Ghosts of the British Museum: A True Story of Colonial Loot and Restless Objects

by Noah Angell

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.

Genres: Nonfiction, History, Paranormal, Museums, Supernatural, Archaeology, Audiobook

Paperback

Published April 9, 2024

Reviews

[Kelly Daniel · Rating 1 out of 5]

Ghosts of the British Museum reads not remotely like the compendium of supernatural experiences that the title suggests. It’s little more than a surface-level historio-political commentary. Worse, it’s presented as a list of assertions without any academic depth or balance and reads (at best) like an enthusiastic but unenlightened Reddit post.

Noah Angell questions the British Museum’s right to exhibit material artefacts from other cultures when their integrity is questionable. You won’t get an argument from me. But it’s ironic that his own misappropriation of my funds shares a similar lack of integrity. Because the spirits in this ‘ghost’ book are literally ephemeral. And don’t even get me started on the consultant psychic whose common knowledge pronouncements are presented by Angell as revelatory. I would half suspect that her inclusion was satirical if the rest of the book was not humourless.

The whole book would, indeed, be laughable if it wasn’t so tedious and hadn’t cost me £20.

The ghosts in this book, like the treasures of the British Museum hordes (according to Angell), are barely to be seen. Rather, they are a secondary, if not tertiary, subtext to the main purpose which is a diatribe against the British Museum, more generally the British Empire, with side-swipes at the current British government and the monarchy.

Angell’s position is hostile from very early on and only gets more dogmatic as the text progresses. It’s hard to read a text when the subject is so obviously loathed. Perhaps the Epilogue would have been better as a Foreword, that way the reader would be more prepared for the increasingly obvious fact that the author doesn’t ‘much care for museums’. However, it’s the Afterword that gives the real insight into the author’s character. Angell quite clearly has the victim complex of the ubiquitous social media Karen.

Suffice it to say, this book made me rage. Not because I condone the misappropriation of cultural heritage, nor the wrongs done by the British Empire, the current government, the monarchy or indeed the ambivalence of the British people regarding their right to ‘treasure’. But because I spent £20 on a lecture masquerading as anecdotes. Selling it as a collection of experiences of supernatural events is a fraud. And as Angell himself points out, there’s nothing more pathetic than dissimulation.

[Jen · Rating 1 out of 5]

1⭐️
First of all, if you listen to the audiobook narrated by the author and can get through all the huffing, puffing, swallowing, heavy breathing and long pauses without nearly ripping your ears off, you are a better person than me. The publishers really should have employed a professional.
Secondly, there are not enough ghost stories. They are skipped over quickly, and they all seem to be told by a bloke down the pub.
Thirdly, Yes, there are lots of valid arguments re museums, their validity in the 21st century, and their acquisitions, but Noah Angell can blow the most of his disdain out his arse. He prefaces his epilogue with, 'I don't much like museums'🙄
Note to self:
1. Learn to dnf and stop wasting time when there are a million other better books.
2. Don't keep being sucked in by pretty covers.

Thank gawd I didn't spend money on this book, only a free Audible credit.

[Jane Parsons · Rating 1 out of 5]

So disappointed. This was just a couple of hundred pages of: ‘I went to the pub and chatted to someone and they told me a story.’

[Amy Louise · Rating 5 out of 5]

4.5 stars rounded up. In my 'day' job, I am finishing up a PhD that considers the literary afterlives of British mythology. As such, I am very interested in the nature of storytelling and in the resonance that certain stories have upon both our individual lives and, more widely, upon contemporary culture. Or, to put it another way, I’m fascinated by the way in which we as a society are haunted by the stories that we tell about ourselves.

All of which means that Noah Angell’s Ghosts of the British Museum, which takes the reader on a tour of a British Museum that has been transformed int a sort-of haunted prison of resonant objects and their stories, is pretty much catnip to my brain.

Angell is a writer and a storyteller who specialises in orally transmitted forms such as storytelling, song, and, yes, ghost stories. Ghosts of the British Museum opens with an idle conversation over raucous drinks in a pub but soon leads into the cavernous galleries and forgotten storerooms of the British Museum as ex-curators, night wardens, security guards, and porters gradually come forwards to tell their tales of things that go bump in the night.

This is not, however, just the usual collection of ghostly tales. Instead Angell connects together the reports of hauntings with a critical examination of the museum-space as the keeper of restless objects, many of which resonate with cultural memory. Take, for example, the four statues of Sekhmet that guard the Lower Egyptian gallery. Taken from the mortuary temple of Amenhotep III on the West Bank of the Nile at Thebes (modern-day Luxor), the statues continue to attract offerings and to receive reverence. Angell tells of warders who warned against moving the statues from their vantage point, only to be vindicated when strange and uncanny happenings plagued the gallery until the Sekhmets were returned. Sekhmet, Angell notes, was a daughter of the sun god Ra, capable of inflicting both punishment and offering protection. Forcibly torn from their guardianship at the temple, her statues seem to be happy only if they are able to guard the other items in the Lower Egyptian gallery.

Whether you believe in ghosts or not, it seems prudent to believe in the resonance of such stories. Objects have power because we grant them power, imbuing them with cultural significance and memory. One only has to look at the debates around the removal of colonial-era statues to see how rapidly an object can become a symbol for something far greater.

As a child, I loved wondering around the galleries of the British Museum. They are, undoubtedly, beautiful and contain objects of great cultural and historical significance. As Angell puts it, however, the galleries are also ‘a colonial-era experiment’ that has, arguably, ‘lingered too long and become an unfortunate ghost’. Try as it might, the British Museum cannot escape the colonial narratives contained within its collections. Look into the provenance of many of its items and you’ll find a history of violence, looting, and theft that, if one were to believe in ghosts, would surely be the perfect backdrop for restless and vengeful spirits.

Angell has cast an unflinching eye on these narratives, using the medium of the ghost story as a means of interrogating the museum’s collections and the narratives of preservation and education that it uses to defend keeping hold of them. It is, for the most part, an effective case although following it requires you to leave behind your scepticism at times. I also suspect that readers drawn in by the title alone will be disappointed to find that Angell’s ghost stories are, in many cases, as intangible as the apparitions themselves.

