

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An ancient tomb holds a huge treasure.

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An unbelievable wealth allegedly protected by an unknown evil.

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One by one, many of those who have disturbed the crypt have died mysteriously.

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Could it be a deadly hex?

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This is the story of the curse of Tutankhamen.

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The

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The

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The

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The

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The

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The

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The

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The

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The

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On the banks of the Nile, the body of a boy king lies dead, wrapped in cloth and mysteriously sealed underground.

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Boy?

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An Egyptian pharaoh entombed with a priceless fortune some 3,000 years ago.

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1,500 years before the birth of Christ, kings of Egypt known as pharaohs were buried in the Valley of the Kings.

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A land riddled with age-old mysteries that continue to fascinate us to this day.

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This is the Valley of Death.

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Chiseled out of the rock is the world's greatest mausoleum.

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The old saying goes, you can't take it with you.

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But the kings of ancient Egypt certainly tried to find a way.

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Each king was buried with priceless treasures of ivory, ebony and gold.

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But each tomb was hidden under thousands of years of sandstorms and erosion.

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For archaeologists, the Valley of the Kings is still the richest place on earth.

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But before the 1920s, they believed that it had already been picked clean by centuries of thieves and collectors.

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But they were wrong.

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At 9 years old, he took the throne and a wife.

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By the age of 18, he was dead.

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3,000 years later, only a handful of people knew the name.

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Tutankhamen.

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One was an unknown archaeologist named Howard Carter.

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Another, his financial backer, the fifth Earl of Carnarvon, George Edward Stanhope Herbert.

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A little known digger and wealthy English lord were an odd couple to pursue ancient wealth.

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But unlike those who had tried and failed before him, Carter carefully and methodically plotted out the Valley of the Kings inch by inch and set out to excavate.

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But he found only disappointment.

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So in December of 1921, Carnarvon summoned Carter to High Clear Castle.

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He told Mr. Carter that he could no longer afford to pay for this useless digging.

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But Carter begged Carnarvon to pay for just a few more months of excavating.

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He agreed, but made it clear this would be the last trip.

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On the third day of the final dig, workers uncovered stone steps leading to a hidden doorway stamped with an ancient seal.

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The first day of the dig was the day of the first dig.

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On the third day of the final dig, workers uncovered stone steps leading to a hidden doorway stamped with an ancient seal.

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It was the mark of royalty.

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Carter sent for Lord Carnarvon right away.

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On the evening of November 26, 1922, they opened the tomb of King Tut and according to legend,

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released the mummy's curse.

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An English Lord and his daughter, along with an archaeologist and his assistant stood on the threshold of the richest find in history.

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Carter peered into the gloom on the other side of the wall for what seemed like an eternity.

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It's too dark.

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It's definitely a dark night.

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At last, Carnarvon whispered,

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Can you see anything?

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Yes, Carter replied.

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Wonderful things.

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There's never been a pharaoh found in any way, almost intact.

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We're talking about things that you look at now.

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You cannot believe that these are the thousands of years old that they are.

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It's awesome.

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The smallest explorer, Lady Evelyn Herbert, daughter of Lord Carnarvon, led the way inside.

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Three men, one woman, and somewhere, a dead king.

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It's dark.

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You're in there, the first person in a thousand years to be inside the tomb of a person who had died.

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There must have been a little of the old haunting, the hauntedness that comes with that.

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The tomb of the boy king was the richest ever found.

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Overnight, Carnarvon, Carter, and Tutankhamun became celebrities.

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They felt, I mean, just total triumph victory.

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And they'd been laughed at, they'd been mocked.

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They'd been kind of a whispering campaign of lost their marbles, you know.

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And here they have it.

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But Lord Carnarvon would have precious little time to enjoy his newfound fame and fortune.

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One morning, in the spring of 1923, Lord Carnarvon cut himself.

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Exactly where a mosquito bit him, days before.

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The wound wouldn't heal. Carnarvon was wrapped with fever.

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As fever turned chills, Carnarvon's wife summoned a specialist to Cairo.

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But Carnarvon was beyond help.

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And at the very moment that he died,

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all the lights suddenly went out in Cairo.

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Carnarvon's body was barely cold when the world's press named the culprit.

