Manchester Museum's Egyptology collection holds a small limestone statuette representing an official named Neb-senu, dating from around 1800 BC and part of the museum's holdings for roughly eighty years by 2013, when its curator, Campbell Price, first noticed something odd: the figure, kept in a sealed glass display case, appeared to have rotated slightly out of its usual position. Price straightened it, only to find the following day that it had turned again, seemingly without anyone having opened the case.
Over the following week, the museum set up time-lapse photography trained on the case, and the resulting footage, released publicly in 2013, showed the statuette completing something close to a three-quarter rotation over several days, moving imperceptibly slowly to the naked eye but unmistakably on the sped-up film. The footage went viral internationally, generating the inevitable wave of speculation about an ancient Egyptian curse activating after eight decades of dormancy, and the story remains one of the most widely reported "cursed object" cases of the twenty-first century.
Price himself, while acknowledging the case remains formally unexplained, has consistently offered a more down-to-earth reading, suggesting that subtle vibration, whether from road traffic outside the museum, footfall from visitors passing through the gallery, or a slight difference in friction between the statuette's flat base and the glass shelf it stands on, could account for the movement over time without requiring any supernatural mechanism. He has noted as a point of interest that the movement seems to occur mainly during museum opening hours rather than overnight, which is consistent with a vibration-based explanation, and that no other object in the same case has been observed to move in a comparable way. Given the genuine, documented and filmed nature of the movement itself, set against the range of plausible mundane explanations offered by the museum's own Egyptology curator, this entry is rated contested rather than documented or dubious: the phenomenon is real, but its cause is not agreed.
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