Don't get me wrong, Ghosts of the British Museum contains its fair share of spectral lights and disembodied footsteps. But this is, at its heart, an excoriation of the colonial museum. Angell picks at that niggle of discomfort that I suspect many of us feel when confronted with 'objects' such as the Egyptian mummies in Rooms 62-63. Although they are, of course, a fascinating insight into ancient beliefs and mortuary practices, the mummies contained within these hermetically sealed cases are still human remains. And, however you want to dress it up, they are remains that have been forcibly disconnected from the land and culture in which they were buried. As Angell asks in his epilogue, 'if Edward III was dug up from Westminster Abbey and laid out in Cairo Museum, some might be heard to ask, do these people have no shame?'

You’ve probably guessed by now that Angell is preaching to the choir with me. As an academic, my work regularly intersects with debates around the decolonisation of our heritage and, having read several works on the topic (I strongly recommend Dan Hick’s The Brutish Museums and Corrine Fowler’s Green Unpleasant Land if you’re at all interested in the topic), I know where my own thoughts and feelings lie.

I suspect many readers will be somewhat baffled by Ghosts of the British Museum. It is, after all, neither a collection of ghost stories nor an academic treatise on decolonisation. Instead it uses the practice of autoethnography to connect together the stories that we tell and wider ideas about cultural hauntings. The methodology is not without its faults, especially in a book that is relatively slender, but, for me at least, it was a fascinating way of thinking about the restlessness that resides at the heart of the colonial museum.

NB: This review also appears on my blog at https://theshelfofunreadbooks.wordpre... as part of the blog tour for the book. My thanks go to the publisher for providing a copy of the book in return for an honest and unbiased review.

[Rainbow Goth · Rating 2 out of 5]

I really wanted to love this book. Honestly, I went in expecting it to be right up my street.

I used to work in a museum, one with its fair share of ghost stories and weird little bits of history tied to the people who worked there and the objects themselves. My background is archaeology, but through my day job I’ve also seen firsthand the sheer audacity of the British museum world and its attitude towards holding on to objects it has absolutely no right to keep.

I’ve heard every argument under the sun about “preservation” and “access” and “public benefit”, but at the end of the day there are countless items that are, quite plainly, stolen. And they should go home. I don’t think that’s controversial.

So the topic is fascinating to me, and I’ve sat on both sides of the fence. But if I’m being honest, I bought this book because of its title. I wanted ghosts. I expected ghosts. I didn’t really get them.

The politics and ethics the author digs into are valid, important, and worth talking about more openly. But they end up taking over most of the book, leaving the supernatural side underdeveloped and oddly sidelined. The ghostly experiences and the supposed evidence behind them never become the main event, even though that’s exactly what the title suggests.

And that was disappointing, to say the least.

[amycw · Rating 2 out of 5]

Vague ghost stories related to the author by past and present museum staff and psychics. However, the author only seemed to be interested in the ghost stories as a vehicle to rage against British colonialism and the theft of antiquities during that era. If you want to make an argument for the return of these antiquities, great! Make that argument. Instead, this seemed like a flimsy and illogical argument that the items should be returned to their countries of origin because unhappy ghosts are trapped in this evil museum. In addition, I just thought it was boring. Every time I set it down, I didn't want to come back to it.

[Chelsea-anne Kennedy · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book is trying to be two things at once and doing neither successfully, for me. The ghost stories are repetitive and lack the detail needed to truly make this a collection of ghostly tales. Each tale varies on ghost appearing on photographs or doors/items moving with no evidence as CCTV gets wiped. Also no reports as staff as worried about losing their jobs. It feels like an attempt to collect stories and for the number of years he spent collecting them I thought there would be more. The author uses the ghost stories to talk about his rage at Britain for stealing these artefacts from around the world and discusses that they should be returned. Which I agree with, but the author uses the argument that they should be returned to appease unhappy spirits. When I feel like the reason they should be returned is that they don't belong to us and were stolen from their homeland. It feels like he is trying to blend the ghosts and talk of colonialism when the book would have been better if he focused on one or the other.

[Autumn · Rating 2 out of 5]

Unfortunately I really didn't enjoy the authors tone, both as an audio book narrator and as a writer
He just sounded miserable and bored the whole time. This had a really good concept to me but just didn't deliver.

[Tutankhamun18 · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read this in one sitting. I do not believe in ghosts per se, but I do believe in the haunting pasts of colonialism, imperialism, theft and trauma.

I really enjoyed this strange exploration of the British Museum through ghost stories told by its security guards, cleaners and other staff members told by an author who values storytelling. The book reflects his focus on storytelling, narrative, the power of words and the way in which certain ghosts are certain- the ghosts of colonialism, imperialism and the current day violence of museums that refuse to return relics to their home of origin.

I like authors placing themselves and why they are telling the story that they are. I liked his intro. I mean I do not believe in the supernatural or ghosts myself but what I loved about this book is that to me the ghost thing is acctually secondary to the perception of the people who work there, the meaning that the objects have and the circumstances that led them to being im the british museum. He is very lyrical and focuses alot on storytelling and meaning in stories, in experiences and in the objects. To me this book really was a way to explore the ghosts of the british museum… the stolen legacies of power and imperialism and colonialism.

-

Quotes:

“When colonial plantations, mines and labour camps were established, the people who were forced to work in them were in turn forcibly separated from their communal ways of being; their material culture was crated up and shipped off to museums abroad, where it was stored and presented as having been saved from extinction.”

“lt’s an open secret among museum workers that colonial and ethnological museums are prone to hauntings. It is also a matter of consensus across cultures that hauntings arise from untended trauma, festering in its irresolution, and made worse by on-going injustice in the world of the living. Perhaps simply to put material heritage in a museum is to make a ghost of it. After all, the creation of a collection often involves the violent or underhanded extraction of artefacts from their original settings, and their indefinite exile as a mere object in the cell-like setting of the museum display.”

Ch1.
- Hans Sloane, 1753 British Museum Act and 79575 objects= British Museum
- “With a mere 1 per cent of an "estimated" 8 million artefacts on display, the British Museum is only marginally an exhibition space; in material terms it's mostly a site of disappearance.”

