Ghosts of the British Museum

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What to expect

What if the British Museum isn't a house of learning, but a vast sinkhole of still-bubbling historic injustice?

What if it presents us not with a carefully ordered cross section of history but is instead a palatial trophy cabinet of colonial loot swarming with volatile and errant spirits?

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 landslide as staff old and new, from guards of formidable build to respected curators, brought forth testimonies of their inexplicable 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 cases, cabinets and deep underground vaults. Be it wraiths associated with genocides, uprooted sacred beings or the afterglow of deaths that occurred inside the museum itself, according to those who have worked there, the museum 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 under the guise of preservation, restless objects are held against their will.

It now appears that the objects are fighting back.

(p) 2024 Octopus Publishing Group

Critics Review

  • A fascinating and illuminating account of some curious incidents at the greatest museum in the world.

    Peter Ackroyd

  • Filled with artifacts wrenched from graves and stolen from shrines, the British Museum is undeniably haunted. In this brilliantly delicate, pointed, shivery book, Angell reveals which of the museum’s many angry spirits have managed to be the loudest. You could read it as a guide to which galleries to avoid – or to where the push for repatriation should be most urgent.

    Erin L. Thompson, professor of art crime at the City University of New York

  • With its shelves of dusty fetishes, objects literally poisoned, conserved mummies, stone mirrors and giant recumbent deities, the British Museum is ripe for haunts both academic and supernatural. When I wrote A Natural History of Ghosts in the British Library both at the British Museum and its new home in Euston I made friends with many security guards who seemed to me more interesting about ghosts, more deeply involved in the emotion of them, than the librarians. Here is a book that actually gives them voice! Achieving the near-impossible of a marriage between paranormal pop-culture and developing folklore and the academic notations of hauntology, American scholar Noah Angell has a cultural predisposition for haunted objects and consequently understands the concept well. Where even the fakes are spooked-up, Angell has found an untapped resource – the unmediated haunt in a highly mediated environment.

    Roger Clarke, author of A Natural History of Ghosts

  • An absorbingly creepy travelogue through the shadowy corridors, echoing tunnels and musty basements of our most famous repository of cultural treasure. With Noah Angell as our guide, the British Museum seems less like a temple dedicated to ancient grandeur, more a haunted prison filled with imperial plunder and restless spirits clamouring for attention, insisting that we remember differently. Next time you visit, I guarantee you’ll be glancing over your shoulder, ears pricked up to catch the murmured laments of the dead.

    Malcolm Gaskill, author of The Ruin Of All Witches

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