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Deadly fall: The other “curse of the pharaohs”

THE OTHER CURSE OF THE PHARAOHS

Category: American urban legends / USA hauntings

I talked about the “curse of the mummy”, also known as the “curse of the pharaohs”. But you might be surprised to learn that there is “another” curse coming from old Egypt – a curse said to strike only a specific place in one of the most iconic American towns: Las Vegas.

Las Vegas is filled with the most extravagant and unique hotels and casinos you will ever see. And one of them is rumored to be cursed. Given we are speaking of Egypt, you won’t be surprised to learn that it is the Luxor hotel and casino: a towering pyramid structure standing over the Las Vegas landscape. The very outward shape of the casino has been known to make people feel unease: the enormous pyramid is entirely black, with no ornaments of any kind, just the opaque and dark imposing structure – and at night one beam of white light gets out from the top of the pyramid, like some occult scene from horror movies.

But even eerier is the dark history of the Luxor – which seems to be filled with a lot of nasty incidents.

The Luxor opened up on October 1993. 30 stories high, it is one of the biggest hotel-casinos of Las Vegas, and its beam was designed to be one of the strongest beams of light of the world, visible by pilots flying even hours away from California. As you can guess, the Luxor was entirely based around Ancient Egypt: the casino is pyramid-shaped, there is a sphinx statue near the entrance, the name of the casino can be found on an obelisk, and the inside is filled with Egyptian-looking statues and murals. The Luxor was created by the Circus Circus Enterprises (a big hotel-and-casino corporation from Nevada) during the brief “family-friendly” era that Las Vegas knew at the end of the 20th century: the Luxor, as a top-class hotel and casino, was designed to attract a wealthy clientele, but its unique theme and decorum was also prepared to appeal families seeking “theme park”-like fun, basically making the Luxor both a five-star hotel AND a true tourist attraction.

To list the incidents attributed to the “curse”, I will invite you to go backwards with me through time…

# 2012: Three guests of the hotel fell ill. They had contracted the Legionnaire’s disease, and it was found that the Legionella bacteria had somehow infected the water system of the Luxor. Bizarrely, after two guests fell ill, the water was tested but the Legionella was nowhere to be found: it was only after a third guest was infected (and in fact later died, the other two healed), that the Legionella was discovered.

# Also 2012: the elevators of the Luxor are not called elevators but “inclinators” because, due to the pyramid-shape of the building, they actually go in a diagonal way, following the slopes of the pyramid. In 2012, two airmen from the Nellis Air Force Base had a fight in the first-floor lobby of the western part of the Luxor. One of the two pushed the other against the inclinator door – which mysteriously opened, despite there being no cabin at the level of this floor: just the empty shaft. The victim fell 25 feet down, all the way to the basement of the Luxor. He was sent to hospital in critical condition.

# In June 2010, Las Vegas football player DeMario Reynolds and his friend, Jason Sindelar, a MMA fighter (Mixed Martial Art), got into a fight in a suite of the hotel. The fight started when Sindelar, drunk and angry, verbally fought with his girlfriend during a party organized in Reynolds’ suite. Reynolds asked Sindelar to leave the party, but it only made him angrier: he tried to hit his girlfriend, and grab her by the neck. Reynolds tried to restrain the fighter by pushing him down the bathroom floor. Then the fight was taken to the main bedroom, where the two men had a short fistfight. Sindelar finally left the suite, but not before returning shortly after, hitting Reynolds in the head and in the chest – after bringing Reynolds to the ground, Sindelar went all out on him, and other guests of the party called the hotel’s security. The injured Reynolds was taken to the Desert Springs Hospital, but he had died of his wounds before arriving there.

# May 2007: in the parking garage of the Luxor, a young food court employee left a coffee cup on top of his car. When he later returned to remove the cup, it exploded in his hand and killed him: a homemade bomb had been placed inside. Investigations led to the arrest of two men, who had indeed created the bomb and placed it in the cup – but they actually didn’t know the victim, and there was no evident motive for why they would do such a thing. Visibly, they just wanted to make a bomb and kill someone – anyone.

