An Unwanted Gift: A Mummy’s Hand

Count Louis Hamon

Count Louis Hamon * was a famous occultist and psychic healer in the late 19^th century and early 20^th century.

He often received exotic gifts from grateful clients he had cured. While visiting Luxor, Egypt in 1890 Hamon cured a sheik that was ill with malaria.

This sheik then insisted Hamon accept an unusual gift—it was the mummified hand of a long-dead Egyptian princess. Hamon disliked the gruesome gift but took it not wanting to offend the man.

Count Hamon’s wife disliked this dry, shriveled hand even more. Her dislike quickly turned to horror and revulsion when she heard the story behind it.

3-D print of the mummified female hand.

In the 17^th century, King Akhnaton of Egypt—who was the father-in-law of Tutankhamun—argued with his daughter over a religious matter. Angered, he exacted a terrible revenge upon her.

In 1357 BC, he arranged for his daughter to be raped and then murdered by his priests. Before she was buried her right hand was cut off and secretly buried in the Valley of the Kings.

The Egyptian people were appalled for they believed his daughter was now barred from entering paradise because her body was not intact at her burial—with this further step, the King's vengeance was complete.

Hamon’s wife insisted he get rid of the mummified hand. But all his efforts to do this failed. When he tried to turn it over to various museums, each curator refused to accept it.

He finally locked the hand away in an empty wall safe in his London home. In 1922, he and his wife reopened this safe. Hamon was shocked to find the hand had changed.

This mummified hand that was 3,200 years old no longer was shriveled but instead appeared soft and had new flesh. Hamon’s wife, upon seeing it, screamed and then fainted. Coming to her senses, she insisted the hand must be destroyed. Hamon agreed.

On Halloween in October of 1922 the couple decided to give the hand a proper funeral before burning it.

Lord Carnarvon

Count Hamon wrote a letter to a close friend—the archaeologist Lord Carnarvon to describe what happened next. 

He wrote he laid the hand in the fireplace and then read a passage from the Egyptian Book of the Dead.

As he closed this book, he and his wife heard a sudden clap of thunder, and then their house was engulfed in total darkness. A strong wind blew the door open.

Hamon and his wife fell to the floor and were surrounded by a chill air. They watched in horror as a figure of a woman entered the room. “She wore the royal apparel of old Egypt, with the serpent of the House of Pharaohs glittering on her tall headdress.”

The woman’s right arm ended in a bloody stump. This apparition bent over the fireplace and then disappeared. Afterward, they discovered the severed hand was gone.

The couple was hospitalized and treated for severe shock. 

Four days later, the count read that Carnarvon’s expedition had discovered Tutankhamun’s tomb, and they planned to enter it despite an ancient warning that was written outside this tomb.

Tutankhamun

Hamon wrote his old friend a letter begging him to reconsider, having just experienced the power of the ancient Egyptians first hand. But Carnarvon ignored his message and died shortly after entering the tomb from an infected Mosquito bite.

One by one, members of his expedition died as well—this series of deaths, later became known as the Curse of the Pharaohs.

*  Hamon an Irishman was also an astrologer, numerologist, and palmist. He had several pseudonyms: William John Warner, Cheiro, and Count Leigh de Hamons.