Radiologic Sciences Examines the 'Carnival Mummy'

By Kathryn Podolsky

Radiography and advanced imaging technology recently brought to life the story of a man who died and was mummified in the early 1900s.

"The Mummy Road Show," televised on the National Geographic Channel, features two experts in the new field of paleo-imaging, Jerry Conlogue and Ron Beckett. The pair travels the world to solve the often mysterious deaths surrounding mummies found in unusual locations.

Tom Edwards, associate professor and director of the University of Central Florida radiologic sciences program, first learned of Conlogue's interest in paleo-imaging when he visited Gulf Coast Community College to recruit A.S. to B.S. transfer students. Conlogue was the GCCC radiography program director. Edwards received a phone call from Conlogue earlier this year when Conlogue knew his team was coming to Orlando to examine a mummy that had traveled as a carnival sideshow phenomenon.

Stored in the Ripley's Believe It or Not! Orlando Museum warehouse, a mummy named "Andy" is the first full-figure human in Ripley's collection. Purchased for a new Ripley's museum in New Orleans, Andy had two sideshow legends. One that he was a carnival worker who wished to be mummified after his death in order to remain traveling on the carnival circuit. And the other legend, which spectators flocked to hear and paid to see, was that he was actually thousands of years old.

Waiting for months among shrunken heads and other bizarre collectibles, Andy was to be examined by Conlogue and Beckett and their newly acquired Orlando team. Edwards had made arrangements with Dr. Greorge Stanley, medical director of radiologic sciences at UCF, to use the facilities at the University Diagnostic Institute Winter Park to perform CT scans on the mummy and help Conlogue and Beckett determine Andy's age and his cause of death.

After examination of the mummy at the Ripley's warehouse, it was discovered that Andy was probably mummified in the 1920s or so. He was transported to UDI Winter Park, where Stanley and Edwards assisted the "Mummy Road Show" hosts with a CT scan from Andy's head to his toes.

"The images were startling," Edwards said.

Not only did Andy have a four-inch nail lodged in his head, the CT scan showed a collapsed lung, broken ribs and a heart pushed well to one side of his chest. Was the nail the cause of death? Did Andy perform a sideshow stunt gone awry? Carnival sideshows in the 1920s and '30s often had a performer, called a "human blockhead," who would hammer a spike or nail into his head through a cavity behind the nostril.

Or did a brutal strike to Andy's chest do him in?

The endoscopy performed at the Ripley warehouse had determined that the nail was lodged too far back in Andy's head for a "regular" carnival performance. But the CT scan showed the nail was not the cause of death.

"This is interesting," Stanley said. "The nail stops...and doesn't fracture the vertebral body." Any closer to his spine, the nail would have killed him.

Further analysis of the CT scan determined that "tension pneumothorax," probably caused by a severe blow to the chest, killed Andy almost instantly.

The nail remains a mystery. Speculating, Beckett tells us, "Maybe someone put the nail in him just after he died as a memento to his sideshow days."

The "Carnival Mummy" show aired on the National Geographic Channel on Nov. 3, 2003 and will be aired again in the future. A copy of "The Mummy Road Show 'Carnival Mummy'" is available for viewing in HPA II. Please contact Radiologic Sciences Program Director Tom Edwards at tedwards@mail.ucf.edu for further information.