Ghosts of the British Museum

Reviews

Come for the delicious ghost stories but stay for a complete takedown of the British Museum project... Absolutely fascinating, thoughtfully told... Powerful and provocative, Ghosts of the British Museum creates its own unique energy and important voice. A fascinating and illuminating account of some curious incidents at the greatest museum in the world. 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. 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. 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. Expand reviews