Blog Tour: Ghosts of the British Museum – Noah Angell

When artist and writer Noah Angell first heard murmurs of ghostly sightings at the British Museum he had to find out more. What started as a trickle soon became a deluge as staff old and new – from overnight security to respected curators – brought him testimonies of their supernatural encounters.

It became clear that the source of the disturbances was related to the Museum’s contents – unquiet objects, holy plunder, and restless human remains protesting their enforced stay within the colonial collection’s cabinets and deep underground vaults. According to those who have worked there, the institution is heaving with profound spectral disorder.

Ghosts of the British Museum fuses storytelling, folklore and history, digs deep into our imperial past and unmasks the world’s oldest national museum as a site of ongoing conflict, where restless objects are held against their will.

It now appears that the objects are fighting back.

My thoughts: this was a really interesting, thought provoking read. I have been many times to the British Museum, it’s collections often coinciding with something I was studying at school – Egyptians, Romans, Greeks. I can remember my sister, aged 5, being absolutely captivated by a pair of huge vases on the stairs, she could probably have fitted in one, and being deeply unnerved by the Egyptian mummies on display.

The main thing haunting the museum it seems are not just those who died in its buildings (there seem to be a very large number of suicides by staff over the years – someone should probably look into that) or the ones attached to the various artifacts, but colonialism.

I was genuinely horrified by some of the things Noah learnt in his meetings with museum employees past and present. The most infamous stories I knew – the theft of the Parthenon marbles by Lord Elgin, the Benin Bronzes the museum just won’t return (give them back already!) But there were so many truly awful stories, of theft, murder and outrageous behaviour. Some of the items are never intended to be displayed – so why does the museum have them?

The number of people who told Noah they’d had creepy experiences around specific items had Mike Wachowski from Monsters Inc singing “put that thing back where it came from…” in my head while I was reading. Cursed objects are cursed for a reason, do not mess with them.

I don’t really believe in ghosts, but I do agree that things can hold onto strange energies. The house I grew up in apparently came with a presence – according to my mum – it’s an old building and she felt the previous owner was a bit worried about how we would treat her home. It sounds a bit woo woo, but the otherwise fairly sensible people who had these interactions in the museum (and my mum, a nurse with a scientific brain) suggest there might be something to it. I was much more sceptical of the psychics and mediums Noah took into the museum – if you’re predisposed to “see” things, funny enough you often do.

I am very much of the return things to their homeland, put the thousands of human remains back where they came from school. We can use replicas, photos, video links to the museums in the items homelands (how much more stunning would the Parthenon look in the Athenian sunlight, finally reunited?) and the internet to study these incredible items, in context, surrounded by their home, instead of in cold and sterile rooms in Bloomsbury. And the British Museum could have a go at being an actual museum of Britain – I really enjoyed the exhibition they did a few years ago on my ancestors, the Celts. It might be nice to have a museum of Britain, though no human remains please, leave the dead to their rest.

Noah’s book is very timely, and made me quite sad to think of so many precious and important things being left to time in Storage, never displayed,yet not returned home to their people and their place, forgotten and neglected. It’s an important and powerful read and I hope more people pick it up and realise that perhaps these artifacts don’t belong there, but to the descendants of the people who created them.

*I was kindly gifted a copy of this book in exchange for taking part in this blog tour, but all opinions remain my own.