While some Maine antique shops can boast of offering items of genuine historic significance, few are stocked with the sort of things that museums vie for. Not so Terry Lewis’ store in Wiscasset. He has one particular relic that is so old and so unusual that it’s attracting tourists and media crews from all over. It’s so authentic, in fact, that it’s creating headaches for the shopkeeper.

For the past four years, a three thousand-year-old Egyptian mummy has been reposing in the entryway of Lewis’ Nonesuch House Antiques, delighting many shoppers and horrifying others. A female Egyptian excavated from the area around King Tut’s tomb in the 1920s, she lies in a glass case, her body a dark carbon color, free from the swaddling clothes most people associate with mummies. Lewis, 50, purchased the body from the Morse Museum in Warren, New Hampshire, in November of 1992 for “the price of a new Ford Taurus,” he says.

In the past few years people have traveled quite a distance to see the macabre relic, including a news team from New Zealand, and Lewis has entertained offers from Boston businessmen and a place called the Museum of Death in San Diego, which offered the shopkeeper four Harley-Davidson motorcycles for the mummy. Lewis says with a laugh that he’s even heard from the notorious collector of the unusual — pop star Michael Jackson. But he hasn’t heard the right price yet. What does an unwrapped female mummy fetch these days? “If somebody offered $35,000 or $40,000, they could have it on the spot.”

The mummy rested quietly in the shop without incident for years, until this past summer when a series of articles appeared in papers such as the Boston Globe and USA Today. Shortly after the Globe article hit the stands, an official visitor stopped by the shop and did some haggling Lewis didn’t particularly want to hear. He was an agent from U.S. Customs, and he placed a seizure notice on the mummy, disallowing the sale or even the movement of the body. And now the Egyptian government has been making noises about wanting the mummy back.

Lewis is not one to keep mum on the subject. He insists he purchased the body legally, and if he doesn’t get adequate compensation, he has threatened to take it to the Carlton Bridge in Bath and heave it into the Kennebec. “This whole thing is insane,” he says. “If it weren’t so ridiculous I’d be truly outraged. I finally met a woman who can stand me for more than a few minutes and now the government is trying to take her away from me.”
 
The whole affair has had an upside, the collector notes, allowing as how traffic through his shop has tripled since all the hoopla began. “I’m loving it,” he admits. “My big fear now is that customs will come down here and lift that seizure notice.”

(Published November 1996)