Ch2.
“The museum was then a recent
and unoted invention - it had not yet become the institution we know it as today, where schoolchildren are bussed in to observe the dismembered building blocks of our shared world. When Europe's powers opened their storerooms of colonial loot to the public, they didn't think about the power retained by the artefacts, or what it would mean to shove them all in together, in such unnatural proximity. The whole point was to present these objects as remnants of worlds that were no longer. But what if these worlds are of a much longer duration than they thought?”

Ch3.
I like the lyrical, painterly writing writing that evokes held breaths, secrets and the unnamed and yet, refreshingly the stolen objects and the colonial project that the BM is, is mentioned and forefronted.

“It's a hard row to hoe. That glint of recognition in the eyes of Security staff when asked about ghosts is not just because they know, or because a stranger is honouring their experience. In some cases they know by name who died in the museum, they patrolled with those who have passed on or have considered the eventuality of passing in the building themselves. They know the rooms and neglected corners where the dead are astir. They know that despite the fact hat we meet in the daylight, it's been years now that they've had one foot in the world of the living, and as time goes by their weight gradually shifts to the other foot, sinking deeper into the soil of the endless night.”

Ch4.
-

Ch5.
Room 4: “Even during the Blitz, when the museum's collections were dispersed to adjacent tube stations, country homes and even a cave in Wales, many of these artefacts stayed in place and were simply covered by layers of sandbags.”

“A large portion of the stone entities in the Lower Egyptian gallery, including the revelatory Rosetta Stone, came into the British Museum's possession after the Capitulation of Alexandria was agreed to. Signed in 1801, in the wake of France's defeat in Egypt at the hands of British and Ottoman forces, the memorandum allowed safe passage for the French fleeing Egypt on the condition that the British absorbed the antiquities that Napoleon Bonaparte's forces had looted since invading Egypt in 1798. With the Capitulation of Alexandria, cumulative tonnes of Egypt's material heritage, formed over eons, were divvied up like winnings in a whisky-fuelled card game. If the British establishment sobered up and renounced its colonial-era belligerence, then Bonaparte's abductees would no longer be in Room 4, but here they are. In each corner of the British Museum, the desires, crimes and imaginings of the colonial period are fossilized like insect parts in amber, like aftershocks from a world that has passed.”

“Despite the museum's public statements that their collections are open to all the world, given the cost of visiting London and the UK's restrictive border policies, the artefacts are much more likely to be accessed by tourists, the monied eccentrics found in Soho's after-hours bars, and day-tripping witches from outside the capital, than by their communities of origin.”

Ch6.

“The Greek government has never recognised the British Museum's ownership of the Parthenon sculptures, and in light of the news of possible thefts, its stewardship has once again been shown to be grievously lacking. As Koniordou put it.
"We saw now; with all these thousands of pieces..." Koniordou pointed to the unfolding scandal in the Greek and Roman department. "It's negligence. The Greek artefacts are much better kept in Greece."
She reached for an analogy to underscore the absurdity of the situation:
Would it be possible to imagine Guernica being cut - and one horse given to one museum, and two horses to another, and one fist here and there? This is outrageous. This is an act of barbarism. What has been done to this monument, it's an act of barbarism, a trauma being done against global heritage, and this trauma must be healed. It has to be reunited for the sake of the decency of the human race; otherwise we are barbarians.”

“The infamous British Museum Act of 1963 forbids deaccession of the museum's holdings in the absence of a further Act of Parliament. In other words, the museum is barred from getting rid of artefacts without Parliament's express approval in the form of a new law. And so, for the past 60 years, Westminster and the British Museum's Board of Trustees have engaged in a Chinese finger-trap model of manufactured legal limbo, where Parliament insists that repatriation is a matter for the trustees to decide, while the trustees maintain that repatriating material heritage requires an Act of Parliament, both parties feigning powerlessness in an unstated agreement to uphold a rancid status quo, with the near-religious refusal to part with stolen material heritage at its core.”

Ch7.
“The Hoa Hakananai a was stolen from Orongo, a village of the Rapa Nui people, in 1868 by Richard Powell, a captain of the Royal Navy. Powell presented it as a gift to Queen Victoria, who then donated it to the British Museum in 1869. The museum lists the stranded ancestor as a gift of the Queen, in a museological sleight of hand that obscures Powell's original theft, and uses the monarch's infallible name to launder stolen property.
The Mau Henna community on Rapa Nui, with support from the mainland Chilean government, has offered to produce an exact replica for the British Museum in a proposed swap for their stolen ancestor. They have offered to put their own ancient stone-carving knowledge to use, with the aid of the latest technological tools through a partnership with the Bishop Museum in Hawaii. The British Museum hardly acknowledged the offer. Its spokespeople restated the usual talking points about how admission to the museum is free of charge, and how millions of people see the stolen friend each year, nearly all of whom are rank strangers.”

“In addition to unequal barter and theft, the museum acquired many artefacts through organisations that sought to rid Africans of their religion. "Many of them were given up by people who converted to Christianity. That's how a lot of them came into the museum - donated by the Missionary Society from converts in West Africa.
As an act of showing that you've joined the church, you would give up your relics."

Ch8.
-

Ch9.
-

Ch10.
“It was not uncommon for relics thought to wield a curse - which had already brought about the untimely death, disfigurement and bankruptcy of those who scavenged them, and in some cases their accomplices and kin - to be donated to the British Museum. In the museum it was believed that the curses had mostly subsided, that they found a measure of peace in joining an esteemed body of ancestors, or that the curse had run its course after inflicting generations of harm.”

“"You're mixing the spirits up" is concise in its double meaning.
Desecrating carefully dressed graves is a dire confusion. Even Neanderthals buried their dead. When the dead are disturbed, it creates confusion in the land. For many, death is spoken of as a return home. If one's body is exiled in death, that going home is woefully complicated.

Ar what point does a person become unworthy of a dignified rest in death? The taboo of displaying the dead is waived by colonial and ethnographic museums in cases where the person died so long ago that they're supposed to have passed an unspecified statute of limitations, or if the person is racialised or otherwise exoticised in such a way that the projected audience wouldn't think them deserving of dignity while alive. To claim that you enjoy respectful relarions with formerly colonised nations while harbouring and exhibiting their ancestral remains betrays a confused, corrupted ethics. The dehumanising forces of colonisation and occupation do not spare even the dead.”

