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.
Long-time readers of The Shelf may know that, when I’m not book-blogging, my current ‘day-job’ is finishing up a PhD in English Literature whilst also moonlighting in several academic and academic-adjacent roles. What you might not know, given that I tend to keep my ‘work’ and ‘life’ hats separate, is the specifics of that PhD. I won’t go into the boring details here but, in essence, I look at 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 into 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.
Ghosts of the British Museum by Noah Angell is published by Monoray (Octopus Books) and is available now from all good booksellers and online retailers including Hive, Waterstones, Bookshop.org, and Wordery.
If you can, please support a local indie bookshop by ordering from them either in person or online! Some of my favourites include Booka Bookshop, Sam Read Booksellers, Book-ish, Scarthin Books, Fox Lane Books, and Berts Books.
My thanks go to the publisher for providing a copy of the book in return for an honest and unbiased review and Anne from Random Things Tours for organising and inviting me onto this blog tour. The tour continues until 03 June 2024 please do check out the other stops for reviews and more content!
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