Family Finds Creepy, Definitely Not Cursed Roman Artifact... In New Orleans

It's October, per my Far Side desk calendar, and that means that I'm starting to get into horror movie mode ahead of Halloween.

There are many tropes that you see time and time again, like the infamous "final girl" trope or the film taking place in some isolated location. But the one I want to talk about is the family that discovers an ancient — and always cursed — artifact somewhere on their property or in their house.

That one never ends well, and I'm inclined not to mess around with it in everyday life. If I found anything at my house older than a McDLT package (it kept the cold stuff cold), I would move. 

I don't play with this kind of thing.

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So, imagine how freaked out a family was when they found an ancient Roman marble tablet in their New Orleans backyard with the phrase "spirits of the dead" written on it in Latin. 

And worse yet, that tablet turned out to be the 1,900-year-old grave marker of a Roman Sailor, Sextus Congenius Verus.

An ancient artifact, a dead language, and some sailor named Sextus? If that doesn't lead to the house collapsing into another reaction or at least the toaster getting knocked off the counter in the middle of the night, then I really don't know what will.

"The fact that (the tablet) was in Latin that really just gave us pause, right?" said Tulane University anthropologist Daniella Santoro, according to the Associated Press. "I mean, you see something like that and you say, ‘Okay, this is not an ordinary thing.’"

However, as bizarre as it is to find something like this in Louisiana — which history buffs may recall was not part of the Roman Empire — there is an explanation.

Santoro and her colleagues discovered that this tablet had been missing from an Italian museum for decades.

It had previously been documented in the collection of the National Archeological Museum in Civitavecchia, but the museum was destroyed during World War II. The museum was rebuilt over the decades, but the tablet was MIA.

That is, until now.

The FBI is now reportedly working to return the artifact to the Italians.

Which means any horror movie nonsense that may happen is going to be their problem.