Alison Dare and the Mississippi Mummy

I’ve been reading the adventures of Alison Dare, the 12 year-old girl adventurer, daughter of world-renowned archaeologist Dr. Alice Dare and masked superhero The Blue Scarab. Collected in two volumes, Alison Dare: Little Miss Adventures and Alison Dare: The Heart of the Maiden, these short comic books are a lot of fun for young and old alike. This month, publisher Tundra Books has broken Alison out of her comic books and into the real world, inviting readers to depict her in exciting adventures in their own town. I decided to play along, creating an adventure called Alison Dare and the Mississippi Mummy. It’s based on true events!

Jackson, Mississippi’s Old Capitol Museum used to be a creaking walk-in wunderkammer of mysteries: a historical hodge-podge of Indian artifacts, Civil War swords and cotton gins. As a kid I used to love wandering the cavernous hallways of the museum, breathing in the slightly stale, cool air, eyes agog at all the cultural treasures on display. But even then, the one thing that I interested me most was something that was rumored to be hidden away: the mummy.

It was rumored that the museum’s founders had purchased a supposedly gen-u-wine mummy straight from Egypt-land from a traveling salesman, only to discover after years of display that it was a fraud. My father had seen the mummy when he was young, as had my mother. They told me that the museum, not wanting their purchase to go entirely to waste, used to pull the mummy out of storage on Halloween, much to the delight of young visitors. I never saw it, but I remember asking about it many times. Apparently the rumors were true: a friend of mine in the Mississippi Department of Archives and History recently confirmed its existence, and actually got to see it in its heyday.

In 2008 Hurricane Katrina destroyed the old museum’s roof, and along with it, many of the artifacts on display. The museum reopened this year, but its formerly eclectic aesthetic has been replaced by a rather series of displays devoted to the legislative process in Mississippi throughout the ages. No longer do the museum’s floors creak and moan, and undoubtedly, this isn’t the kind of place that a mummy – fake or otherwise – would willingly call home.

Still, in my own overactive imagination, I can imagine that Katrina awoke the mummy from its slumber, and during the ensuing two years of reconstruction it roamed the museum’s halls by night and maybe slept in a janitorial closet by day. Today, the mummy doesn’t especially care about its origins, all it cares about is how blandly “educational” the museum has become and how much it would like to bring back some of its formerly spooky charm. I can envision a group of bored schoolchildren being escorted by their teachers: one of them lingers a little too long and catches a glimpse of a dusty, bandaged visage glaring from the shadows. Later, night watchmen begin to report the sounds of shuffling footsteps on the far side of the museum, and maybe a low moan that might – or might not – be the wind. The mummy has returned!

I don’t know if Alison Dare gets down south too often, but this seems like it could be her kind of thing. What would she find? A real live, real fake mummy? Would she be sympathetic to its goals? Would she have to fight it? How about this for a curve ball: what if that mummy just turned out to be an aging Gen Xer using a poorly remembered childhood memory as an excuse to bring the museum back in line with his own predilections? (So what if the local Piggly Wiggly sold out of Ace Bandages in one single night? Why are you telling me?)

The only place that we might be able to see Alison Dare and friends solve this mummy mystery is in the theater of our minds, but if you’d like to experience the adventures she’s already had, be sure to pick up Alison Dare: Little Miss Adventures and Alison Dare: The Heart of the Maiden.

An aside: shortly after finishing this piece I was just told that the mummy will be on display this October. If I’m still living in Mississippi then I’ll finally have a chance to meet it face to face!