THERE’S SOMETHING FIERCELY maternal in how Tammy James talks about “Sylvester,” the mustachioed mummy her father-in-law bought in 1955 to display in Ye Olde Curiosity Shop on Seattle’s waterfront.
“People have always questioned whether he was real,” she says. “He just doesn’t look like other mummies.”
While “Sylvia,” his peer at the Curiosity Shop, sports a properly shrunken and calcified look, Sylvester displays a lacquered sheen and rubicund fleshiness belying his death, which happened sometime before he was dug up in the desert in the late 1800s.
This past weekend, though, two visiting doctors/television show hosts proved not only Sylvester’s authenticity, but that he is special. And it’s all on film. A CAT scan revealed the surprising news that his organs, from his brain to his liver, are still intact, floating in 70 percent of his original body fluid.
“You know, the smell was always there,” mused James. She hastened to add that the odor wasn’t overpowering, just present when his case was cleaned.
This is big news. No one can recall a mummy whose organs have been as well preserved, says Larry Engel of Engel Brothers Media, which is producing a half-hour show on Sylvester as one segment of a 13-part serial called “The Mummy Road Show,” slated to air on National Geographic in the fall.
It also shoots holes in Sylvester’s original story. The theory that he died of a gunshot wound in the California desert, the shifting sands burying and instantly preserving him, is impossible because he’d be shriveled, explains Engel. The hosts are corralling more expert help and hope to clarify details in the coming weeks, he said.
“Maybe someone embalmed him, maybe something else happened,” he said. “Sylvester is a much more complicated story than we originally thought.”
Though James will need to change the text on Sylvester’s souvenir postcards once the cause, year of death, and the mystery of his post-mortem longevity are determined, there is no hiding the pleasure at Sylvester’s newfound celebrity.
“I’ve always known he was wonderful,” says James with pride. “I always knew he was real.”
Leah Kohlenberg
