Blame this.
Iasee Nebankh Apede
(Summon Sarcophagus Bird)
This spell is easily the single most frustrating item in all of occult Egyptology. Why? Because it works! If you utter the words of the spell correctly, and if you have an authentic Egyptian artifact (at least twenty-five hundred years old) with a sufficiently large hole in it, and if you play the right tune… the spell produces birds who will appear out of the crack.
And that’s it. They’re normal little birds. They don’t do anything unusual. They have no supernatural abilities at all. They certainly don’t register as eldritch, uncanny, unnatural, and/or spooky. People who have gone to the trouble of learning this spell quickly discover that it is useless for convincing people of the existence of the supernatural: skeptics invariably conclude that the spell was some sort of elaborate trick. And in campaign worlds where magic openly exists, this spell is the only one that survives from the ancient Egyptian period, and at least four generations of academic magicians have vainly tried to use it as a springboard to better understand Egyptian magic. And quite a few of those academics have cracked under the strain of relentless failure in that regard. All in all, Iasee Nebankh Apede is a (highly annoying) thaumaturgical dead end.
Heck, there’s not even really good eating on a Sarcophagus Bird.