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Inscribed within the tomb, wrote one reporter, was a curse that warned,

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I will kill all those who cross this threshold.

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Another paper reported, they who enter this sacred tomb shall swift be visited by wings of death.

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For Carnarvon, death indeed came on wings, the wings of a mosquito.

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So began the legend of the mummy's curse.

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Some say that supposedly it continues even today, but scientists aren't so sure.

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Come along as we investigate the source of the mummy's curse.

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Which with their scare returns.

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Was there really a deadly spell cast thousands of years ago on the tomb of Chudankhamen?

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The tomb of King Tut has reportedly claimed lives of many victims.

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To this day skeptics wonder if there is some truth to the lethal hex.

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But in 1922, Howard Carter shrugged off the curse and went back to work.

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Perhaps easier said than done.

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Almost immediately, wealthy travelers fascinated by Tut's treasures

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and unafraid of his curse, descended on his tomb.

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One of the few allowed inside was the railroad tycoon, George J. Gould, guided by Carter himself.

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First private tour, Gould paid a heavy price.

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That night he came down with a fever.

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The next day, he died.

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Around the same time, a British industrialist suffered the same fate.

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But were they really victims of a curse?

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Or was there a more logical reason behind their deaths?

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I received a call from a physician and he told me this very interesting and very unfortunate story about a woman

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who had gone with her husband to Egypt and had gone into the tomb of King Tut.

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And it turned out that she had picked up a fungus.

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That woman was Cheryl Munson, a part-time art student and housewife.

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Cheryl died shortly after visiting the tomb in 1995.

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The cause, apparently, was exposure to a fungus called aspergillus nigir.

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So what we had to find out was whether these molds were also present in the tombs that she visited.

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And so we called the Egyptology Department at the University of Pennsylvania.

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So they were wondering if this had anything to do with the curse.

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It had.

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In 1923, two men died suddenly after visiting Tut's tomb.

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What doctors chalked up to a fever was reported as Tut's Curse.

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Two more sudden deaths followed.

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Pecky Callender, who helped Carter break into the tomb, and Arthur Mace, who helped to remove its contents.

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Possibly, the true killer lurked on the very walls of the tomb.

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To Howard Carter, it looked like chipped paint until he looked closer.

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Then he realized it was some sort of fungus.

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I think by connecting Howard Case, which is a modern-day case, to the visit and the tombs itself,

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we were able to have a direct link to what might have happened to the archaeologists who had visited some time ago.

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And I am rather confident that in at least some of these cases, aspergillus could have easily played a role.

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This is really such a well-preserved mask.

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You can see these copper eyelashes around these stone eyes here.

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Dr. Rosalie David is the Queen of Mummies, a curator for Egyptology for England's Manchester University Museum.

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She's examined 35 mummies, more than anyone else.

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Working with a mummy can be hazardous, both for the operator and for the mummy,

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because the operator could breathe in spores from the mummy dust.

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And in reverse, the operator could deposit bacteria or moisture onto the surface of the mummy, thus causing decomposition.

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Though dead for thousands of years, a mummy is alive with germs and bacteria.

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Some harmless, some deadly.

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We wear protective clothing when we work with the mummies,

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and this protects us against the fungal spores.

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Rosalie David believes she knows the true fate of those who disturb the bones of Tutankhamun.

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Their crude autopsy freed an invisible killer.

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In the old days, the operators didn't wear protective clothing.

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They could have unknowingly unleashed airborne toxins when the tomb was opened.

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If a little fungus caused all of this destruction,

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why are the ancestors of Lord Carnarvon still filled with the case of the jitters?

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Find out when we return to Truth or Scare.

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Since the burial of King Tut, the so-called Curse of the Mummy has traveled across the centuries.

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By 1929, 13 people were dead.

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Anything remotely connected with the tomb of Tutankhamun seems to have left death and destruction in its path.

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The man who found Tut's tomb, Howard Carter, was among the few to escape its curse.

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Almost.

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His good friend Carnarvon is dead.

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He is under huge pressure from the Egyptians.

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He's under enormous pressure from the press that didn't get the story.

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He has a tiny little space to work in.

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He's going crazy.

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Howard Carter just gets to the point where he can't take it any longer.

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And he cracked.

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He did this rash act of putting this enormous iron gate and locking it.