“While all of that may be true in some measure, this is a pedagogy borne of grave-robbing. Whatever the British Museum can tell us about the burial practices of other cultures, the more striking thing is the curious cultural practice of denying burial to others and exhibiting them, or stowing them away. The museum's collection of human remains evidences a culture of gathering the dead as loot, in furtherance of war and other extractive colonial-era industries, of treating the dead as objects of study and fuel for race craft, and as curiosities to be catalogued in showrooms and cellars.

This is a condition endemic to the museums of Western Europe and North America. Are the dead really held captive for research purposes, or is it out of ignorance? Are they restricted from going home as a matter of imperial pride, or out of a paralysing sense of shame? Are they stranded as a result of apathy, or an active and sustained refusal to acknowledge the humanity of others? I ask these questions well aware that these binaries do not hold; the museum is all mixed up.”

Ch11.

“ is a lot to hear in the telling of these stories. That is, in how they're told. As the warder begins strolling down the concrete corridor, the gate is a gate. Once it's rattled by the unseen presence, it's referred to as a cage. In a telling linguistic slip, a gate keeps others out, whereas a cage keeps the caged in. In its desperate shaking, the gate signalled that it was a cage. The warder didn't understand the rattling as the work of a trespasser, which he would've been prepared to deal with, but an invisible captive, whose rattling didn't warrant further looking into, only blind horror.”

“Viewing this incident through the lens of the British Museum's official literature on human remains - which is as thick as a phone book and essentially asks us to understand them not as objects, but as people, people who can teach us - what would these Sudanese people tell us about the flood they endured in the museum? What would they tell us about the feeling of their bones being turned to mush in the basement, some after a lifetime spent under British colonial administration? Do they understand themselves as prisoners of war? It's not unheard of for corpses or even body parts to figure in prisoner swaps - the return of war dead has long been an accepted part of normalising relations after a season of conflict - but what do the British want with them now? Is humiliation felt in the afterlife, or do they look at the museum's machinations of domination as petty and pitiable?”

“The British Museum's association with the Transatlantic Slave Trade and its legacy can be accurately described as foundational.
The collections of Hans Sloane, which formed the nucleus of the museum's holdings when it was established in 1753, were financed in large part by profits made from enslaved labour. In 1695, Sloane had married Elizabeth Langley Rose, a planter's widow who maintained massive sugar plantations in Jamaica, making Sloane an absentee slave owner. He had seen the horrors of slavery up close when he served as a planter's physician, and reluctantly also as physician to the enslaved, during his famed voyage to Jamaica.”

“This part of the museum's founding story is widely known but rarely acknowledged; the presence of slave-trade artefacts in the collections makes the link more tangible. It also raises some questions, most obviously the issue of why these slave stocks have been placed in the African collection. The stocks were part of the infrastructure of British slavery, and were deployed in colonial India too. They are more a part of British history than they are of African, in the same way that a British-manufactured musket, a slave ship or a slave trader's charter would be. Misfiling them in the African collection obfuscates who they were used by, and to what end. These are the tools that British slave traders and planters used to terrorise others, and to enrich themselves. The fact that they were part of a process that decimated and brutalised Africans and their communities does not make them in any meaningful sense African. That they remain hidden in Storage is symptomatic of the determinedly amnesiac attitude of the British to their role in the slave trade, and of the British Museum towards the crimes that are inseparable from its foundation and modes of acquisition.”

“If the museum is a place of public memory, Storage is a place where things are relegated to the realm of the forgotten. The slave stocks are symbolic of things that the official institutions of British culture would prefer to forget. The British Museum has misplaced these slave stocks in much the same way that the British national memory has confused its own role in the slave trade.
It dishonours the memory of the millions of people that Britain enslaved to insist that the slaver be referred to as a liberator. One wonders, has the British Museum forgotten these slave stocks, or hidden them? Or is it hiding from them? Can we be so generous as to imagine this misfiling as a clerical error, or does it point to a deeper, epistemic category error? To file the slave stocks away in the African department's Storage is a material means of compartmentalising slavery as African history, as distinct from British heritage, and banishing to a forgotten room the memory of those that the British violently restrained in the Middle Passage. Storage is the concrete, institutionally enforced reality of "out of sight, out of mind", where no one will hear your silent screams aside from the Security guards who who hurry past with no power over your fate. In Storage the museum's seal of forgetfulness is applied in ways that we may never know.”

Epilogue

“The sins of the father visit the child when the child visits the museum. How do you teach children that stealing is wrong, and then send them on school trips to the British Museum? The British Museum is one of the most visible outposts of what remains of the British Empire.”

“After all of this, some may protest that they don't believe in ghosts or spirits. I can only offer that a lack of belief offers no protection from reality.”

“For even a fraction of the sacred structures of the world to be made whole again, the colonial museum must be dismantled. There's no two ways about it. There is more to be gained in letting the house of spirits fall than in building a new prison. The colonial museum is itself a colonial-era relic, a cursed object, unfit for sacred presences. It's a ghost of a bygone world that's afraid to admit the reality of its passing, a ghost that deserves to be put to rest.”

[Jess D · Rating 1 out of 5]

Less a compendium of ghost stories/experiences and more of a rant on colonialism berating the reader. There were some interesting stories although they were more of a footnote than the main focus.

[Florence · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was an enjoyable read, particularly the honing in on particular objects in the museum’s collection and their colonial provenance. I also liked the witness accounts re the storage beneath the museum which is a labyrinth of unaccounted-for objects (many of huge religious significance which was interesting to learn re Pool of Siloam). I did find some of the ghostly anecdotes repetitive and lacking substance, though I think they made sense in painting this overall picture of a colonial black hole filled with ‘restless objects’ tormenting the employees. They were fun but with a true undertone.

Also I think those that are upset that the author seems to hate the British probably need to be confronted with how grim the colonial rule and empire was a bit more often.