# September 1996: A woman jumped from the 26th story of the hotel and died. Her heavy injuries coupled with her lack of identification made it hard to identify her – she fell near the entrance of what was then the buffet, but by today has been completely reshaped into the new food court of the casino. We never knew who she was or why she jumped – all we know is that she clearly killed herself. The women of the 26th floor soon became a “ghost story” in Las Vegas, as everybody invented their own “legends” about the reason for her fall: the most famous of which claims that the woman was a prostitute who killed herself after discovering she had HIV. Still today people claim her ghost can be seen on the 26th floor.

# Beyond this woman, three more deadly falls were reported at the Luxor, two of which were suicides but one – a man jumping from the 10th floor – still of unknown nature (suicide? Accident? Murder?).

# But the oldest “ghosts” of the Luxor are said to be here since the building of the hotel. You see, William Bennett, the CEO of Circus Circus Enterprises in the 90s, built the Luxor in eighteen months at a very low cost. When you see how big and grand the construction is, you realize what it means: corners were cut. We know that when the Luxor actually opened, in October 1993, the construction wasn’t actually complete – some parts of the structure were still built, and some guests had to stay in unfinished rooms. We also know that during the first years of the hotel, the “inclinators” didn’t work properly – and soon people realized that the Luxor had been built in an unusual soft spot of the desert, meaning the pyramid was literally sinking in the ground. This led to the rumors that workers had died during the constructions – while there is no official death record of any worker during the building of the Luxor, the rumor claims that at least two men died during the building, but that their death was covered by Circus Circus Enterprises – some local media even went as far as claim it was seven men, and not two, that died. The rumor notably fed of the real fact that the construction of the pyramid had been a very difficult and dangerous process due to its unusual shape (coupled with the all the cut corners). Rumors claim that in the quiet part of the hotel the ghosts of the workers can still be spotted – and back when the hotel had a unique boat-riding attraction called the Luxor’s Nile Riverboat, some visitors claimed to have seen the dead workers inside the tunnels.

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All those incidents and ghost-sighting coupled together led people to believe that a “curse” had been placed on the Luxor. Why? Because of the very Egyptian model of the Luxor.

The outside pyramid is a reproduction of the Great Pyramid of Giza (well, it is only three-quarters its size, so a smaller replica), and the hotel contains the biggest and most accurate replica of the Tomb of King Tutankhamun known on American ground – carefully recreated down to every detail with the same materials originally used for the tomb. No need to tell you that Tutankhamun was THE big curse of Egypt, but strangely it is not this replica that is thought to have brought the curse, but rather the rest of the hotel: because the other “Egyptian decorum” are all noted to be basically cheap and inaccurate replicas. As such, it is thought that the curse was brought onto the casino due to being a mockery of a pyramid, and due to the creators of the site not understanding the meaning of the occult and mystic symbols they used.

For example superstitious people refuse to go play in the Luxor due to a pyramid being a tomb – and it is always bad luck to go gambling in tombs or near graves. Other point out that there is only one sphinx in front of the pyramid’s entrance, when Egypt belief claimed that before a palace or a pyramid you needed to build two sphinxes to ward off evil spirits and wicked influences. The constructors did so to replicate the “lonely sphinx” sitting in front of the Great Pyramid – but archeologists will tell you that if there is one sphinx today, it is because the other one was destroyed. The urban legend notably claims that the dark pyramid attracts malevolent energies, and that the only way to purify it would be to place an eye sculpture at its top.

Now beyond the Egyptian-cultural-appropriation theory, another story for the “origins” of the curse is much more local and rooted in the history of Las Vegas: it is said that the Luxor is cursed because it was built on the site of a former secret mobster burial ground: a mass grave for the victims of the mafias.

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