Weird Burial Stories · The Archive

Article

Ötzi the Iceman

By Weird Burial Stories Editorial Desk · 2026-09-27

On 19 September 1991 hikers found a body in the ice at the Tisenjoch. He had died about 3300 BCE, with a flint arrowhead still in his shoulder and a copper axe, one blade hafted in yew, beside him. He is in Bolzano.

By C. V. Wooster

On 19 September 1991 two hikers found a human body in the ice at the Tisenjoch, a pass in the Ötztal Alps on the border of Italy and Austria. The first story was a mountaineering accident. Accelerator dating of tissue, bone, and grass from the find places the death in the Late Neolithic, between 3359 and 3105 BC: about 3300 BCE. The man is called Ötzi. Nobody buried him. The cold dried him, snow and ice covered the gully, and a warm summer opened it again. Since 1998 he has lain in a cold cell at the South Tyrol Museum of Archaeology in Bolzano.

A body on the border

The museum's discovery account is specific. Erika and Helmut Simon, German holidaymakers, were at 3,210 meters near Tisenjoch, Giogo di Tisa, in the Schnalstal, or Val Senales. Only the upper body was out of the ice. They reported it at the Similaun refuge. The landlord called the Austrian police and the Italian carabinieri, because the site is on the border. A recovery the next day failed in bad weather. The axe came down. The body did not. Reinhold Messner, shown a sketch of that axe, was the first to say the corpse was very old. The body was freed on 23 September, filmed as it was worked from the ice with ice picks and with no archaeologist present, then flown to Vent in the Ötztal and driven to forensic medicine in Innsbruck. On 24 September Konrad Spindler estimated the mummy at "at least 4000 years old" and put it in a cold cell that imitated the glacier.

A survey on 2 October 1991 put the find 92.56 meters on the Italian side, in South Tyrol. The museum explains the line: when the border was drawn after Italy's annexation of South Tyrol in 1922, snow hid the watershed the border was meant to follow, and the line that was drawn remains the legal one. The mummy stayed in Innsbruck for the first study. The Viennese journalist Karl Wendl named him Ötzi, after the Ötztal Alps, and that name outlasted the five hundred others tried in the first weeks. He had lain in a gully about three meters by seven, below the Finail peak, sheltered from the moving ice. He is a wet mummy. The organs were never removed, which is a different preservation from the deliberate mummification in the Death Glossary.

The arrow found in 2001, and the head

For ten years the death was told as an accident. In 2001 an X-ray showed a flint arrowhead in the left shoulder. The museum records a two-centimeter entry wound in the back. The shaft is gone. The museum says it was pulled out, by Ötzi or by the shooter, and that the arrowhead broke off and remains. Its shape matches other flint points from the area, including arrows he carried. On the museum's reading the point severed the subclavian artery and he bled to death within minutes. A deep cut on the right hand, between thumb and index finger, had never healed. The museum's research list places that cut a few days before the death: close fighting, then the shot. Pollen and maple leaves in a birch-bark container put the season in early summer.

The head injury is part of the museum's account, and it is not a settled fact. The museum says he also suffered a severe head injury, probably at the same time as the arrow wound, from a fall or a blow. A clinical review published in Scientific Reports on 27 November 2025, with Marco Samadelli and Albert Zink of the museum among the authors, found no clear sign of a brain injury suffered in life. The same paper argues that a heavy bleed out through the arrow track is unlikely, and that he may have lived for hours after the shot. The flint found in 2001 is not in dispute. The speed of the death, and whether a blow to the head belonged to it, still depends on which reading of the scans is followed.

One copper blade, hafted in yew

The axe survived intact. The museum calls it the only one of its kind. It has a single trapezoidal blade of 99.7 percent pure copper, cast, cooled, and then hammered, set in the fork of a yew haft about 60 centimeters long, fixed with birch tar and bound with leather. Wear shows it was resharpened. The copper is not Alpine. The museum reports that the ore was mined in southern Tuscany, from isotope work it lists under 2017. Around 3000 BC, the museum notes, a copper axe marked high rank and was often buried with its owner. This one was not buried. It stayed on the pass. The museum still asks why it was left.

The rest was a traveling kit, not grave goods placed by mourners. The Death Glossary uses that term for objects buried with the dead. He had an unfinished yew bow, 1.82 meters and still a stave, a deer-hide quiver with twelve shafts and two finished arrows, a flint dagger on an ash handle, birch-bark containers (one holding maple leaves and charcoal, read as a carrier for embers), the frame of a backpack, and birch fungus the museum assumes was medicine.

The body and the last meal

The mummy is 1.54 meters long and weighs about 13 kilograms. In life, the museum estimates, he stood about 1.60 meters and weighed about 50 kilograms. Bone in the femur puts his age near 46. His lungs were black with soot. Joints were worn, and older breaks in the ribs and nose had healed, unlike the arrow. Sixty-one tattoos, lines and crosses made by rubbing charcoal into cuts, sit at the ribs, the lower back, a wrist, a knee, the calves, and the ankles, under where clothing would have been. The museum assumes they were treatment for worn joints, not display.

The stomach was still there. In 2018 Frank Maixner and colleagues described it in Current Biology under the title "The Iceman's Last Meal Consisted of Fat, Wild Meat, and Cereals." The abstract says the meal was remarkably high in fat, with fresh or dried wild meat, cereals, and traces of toxic bracken. The museum's summary of that paper names deer and ibex, einkorn wheat, and a little toxic bracken. The abstract does not decide whether the meat was fresh or dried. Neither source explains the bracken. It is poisonous, and it is present. That is as far as the published claim goes.

The curse is a legend

A popular legend, the Ötzi curse, says that people who found him, brought him down, or studied him later died because of the mummy. It is a legend, not a finding. The museum's pages on the discovery and the death describe a recovery and an arrow. They do not describe a curse. A June 2026 interview with the museum team, published by The Collector, says there is no scientific evidence for a curse, calls the idea a media-driven myth, and treats the later deaths of several people who worked on the recovery as unconnected. The habit is an old one on this site. A haunted cemetery is often a press story laid over a real ground, and a safety coffin at least has a patent that says what was feared. The curse has neither. It was added afterward. It is not how he died.

Bolzano

Since 1998 the mummy has been in a cold cell at the South Tyrol Museum of Archaeology, Museumstraße 43, Bolzano, also called Bozen. The cell copies the glacier: −6°C and about 99 percent humidity, the body on scales and sprayed with sterile water so it does not dry further. Visitors see him through a small window. The axe and the rest of the kit are in the same building. A stone pyramid marks the gully. He was never interred. His address is a museum. A coffin that was closed on a known day is a different kind of evidence: the Egtved Girl was laid in an oak coffin, and a yarrow flower on the rim dates that burial to summer.

Those terms, and the others this find keeps raising, are in the Death Glossary.

Sources