[Katy]

A very interesting starting point to jump into the topic. Dont expect a compendium of ghost stories more of a exploration of ideas around the topic of how objects hold memories. Maybe suffers from being a little miscategorised but if you pick it up like i did with no expections it's an interesting leaping off point.

[Adrian Bloxham · Rating 4 out of 5]

I didn’t like the British museum when I went, the only thing I was glad I saw was the Sutton Hoo mask. This tells me part of why I felt like that. A museum built on theft, blood and shame and the ghosts restless and lost

[Nicole Archer · Rating 4 out of 5]

yeeeeee boiiiiiiii ghosts r real and they want the British museum DEAD

[Youcef · Rating 1 out of 5]

juste MDR. moi qui pensait lire un livre qui allait traiter des objets d’art volés et des crimes de la colonisation et qui me retrouve a lire des histoire de paranormal et d’esprits pendant 200 pages. Lorsque l’auteur évoque parfois (max une fois par chapitre) la question coloniale, ce n’est que brièvement avant de revenir a ses histoires de fantômes : enough activism for today. Rendre les oeuvre volées car elles s’inscrivent dans un processus colonial violent qui continue (certes sous des formes différentes) aujourd’hui ? naaaaan. Par contre, les rendre car des esprits hantent le British museum et que cela peut faire peur aux gentils touristes et aux européens ? là oui. Non pas que j’attendais une prise de position engagée sur le colonialisme de la part d’un auteur blanc et privilégié, mais ce genre de livres dessert la cause. Certes il aborde le vol et la cruauté de l’action coloniale, mais ces passages sont dérisoires dans une oeuvre qui se concentre sur un point de vue européen, qui ne remet en cause ces actions qu’une fois qu’il sent leurs répercussions. Bref décevant

[Rebecca Hearne · Rating 1 out of 5]

Reads like a too-long irrelevant recipe blog’s introduction. Come for the British Museum’s colonialist structures and hierarchies BY ALL MEANS but don’t start on how its collections are badly managed (i.e., slagging off the vast numbers of uncatalogued objects which ANYBODY who works in collections will tell you is ubiquitous nationwide and probably globally) if you’re not going to interrogate why. Not enough of the titular ghost material, and I HATED the ghost material, so that’s saying something. The author seems both far too clever for his own good and a complete and utter dumbass. This book is so stupid. Infuriating. Flimsy whiny and pathetic

[Ameeliiaeelia · Rating 3 out of 5]

Loved the historical context in this book and bolsters an already strong argument for the return of the stolen artefacts that are in the British Museum. For the first three chapters I’m nodding my head; it makes total sense that these artefacts would be haunted!

After that though, I feel like his points became repetitive ... also it seems most of the ghosts haunting the British Museum aren’t even the ones attached to the objects or human remains (which was supposed to be the point of the book) but instead are dead museum workers which felt valid but also irrelevant (no disrespect lol) and muddied Angell's overall argument

[Fi Price · Rating 4 out of 5]

I found this book extremely interesting and engaging in a level and perspective I did not expect. The carefully chosen use of the word Ghost in the title certainly drew me in, and as a scholar of history and a lover of the ancient it sounded like the perfect combo for me. But Angell manages to draw in a much broader commentary here on the moral questions around antiquities and museums which is extremely thought provoking. Although I doubt it will dissuade me from future museum visits, I will certainly view them in a different light, and the artefacts housed within them, which deserve respect and reverence.

[Agnes Jones · Rating 5 out of 5]

‘the dehumanising forces of colonisation and occupation do not spare even the dead’

a gripping account of items in the british museum, i learnt so much

[Louise Stewart · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 interesting read

[David · Rating 5 out of 5]

well written and very very interesting, I never give 5 stars on here but for this I will. Love love love it

[SecretSquirrel · Rating 1 out of 5]

I only wish I’d read the other one star reviews before I bought this absolute money waster.
Pages and pages of nothing. A chore to plough through. Not recommended I’m afraid. A very hard pass.

[Carole Tyrrell · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ghosts of the British Museum
The British Museum is, according to this book, a ‘house of spirits’ who are condemned to walk its corridors and rooms and staircases at night or by day. They may have come with an acquisition or might be an ex employee who’s still on the premises and never clocked out.
But who knows what mingles with visitors and staff? The visitor services staff or the overnight security might know if a visitor has something strange to show them on a photo taken inside the vast building or there’s something amiss in the long hours of the night……
This book came from articles in the media during lockdown. The author had written of the British Museum and its alleged out of hours spectral visitors and it was a sensation at the time. Now he has written a book about them, sourced from current or ex-employees, some of whom were happy to be named and other who wished to remain anonymous. Certain rooms in the Museum seemed to be more ‘atmospheric’ than others and sometimes it was just a feeling that something wasn’t right.
The author hails from North Carolina, USA. In the introduction he describes it as ‘a land of many ghosts’, discusses the plantation system and his upbringing. In the plantation discussion he writes of a noted abolitionist whose grandmother became too old and ill to work in the fields and she had also become blind. She was exiled to the wood of the Great Dismal Swamp to fend for herself. There is macabre scene of when he would take her food after dark while ‘hearing from her cries and those of her ailing, arthritic and forsaken elders mingling with the ambient sound of the forest.’ The author also mentions ‘haints’ which is a word used widely in the Southern US which means ‘one who haunts.’ So, he comes from a tradition of living with the supernatural in my opinion.
It didn’t take long when he joined the Museum to realise that ‘museums breed ghosts’ and ‘that colonial and ethnological museums are prone to hauntings.’ Maybe they have unfinished business with the people from whom they acquired the collections and pieces or that they didn’t know quite what came with them. It has been suggested that many of these objects were imbued with power by the people who made and venerated them and that the combination of all of these different objects and their power may have created an untapped power source. The Benin Bronzes, the Mechanical Galleon, mummies and others all have their own stories of encounters in the book…
But this is a book of two halves; the hauntings and also the history of the Museum itself and the sometimes dubious ways in which it acquired some of its items. In the light of countries asking for their heritage and items to be returned I understood how important they were to their culture and rituals. Some readers may find this section a little too preachy but, as the Museum doesn’t seem to know quite what it’s got or how much as much of it is uncatalogued, it is a subject worth raising.
Others looking for a book exclusively devoted to possible hauntings may be disappointed but I liked reading about the Museum’s history and the acquisition of objects. After all the book does bill itself on the front cover as ‘A true story of colonial loot and restless objects.’ But I will certainly be seeing the Museum in a new light on future visits and, in particular, certain galleries and objects.
According to the book, there seem to have been a few suicides at the Museum and mainly in stairwells which are liminal places or thresholds. Perhaps they wanted to be found.
One of the most fascinating chapters was the final one ‘Storage: the Domain of the Disappeared.’ In this, I got a real sense of the vastness of the Museum’s storage basement with rumours that it might contain an entire Ethiopian monastery. The author also mentions other fabulous objects rumoured to be in it and that have never been on display. After all who decides what goes on show and what doesn’t and why? I had the impression that the visitor only sees the tip of the iceberg.
An intriguing book which made me think about a museum’s purpose and what may lie within it that remains unseen. Although I was looking for a book on allegedly true ghost stories, the book was more than that and I really enjoyed it.

