The Curse in the Package: The Business of Mummified Humans

There are investigations that are simply bizarre, and this is one of them. Mummified human heads, hands, legs, and other body parts are openly traded through social networks, sales sites, and auctions, some showing traces of fungi and microorganisms, and some of them travel to buyers through the regular mail, with no warning whatsoever about the danger. A study titled "The Real Mummy's Curse" has mapped out the market, and the real curse, let us say this much up front, is not supernatural.

The researchers Kirsty Squires, Dario Piombino-Mascali, Clara Urzì, and Damien Huffer evaluated 128 listings and auctions for their study published in the International Journal of Cultural Property, on Meta platforms, through online dealers, and at auctions. In 122 cases, 95.3 percent, the items were human remains, and in 6 cases they were mummified animals. The market is partly underground and often illegal; the internet has made cross-border trade easier, while sellers almost never told their customers how toxic and microbially contaminated remains should be stored safely. One qualification up front: there were no laboratory tests, the assessments were based on photographs. That does not prove that any particular piece was contaminated; what it does establish is something else, that this market moves potentially dangerous biological material carelessly and mostly outside the rules.

Complete mummies were the exception, with only a single whole body offered for sale. Dealers more often offered individual body parts, 27 times hands and legs, 21 times entire heads. If complete and partially preserved heads, skulls with remnants of skin or hair, and the shrunken heads traditionally made by the Shuar people are counted together, 66 of the 128 objects fell into this group, 51.6 percent. The preference for heads has a grim history. From the 18th century through the first half of the 20th century, the heads of Indigenous people were collected as curiosities and misused for racist research, and even today such remains are traded as rare relics or tribal art. Sellers gave an origin for around 80 percent of the pieces, most often Egypt, followed by South America, but it was rarely verifiable; for 26 objects, 20.3 percent, the origin remained completely unknown.

At this point, this is about more than statistics. A philosopher from Königsberg taught that a human being must never be reduced to a mere thing, that a person is an end in themselves and never merely a means. That is exactly the line crossed by a trade that cuts up a dead person, puts a price tag on them, and ships them as decoration. What is being offered here as a relic or as art was once a face, and the dignity that belonged to it does not expire with death.

The first of the two dangers lies in the substances used in embalming, which varied greatly depending on the period. The most toxic were the substances used in the 19th and early 20th centuries, including arsenic, mercury, lead, antimony, copper, and zinc. Arsenic is considered highly toxic, it can seriously damage the skin and internal organs and increase the risk of cancer, and it can also cause neurological disorders. Mercury attacks the brain and kidneys, as well as the lungs, and lead damages the nerves and blood formation, as well as the kidneys and reproductive system. Older cultures worked with bitumen, cedar oil, natron, resins, myrrh, and incense, generally less dangerous, although natron, because of its alkalinity, can cause chemical burns after prolonged contact. Anyone who buys such a piece ultimately knows neither where it came from nor what it was treated with.

The second danger is microbiological. Drying out a body does not make it germ-free, bacteria and fungi can survive in tissue, as can yeasts, and with moisture and poor storage they can begin multiplying again. In 13 listings, the researchers identified possible signs of fungal growth, light and dark spots, as well as cotton-like coatings; 8 of them were immediately available for sale, and in 6 of those the decomposition had progressed so far that simple contact could become dangerous. Here too, the qualification applies that a photograph cannot identify either a fungus or a bacterium, and some colonization is invisible to the naked eye. Particularly treacherous are dormant spores that can become airborne when the remains are unpacked or damaged. Earlier investigations found fungi of the genera Aspergillus and Penicillium, as well as Stachybotrys, including in the air inside the crypts of the Church of Saints Peter and Paul in Kraków.

The title of the study points to the old stories about the mummy's curse, and for some mysterious deaths the researchers offer a very earthly explanation. After the tomb of Polish King Casimir IV was opened in Kraków in the 1970s, 10 of the 12 restorers involved died, something that has been linked to the inhalation of Aspergillus spores. Lord Carnarvon, the financial backer behind the discovery of Tutankhamun's tomb, may also have died of severe aspergillosis; he died in 1923 and became the central figure in the legend of the pharaoh's curse, although this remains explicitly a hypothesis. As far back as the 19th century, the traveler Giovanni Belzoni complained about extremely fine dust in tombs that made breathing difficult, and perhaps, the study suggests, some of it consisted of spores. This is not automatic, for healthy people the risk remains low, and it becomes serious mainly for people with weakened immune systems.

Museums operate under strict rules, gloves and masks, plus protective clothing, including protection against pesticides once used on collections. In the private market, all of that disappears. In 22 images, people were holding mummified remains with their bare hands, and protective equipment was almost never mentioned in the listings. Either the sellers do not know about the danger, or they hide it in order to make the sale. Shipping makes it even more problematic. An American buyer proudly displayed remains from the United Kingdom, and the labels showed that Royal Mail had carried the package, even though shipping human remains through the service is prohibited. Nearly all major carriers prohibit it. Anyone who conceals the real contents gets around the rule; in one case the shipment traveled under a customs code for educational models beginning with 9023, while in others category 9705 for anatomical collectors' items offered a way to disguise the true nature of the cargo.

Particularly revealing was our own research into the carriers' shipping rules. We checked more than 20 postal and courier services, and most explicitly prohibit human remains, from Aramex to Deutsche Post and DHL to La Poste, Parcelforce, and Couriers Please. Some are even more specific, DPD and UPS explicitly list body parts and organs. The Polish service InPost goes furthest: in its rules for Poland it explicitly lists human and animal organs as well as tissue, while its general prohibited-item lists also include human corpses, ashes, and funeral remains; for certain shipping routes to Italy, it additionally lists even human and animal embryos.

But the net has holes. Allied Express Australia does not explicitly prohibit human remains and bans only vaguely defined biological products, PostNL excludes only tissue and blood, along with excretions, and Swiss Post mentions only urns. Canada Post even carries remains, provided the strict rules for controlled goods are followed. Others allow only ashes and prohibit the body, including Poste Italiane and Royal Mail, as does the U.S. Postal Service, which is the only carrier in the United States permitted to transport cremated remains. FedEx, meanwhile, generally prohibits remains but allows documented tissue from living patients. Anyone determined to sell looks for the softest rule in this patchwork and, if necessary, writes something harmless on the paperwork. In the end, it is less a ban than an invitation to anyone who knows how to read it.

That means the trade affects people who have no idea what they are handling. The buyer knows what they ordered, but the warehouse worker and the driver, and also the customs officer, think the box is an ordinary package and wear neither a mask nor gloves. Packaging tears, shipments are opened by customs, and in the past postal parcels containing contaminated remains and textiles have already been intercepted. The researchers are calling for clearer rules from postal companies and trained staff capable of identifying dangerous shipments.

The largest market in the sample was the United States, with 34 of 62 assignable listings, 54.8 percent, but the authors warn against extrapolating from that to the world; the sample was not representative, and part of it came from the archive of a researcher who has tracked the trade since 2014. Of the 128 objects examined, the location of sale could be clearly identified for 62. Even the peaks in 2017 and 2018, as well as 2023 and 2024, do not prove worldwide growth, especially since part of the business is likely to have shifted into closed groups and private messages. Their advice to anyone who comes across such listings is simple: preserve the evidence and notify both the platforms and the authorities. But the real damage goes beyond health, because the trade destroys the scientific context of the finds and feeds the black market in cultural property, and it continues a colonial practice that turned the dead into exotic commodities. As long as it continues, the study says at the end, both the living and the dead remain at risk.