This chapter uses Kimberly Cox’s work on ‘manual intercourse’ to explore two-way touch in the Egyptian gothic. Not only does the Egyptologist touch the mummy, but the mummy returns that contact. Touch is examined across four distinct categories: acquisitional touch (and denial of it), touch between the living and the dead, contaminating touch, and disturbing touch. I have created these categories based on the most common types of touch found in these texts and use them to trace the violence enacted on Ancient Egyptian bodies. The transformative properties of contaminating touch in Richard Marsh’s The Beetle (1897) form the main case study of this chapter. To be touched against your will is the ultimate form of violation for the middlebrow reader, who experiences it through these characters. Ultimately, touch highlights the uneasy morality between the desire to own and hold spoils of Empire and desecration of the dead. As a response to the violence enacted on these Ancient Egyptian bodies, their textual counterparts return that violence before being quashed with equal brutality.