[Kitta Cat · Rating 4 out of 5]

I love ghost stories and folklore, so it was inevitable to me that I’d want to read this. And for writer and artist Noah Angell, the stories are the point: his work focuses mostly on oral traditions of song and storytelling. This is not a book for convincing skeptics, or for those looking for carefully researched and/or scientific validation of spectral experiences. It’s about stories - the lived experiences of the staff who have worked there, and the history of the museum and the objects stored within.

And both are, to put it bluntly, haunting.

From ghostly photobombs in tourists’ pictures to heavy hard-to-move doors that mysteriously open themselves, inexplicable temperature changes to actual apparitions - the staff of the museum have experienced it all. Some leave as a result and some just accept it as a reality of working there. Most reach an attitude of respectful acknowledgement that these are more than ‘just’ objects on display.

Some never leave, the museum claiming its own death toll of workers who have passed within its walls, but such things are generally kept very quiet, because it does not fit the grand facade the British Museum likes to project to the world.

And that is another recurring theme, too: the narrative of the British Museum as a preserver and repository of knowledge versus the tragic and violent history of the institution itself.

Founded by the wealth of a slaver, stocked with ill-gotten gains from grave-robbing and vandalism, slow cultural genocide by colonisation and conversion, and its more violent wartime counterpart; even if the ghost stories don’t discomfort you, by the time you consider how these objects have arrived in its vast collections, you should be feeling deeply uneasy at the nature of the history this vast hoard represents.

Noah Angell comes from North Carolina, a state rich in oral history and ghost stories, shaped by a bloody colonial past and founded on slavery; as such, he notes the blind spots in the ‘official’ narrative of the British Empire as perpetrated by the BM. The slave stocks stored away in the African collection, despite being a relic of the British role in the Trans-Atlantic slave trade - the same trade that funded the original collection. The thousands of unidentified, uncatalogued human remains hidden away in mouldering boxes that will probably never leave basement storage, despite the museum’s statements regarding the ‘deep respect’ such remains are due. And of course, the forbidden topic of repatriation: this may not be Britain’s heritage but it is Britain’s property now, and to admit that it might more properly belong in its culture and country of origin is to admit that it is all stolen property, and none of it belongs to Britain at all.

Some of the language felt a bit florid at times, but I figure that is possibly a hazard of a narrator who specialises in oral storytelling. Sometimes it meanders a bit. I’m not a die-hard believer in ghosts - it’s more that I don’t disbelieve in them - and mediums leave me feeling highly skeptical, because to believe anything a medium tells you, you must first believe they are a genuine medium. In keeping with the oral history aspect, the stories themselves are anecdotal, a casual ‘this happened to me and I can’t really explain it’ that is honestly more emotionally persuasive than any painstakingly researched case, but that is the appeal of a good story. And while I started reading for the stories, the history behind the museum is where I really felt the impact. It left me with a desire to visit, both to see some of these powerful objects for myself, and to demand in person, “Why won’t you give them back?”

Frankly, the British Museum deserves to be haunted.

[S.C. Skillman · Rating 5 out of 5]

This author seems to have two agendas: 1) to share a vast array of ghosts and spirit experiences at the British Museum and 2) to decry all those cultural thieves and looters at this august institution, and shame them into giving all their artefacts back to their original owners and dismantling the entire museum. A rather bizarre dual motive, but it still makes for a fascinating and highly readable nonfiction book.

I often found the author’s stance political and highly partisan, and some may consider him to have an ‘over-developed sense of the dramatic’, but it comes across as a crushing attack on the whole ethos of the British Museum. However, many would not consider his claims - the presence of numerous aggrieved, unquiet ancient spirits - as a reason to empty the place and close it down. At one point he correlates the macabre enjoyment of tourists today viewing the mummified human remains in the Upper Egypt Galleries, to the mindset of those who used to go for a fun day out to watch the public hanging.

I found the book a mixture of annoying, shocking, fascinating, and always captivating. I have to give it five stars for gripping me throughout and also inspiring me with new ideas on how to research a nonfiction book. He interviews museum workers past and present in person and on the phone, corresponding with some by email and chatting with others in the local pubs and cafes. He cites seminars, websites, books, news reports, unpublished MA theses, journals, YouTube videos, museum talks, TV programmes, archival documents, online articles, Ghost Club Minutes, museum catalogues, traditional songs, sermons, the quarterly statement of the Palestine Exploration Fund, and the British Medical Journal.

Packed with his own strong opinions and backed up by numerous detailed first person testimonies gathered from museum workers, curators, warders, cleaners, and night security staff, this book is thought-provoking, engaging and controversial and cannot but provoke an emotional response on the subject from readers, one way or another.

I feel sure the readership must be divided between those who are now fired up anew to visit the British Museum again as soon as possible, and those who resolve never to go near the place again… or just stick to the occasional special exhibition in or off The Great Court (as in my case).
Noah Angell knows the collections, galleries and rooms of the British Museum extremely well and I was very impressed by that. He also succeeded in chilling me with his information about a vast number of uncatalogued items lying in mournful Storage on the levels well below the museum’s public halls. His style is highly colourful and imaginative, and very readable.

