he called me and said he was downstairs. On the way down I stopped off at one of the technician’s offices and asked for a cart to pick it up. The technician wanted to know what I needed the cart for. So I explained that I needed it to pick up a crystal skull and I received the rather ominous warning, “Don’t look it in the eye – they’re cursed!”’
Undeterred, Dr Walsh wheeled the skull back to her office. And so it was that she found herself the caretaker of the world’s largest, and probably the ugliest, known crystal skull. We looked with interest at the photographs she sent us. Larger than life, the skull is about 10” (25.5 cm) high, 8.25” (22.8 cm) wide and weighs a phenomenal 31 lb (14 kg). Unlike the Mitchell-Hedges and British Museum skulls, it is not clear, but very cloudy. Also unlike the Mitchell-Hedges’ skull, but like the British Museum one, this skull has no separate jaw-bone.
One particularly curious feature of the skull is the fact that despite its massive weight it is actually completely hollow, so that you can look right through its eye sockets deep into its empty interior. It looks almost like a peculiar Halloween lantern, as if a candle might once have been placed within it which could be glimpsed only through the eye sockets. The skull has a smooth finish but is lacking in detail and its features are only crudely represented. But, whatever the quality of its craftsmanship, this skull is by no means a beautiful object. To me it looked rather ugly, whilst Ceri said she found it ‘positively disturbing’, ‘like looking at the mere shell of a human being’. The overall impression it gives is of a strange, almost non-human face. Ceri said it looked as though it were the image of some earlier period of human development and certainly from one particular angle it does look almost Neanderthal (see plate no. 9). But is this skull really cursed? Could we really not look it in the eye? And where had it come from?
Jane Walsh said she had had the skull in her office for quite a while now and had looked it in the eye many a time. ‘Nothing’s happened so far. I haven’t experienced any curses or anything,’ she said lightly.
But there was something about the arrival of the skull which some considered evidence of it being cursed. For why did its mysterious donor wish to remain anonymous?
Investigations in this area had uncovered some rather disturbing information. Attempts to track down the anonymous donor had led instead to his lawyer. The reason for this, as the lawyer explained, was that the donor himself, whose name he could not reveal, was now dead. After sending in the skull he had committed suicide. His lawyer explained that since coming into possession of the crystal skull this man had experienced a whole series of awful tragedies – his wife had died, his son had a terrible accident that left him brain dead and he had gone bankrupt. Finally, he had decided to end it all.
The question was, did all this have anything to do with the curse of the skull? Dr Walsh seemed quite convinced that the anonymous donor had simply decided to take his own life as a result of the tragedies that had befallen him and that these tragedies had nothing to do with the crystal skull.
However, Dr Walsh had noticed something rather strange that had been happening ever since the skull had come into her possession:
‘I don’t believe the skull is cursed… But, since I’ve had it in the office it seems to attract other skulls because I’ve gotten calls and had people bring in several other skulls and I keep hearing of new ones.’
The surprising thing was that what Jane Walsh had been experiencing was very similar to what had been happening to us. As we continued our investigations we kept finding that each time we heard about a crystal skull, its owner or someone associated with it would put us in touch with someone else who would know of another one.
After all this, Dr Walsh too had become very interested in finding out where her own and the other crystal skulls had really come from. Was her skull really Aztec and once the property of the Mexican President, as the handwritten note accompanying it had stated? Dr Walsh, it seemed, was not at all convinced that this was necessarily the case, particularly given that its anonymous donor also claimed that it was purchased in Mexico City, as recently as 1960. So, like us, she had set about investigating crystal skulls and had even started writing a research paper about them in an attempt to determine where they had come from.1
Dr Walsh had been investigating the subject for some time now, but she had not yet reached any firm conclusions. However, having done so much apparently inconclusive research, she was getting more and more determined to solve the mystery. She had decided that the only way to get to the bottom of it was to carry out more rigorous scientific testing. That is why the British Museum had put us in touch with her. For it was now her plan to try to bring the crystal skulls together in order to carry out a series of tests. The idea was that by having as many of the crystal skulls as practically possible gathered in one place it would be possible to compare their artistic styles and do comparative scientific tests in order to finally establish their authenticity. Dr Walsh hoped also to mount an exhibition for the public.
We were amazed when we heard of Jane Walsh’s plan. The ancient legend itself had said that one day all of the crystal skulls would be rediscovered and brought together, and at that time they would reveal their important and sacred information for the good of all humankind. Could it be that now was the time for their information to be made available? Were the skulls coming together for the start of the new millennium? It was beginning to look as though all was about to be revealed.
But the problems were many. For one thing Dr Walsh seemed not at all convinced that any of the crystal skulls were genuinely ancient. She tried to explain the depth and complexity of the problem by telling us about some of the other crystal skulls she had now come across.
Dr Walsh had looked first to other museums around the world and had soon found yet another near life-size crystal skull. This one, she explained, was housed in the Trocadero Museum, or Musée de l’Homme, in Paris. The Parisian skull, though smaller than the Mitchell-Hedges, the Smithsonian and the British Museum skulls, is still of a reasonable size. Made from clear quartz, it is around 4.5” (11 cm) high, weighs only 6 lb (2.75 kg) and has no separate jaw-bone. But the interesting thing about this skull is that it is very stylized in its features, with very rounded eyes and chiselled teeth, very much in the style attributed to the ancient Aztecs and their close neighbours the Mixtecs.
This skull also has a vertical hole drilled right through it from top to bottom. As Jane Walsh explained, a horizontal hole would mean that it was in the same style as the real human skulls the Aztecs used to skewer onto skull racks, which in her opinion would indicate ‘an almost certain pre-Columbian provenance’, in other words, that it was genuinely ancient or at least dated to before the arrival of Christopher Columbus and the Europeans in the Americas. But a vertical hole indicated that it might have been used by the early Spanish conquerors, perhaps as the base for a crucifix. However, the hole on the Parisian skull was known to be ‘bi-conical’ in shape, indicating that it was definitely made by hand, not machine tools, and was therefore probably made before the arrival of the Spanish.
We spoke to the curator of the American collection at the Trocadero Museum, Daniel Levine, who is convinced that the skull they have is genuinely ancient and, he believes, Aztec. Monsieur Levine told us that French experts have already agreed that it was made by the Aztecs in the fourteenth or fifteenth century and that it may have been an ornament on a sceptre carried by an Aztec priest. Apparently ‘the style of the piece is characteristically Aztec’ and ‘the Aztecs are known to have done a lot of carvings of this type in rock crystal’. He indicated that the museum had also already carried out their own scientific tests on the skull. The bi-conical drill hole meant that the skull had definitely been made by hand and they had even found traces of copper tools like those used by the Aztecs on the skull’s surface. So the Trocadero Museum was quite convinced this skull, at least, was genuinely ancient and could see no need for further scientific testing.
But was there any evidence of exactly where it had really come from or when it had first been discovered? All Daniel Levine could tell us was that it had originally been given to the museum and had already been part of the Collection Française when proper records began back in the late 1800s.
So we spoke again