Employees at a British museum were stunned recently when they reviewed video footage that showed an ancient Egyptian statue spinning mysteriously on its own.
Housed at the Manchester Museum in Manchester, England, for the last 80 years, the
statue of Neb-senu never moved before but video has now caught the statue spinning, curator Campbell Price told the U.K. newspaper The Sun.
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"The statuette has been on a glass shelf in about the same place in the gallery for decades — and has never moved before. None of the other objects in the display had moved. It's bizarre," he said.
Price noticed recently that the relic, which Egyptians believe house the spirits of the people they represent, was facing the wrong way, so he moved it back to its original position in its locked case. The next day, it was rotated again. This time, Price set up a camera to record the statue.
"The statue only seems to spin during the day when people are in the museum," Carol Redmount, associate professor of Egyptian archeology at the University of California, Berkeley, told ABC News. "It could have something to do with its individual placement and the individual character of the statue."
Other experts claim the statue shifted because of the subtle vibrations caused by people walking by, but that doesn’t explain why the statue never moved before or why it spun in a complete circle.
Price said the statue seems to depict an official with priestly duties, as evidenced by its wig and kilt, and the hieroglyphics on the back of the idol spell out a prayer for offerings.
"It probably lay buried until it was found by an archaeologist or a local Egyptian before being sold and entering the art market," he said.
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