From the paranormal point of view, depending on your own worldview, you could find the contents of the book disturbing, creepy, deeply unsettling and sad, and feel angry about injustice and the misuse of power. Others may just find it amusing and intriguing.

Such comments are included as ‘The Director of the British Museum plays prison keeper to the house of spirits’ and ‘The colonial museum must be dismantled; it is a colonial-era relic, a cursed object, unfit for sacred presences… It is the ghost of a bygone age, a ghost that deserves to be put to rest.’

Unfortunately for his avowed intentions, his book may well serve to greatly increase the numbers visiting the museum, thus supporting and validating their ethos and continued success and prosperity even further, regardless of the feelings of the aggrieved ancient spirits.

[milo in the woods · Rating 2 out of 5]

i thought that this wasn't really about ghosts. there are a few tangential stories, but they're all essentially pub gossip and there's very little academic research behind them. instead, it's primarily a polemic railing against the institution of the british museum, which i think is an important and valuable piece of work but it felt quite underbaked to me. honestly, it also didn't feel very well integrated with the ghost stories.

i think that because this author was trying to write about ghost stories, whilst his personal opinions about the british museum kept bleeding through, it felt quite muddled and poorly put together. i kind of think that the author could have dropped the conceit of ghost stories, done some more impactful and intentional academic research, and produced a much more effective and impactful non fiction book.

on the other hand, i also kind of think that this could have worked much better as a podcast or webseries (although i realise that this would be complicated as many of the interviewees wished to remain anonymous). i think that if there had been individual podcasts with interviewees, then the author could have focussed on a particular person's experiences with spirits in the british museum and then maybe used that as a jumping off point to talk about the history of colonialism and the institutional issues within the british museum. or it could have been a type of oral history of the spirits of the british musem in the style of once upon a time at bennington college. i also didn't actually think that it was well written, and i thought the authorial voice would translate better in an oral format.

this just felt so unpolished and also like it was missing direction. i think that this could have been so much better than it was. i do think it is a shame how rigid the british museum seems to be about letting people view the internal goings-on, because i think it would be a really good opportunity for them to gain goodwill with the british public, especially after the cataloguing and theft scandal of 2023.

i also didn't enjoy how involved this author is with psychics. i am open to ghosts and spirituality, especially in historical contexts because it makes sense to me that the echoes of trauma would be present in places like the british museum. i do not, however, hold with psychics. i think they're quacks and i think their behaviour in this book (which the author treats as magnificent revelations) is really weird, often seeming trite or even disrespectful. i dislike that they would presume to speak for the long dead, or the divine. i also thought that a lot of what they said was pretty unremarkable and could have been indicative of a cursory google of relevant events and histories of the british museum rather than indicative of some otherworldly ability. i do hold prejudices though and i am willing to recognise that because of my preconceptions about psychics, i was never going to enjoy their inclusion in a non fiction book like this.

the final chapter was about storage in the british museum and, whilst it still had the flaws that i have related above (absent the psychics), i found it so gripping. it is solely the reason for a two star rather than a one star read. i desperately wish to know if they actually have an ethiopian temple down there.

[Swords & Spectres · Rating 1 out of 5]

This was a chore. Which, might I add, is a very charitable thing to say considering just how much of a chore this book was. Unless you've been incredibly misbehaved and are in need of a bit of self-flagellation, I'd advise against picking this up. Then again, who am I to judge? You may really enjoy random ghost stories told in pubs with the only real basis for belief being 'honestly, mate. It happened. Trust me.'

One of my bug bears is the fact that a fair few people giving testimonies remain anonymous. I get what they'd want to. Crying ghost often sends you name onto a black list as far as academic appointments are concerned, But, there's also no proof whatsoever 'anonymous' is a real contributor. I could write a book and fill it with tales from 'anonymous' and nobody would know if I'd simply made the stuff up to fill pages. I'm not saying that's what the author has done, it just always sets alarm bells ringing. The academic heart in me appreciates verifiable sources.

My next bug bear is that this subject matter was written by the absolute worst person who could have written it. If he'd done the charitable thing and started his prologue the way he started his epilogue ('I don't much care for museums') then I'd not have bothered picking it up and saved myself some tedium. Not that it was hard to pick up on the fact the man disdains museums. He makes some very valid arguments about why the museum (and others of its ilk) should think about repatriating the artifacts that they've stolen from various civilisations (many of them of deep religious significance), but my word ... if you removed all but one or two instances of long-winded, passages about how the museum stole this or that (often repeated for multiple paragraphs but said in different ways to appease the word count gods) then this book would be a fraction of the size.

The actual ghost story part of the book, you know, the part the book is named after and was the main selling point, is minimal. Minimal to the point where it's often rushed through so the author can get back to bemoaning the museum. Or blaming the British for everything under the sun. The vast majority of these ghost stories were told to him by 'some guy down the pub' but, as mentioned before, they were merely a vehicle to get back to his soul passion of moaning about this or that.

The one upside was the history put into the pages. When he wasn't rushing through ghost stories or wading through paragraphs about theft or appropriation, there was some good detailed history about the artifacts involved. It did always devolve into yet more talk of thefts etc ... We get it. That is how the museum acquired the vast majority of its collection. It isn't right and a lot of what they have should go back home, but saying it eight lines out of every ten does not for a good book make. I'd actually argue that reinforcing it so much turns the reader against the author. As I was quite for his cause until it was the only thing I had thrown my way.

I thought I did supremely well by not DNFing this one. I got all the way to the end and was ready to give myself a pat on the back for the effort. Only for that epilogue to start. That was where I DNF'd. He may not care for museums, but good heavens, I didn't care to carry on past that part

[Steve G · Rating 2 out of 5]

2.5*

I need to start by saying that I essentially picked up Ghosts of the British Museum by accident.

I was buying two other books which I were keen to read, and since the bookshop had a "3 for 2" offer on, I was able to pick up another book of choice for free.

I'm an idiot. I didn't really read the title of this book properly, and just grabbed it thinking it would be a "brief history" or "stories of" the British Museum. It was only when I got home that I realised it was about the supernatural.

