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As of this Thursday, there are currently three "mummies" in Indiana, two of which are in Richmond.

One of them rests at the Wayne County Historical Museum. The building itself dates back to 1865 and was founded by Julia Meek Gaar.

Gaar was a world traveler from one of the oldest and wealthiest families in Richmond. She was always especially interested in collecting ancient items from around the world. Executive Director of the Wayne County Historical Museum says Gaar bought the mummy in 1929. She had it shipped to Richmond and it arrived here in January 1930. But it took 11 years to cut through the red tape to get it released by the Egyptian government.

“And the story is that back in the Victorian times the late 1800s a lot of tourists did buy mummies and they shipped them back as really souvenirs. The Egyptian government decided they wanted to bring that to a halt. And so they stopped letting the mummies leave Egypt in 1929,” says Harlan.

Harlan says Egyptians would mummify bodies because they were thought to have an afterlife.

“The side of the body is split open, the internal organs were taken out all except for the heart, the heart never came out it always stayed in the body. Our particular mummy in the particular time period that it was mummified. The organ were re-wrapped in linen material and put back into the body cavity,” says Harlan.

The second mummy in Richmond is at the Joseph Moore Museum of Natural History at Earlham College.