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It was the English takeover of something that the people of Egypt owned, which was true.

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And they went crazy and they threw him out.

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After a year's suspension, Howard Carter was allowed back to the tomb.

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But he was forced to forever surrender his claim to Tut's treasure.

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So he spent the rest of his life cataloging Tut's priceless treasures.

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The treasures that he found but could never own.

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Perhaps his was the worst curse of all.

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Howard Carter hoped to put an end to the so-called mummy's curse.

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Before his death in 1939, he arranged for the young king's remains to be returned to his tomb.

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But Tut wouldn't rest in peace.

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In a chain reaction of tragedy, his curse claimed five more victims in quick succession.

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First, Lady Carnarvon died suddenly and strangely of an accident.

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Lady Carnarvon died suddenly and strangely of an insect bite, just like her husband.

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Then, Richard Bytel, Lord Carnarvon's secretary, died mysteriously in his sleep, with no explanation.

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Three months later, Bytel's father, Lord Westbury, leapt from a seventh floor window to his death.

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He left a note blaming his son's death on the curse of King Tut.

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On the way to the cemetery, Lord Westbury's hearst struck an eight-year-old boy.

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At the exact moment the boy died, so did an Egyptologist at the British Museum.

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Next, the treasures of Tutankhamen go on tour and the so-called curse invades the modern world.

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Which with your scare returns.

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Tutankhamen was buried with 5,000 priceless belongings.

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His royal treasures were meant to join him on his journey to the afterlife.

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Instead, they took a detour.

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In the 1970s, Egypt bowed to popular demand and sent scores of Tut's relics on a world tour.

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Among the sightseers, when the treasure reached London, was the first person to enter Tut's tomb, Lady Evelyn Herbert.

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My mother had never seen the final sarcophagus because they hadn't reached that particular chamber before her father died.

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At the time of the exhibition in London, the television and radio used to ring up my mother and say,

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tell us about the curse, and she'd laugh and say, well, I'm alive and kicking at 70, and I don't believe in it.

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And coming out of the museum, probably on her fifth visit, she had a major stroke and was paralyzed from then on.

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But of course, it could easily have been a coincidence.

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Some say these incidents were not caused by an evil hex at all.

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Dr. David Silverman, a renowned Egyptologist, sought out another logical origin of Tut's curse.

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In any of the inscriptions that occur in the tomb, there are none that can be considered a curse.

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So what we would consider, or as an Egyptologist, I would consider an ancient Egyptian curse, does not occur in the tomb of King Tut.

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It appears that the mummy's curse was accidentally created by its first victim.

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When Lord Carnarvon gave exclusive coverage of Tut's tomb to the London Times, rival papers were furious.

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At Carnarvon's death, they got even by printing rumors of a curse.

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Even the weird events when Carnarvon died can be explained.

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All the lights went out in Cairo when Carnarvon died. The lights always go out in Cairo at all times.

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All of this stuff took off. It was just like anything today.

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An outrageous series of half truths and some truths and some lies, some made up.

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The son of Lord Carnarvon talked about how he doesn't really believe in the curse,

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but he said there really isn't any way to explain a lot of what went on.

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And that has kept the curse alive.

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No matter how you try to kill it, it's like a phoenix. It resurfaces over and over again.

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But then again, no matter how much we hear that there isn't a Loch Ness monster,

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or that there aren't any UFOs through logical means, we still believe in them, don't we?

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It's marvelous human nature. We need this sort of stuff. We love it.

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Even if I know it's all made up, I love it. I love the touchers.

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The treasure of Tutankhamen now makes its home in the Cairo Museum

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where untold numbers have gazed upon it in wonder.

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But the mummy itself once again rests in its ancient home in the Valley of the Kings.

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Once the least known pharaoh, he is now the most phoenix.

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Tutankhamen, now a household name, has what all pharaohs wanted most.

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He has gained immortality, only a name.

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Ironically, this young Egyptian pharaoh owes his fame to the English nobleman,

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who some 3,000 years later disturbed his tomb.

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This is the same man who was believed to have unleashed a chain reaction of death.

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But whether it was by exposing the world to a lethal mold, or by unlocking an ancient curse,

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we will always be fascinated with the life and death of the boy king, known as Tutankhamen.