Given I picked this book up for free, I thought I'd still give it a read. It is a short read at 220 pages and I figured it may have bits of history regarding the museum that I may be find interesting.

I therefore need to be honest and say that I'm reviewing this book as somebody not remotely spiritual or interested in ghosts. Perhaps somebody with more of an interest in ghosts and spirituality would have a different experience. Unfortunately, for me however, the book was a bit of a swing and a miss, and it wasn't the easiest read for me to finish. Nevertheless, I've decided to award 2.5* as there were moments of the book that I did enjoy.

The book is much less about ghosts than you may expect. Most of the book is actually centred around the colonial history of the British Museum and the rights (and many more wrongs) surrounding the objects being stored there. The ghost stories are really then just added on as an "extra" when discussing some of the artifacts in there.

The author is clearly very passionate about his belief that the "Colonial Museum" needs to be shut down, and it is as much a relic of the past as the objects inside of it. The passion from the author is admirable, and some of his arguments are quite well made, but I think many readers will be disappointed by the lack of actual ghost stories in the book.

Personally, I quite enjoyed reading about the history of the museum and the objects inside, but I can see why other reviewers have been less than impressed by the content in the book given its title.

The book also isn't all that well written. The language is actually surprisingly difficult to read and doesn't flow especially well. Throughout the book, the author uses some slightly odd word choices, and the sentences are sometimes structured in ways that could have been much more simply laid out.

Overall therefore, I think 2.5* is appropriate.

The book has some interesting moments, particularly when discussing some of the lesser known artifacts kept in the basement of the museum. I also found the discussion around colonialism and the history of the museum thought provoking (even if it did come across a little strong).

I'm glad I picked up this book, and honestly, given I have no real interest in spirituality, it was a better read for me than I expected it would be when I realised what it was.

Is it a good book, though..? And would I recommend purchasing it at full price..? Unfortunately, my answer has to be no.

It just doesn't really deliver especially well on what it was written to be, and ultimately I'm not all that convinced it is worth picking up for either the history or spiritual reader.

[Anneena · Rating 4 out of 5]

In the British Museum I found that if you look past the displays and listen to staff, you'll find that the ghosts proliferate unchecked, each new acquisition potentially adding to the hive of psychic unrest. They stage revolts against keepers and warders, and stew in quiet corners and cellars, their exile-induced heartache building and breaking in the maddeningly idle tides of museological time.

This was a fascinating exploration into the ghosts and restless spirits both presented and hidden in the British museum - a remnant of bygone colonial era. At times this was difficult to read in it's frank retellings of the British empire's conquests and the ongoing colonial mentality of hoarding those treasured objects and bodies.

I particularly enjoyed the passages told by the Forever Nights, those security guards marching through galleries and halls, often experiencing the bulk of those restless hauntings, and those chapters on the museum storage.

Storage as a place of neglect, institutionally enforced separation and profound loneliness... Storage at the British Museum is neither a home, nor a place of rest for many of the relics and human bodies entombed therein; perhaps it should be seen more like a holding cell, an imperial-era detention centre still processing and imprisoning millions of ancient beings and lost gods who desperately want out.

Desperate rattling is a probable rhythm down there; the tremors of an unfreedom felt in the afterlife.

There's something truly devastating about the entitlement and violence of extracting sacred, venerated objects from another land, only to be kept on some man's mantlepiece gathering dust. To then be donated to a museum and hidden in a basement, seemingly forgotten for decades. It's another kind of cruelty to then deny it's rightful return home.

This was both eerie in it's contemplation of spirits and the sentience of objects aware and imbued with a history of violence and colonial enterprise, and infuriating in it's honest account of the imperial extraction process. I appreciated how Angell highlighted the dissonance between the museum's claim as a modern institute of history and education and it's ongoing looting and occupation. How the British museum and UK education system is so quick to separate itself (on principal) from the history of how these objects (and people) were obtained. That comparison of categorising the slave stocks as 'African History' while hiding them in storage - this as a means of compartmentalising slavery as African rather than the purposeful acts of the empire and a clear illustration of the British colonial legacy. 'Storage is the concrete, institutionally enforced reality of" out of sight, out of mind"'.

While I did expect more than the anecdotes of hauntings described, I really enjoyed this read.
4 stars

[Roisin Walsh · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is written in a very engaging, readable style of prose - I consumed most of the text in a single sitting while on a flight, and probably could have finished the whole thing in one go if we hadn't landed.

I agree with many of the other reviews, in that this book really suffers from trying to be two things at once.
For me personally, I was much more interested in a deconstruction of the colonialism at the heart of the British Museum. My favourite portions of this book were the ones dealing with the questionable acquisition of objects, calls for their repatriation, and the establishments response to all this. I knew going in that I was going to be less interested in any ghost stories themselves, but thought that it seemed like a clever idea for a framing device to tell a more important story about history and politics.

Unfortunately, the framing device just does not work at all.
The 'ghost stories' are all extremely weak and vague, but are presented by the author as paramount. It's obvious he doesn't want to waste time talking about boring things like archaeology, when he could be talking about how a bloke in the pub got the heebie jeebies 25 years ago. The absolute worst anecdotes come from his 'psychic' friend - it actually beggars belief that some of these were kept in the book at all. If there was any editorial oversight, it makes you wonder how much absolute nonsense must have been presented by Angell, that these 'psychic revelations' made the final cut.

Ultimately the major issue with this book can be summed up by the author themselves in the afterword - they 'never much cared for museums', in their own words. This leaves us with a book that tries to appeal to two sets of readers - those who believe in ghosts and think museums must be full of spirits, and those who are fascinated by museums as house of learning but also hotbeds of political discourse - neither of whom will be satisfied by this book.

Fans of ghost stories will be left disappointed by the weak, insubstantial offerings on display here.
Fans of Archaeology, History, Politics etc will be disappointed by the anti-science and anti-education pronouncements made in this book.

Overall, there were flashes of brilliance throughout, and despite disappointment I did find this a semi-decent holiday read. It made sense to learn the author is a tour guide and storyteller, as I do think that they have an engaging writing style. It was their choice of subject matter that let them down. Ironically, I think Noah Angell could have a good career as a ghost writer, for someone with a bit more sense.