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Ghosts of the British Museum

A True Story of Colonial Loot and Restless Objects

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Ghosts of the British Museum

By: Noah Angell
Narrated by: Noah Angell
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 'An absorbingly creepy travelogue through the corridors, tunnels and basements of our most famous cultural repository. With Noah Angell as our guide, the British Museum becomes a haunted prison filled with imperial plunder and restless spirits clamouring for attention.' - Malcolm Gaskill, author of The Ruin Of All Witches

'Fascinating and illuminating' - Peter Ackroyd

'Brilliantly delicate, pointed, shivery... 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

'Achieves a near-impossible marriage between paranormal pop-culture, folklore and hauntology' - Roger Clarke, author of A Natural History of Ghosts

'A heady cocktail of history and folklore that leaves a haunting aftertaste... Spine-tingling' - Lindsey Fitzharris, New York Times bestselling author of The Facemaker

What if the British Museum isn't a carefully ordered cross section of history but is in 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 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.©2024 Noah Angell (P)2024 Octopus Publishing Group Art Colonialism & Post-Colonialism Politics & Government
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This is an excoriating dissection of the principles of Empire at play in the construction and consumption of the British Museum. Using the unquiet presences (emanating from both objects and former staff) that haunt this space as a way in, the author offers a damning indictment of the theft of cultural artefacts that was conducted in the name of Empire which led to the despoliation of cultures worldwide to fill the treasure-house of this Museum--and which remains unacknowledged by Museum hierarchy to this day. Regarding the narration, while generally I prefer a work to be read by its own author, and while this author had a very pleasant voice to listen to, in this case a professional speech actor may have been preferable. Sentences were often accompanied by snuffling, slurping sounds, and it was confusing that many words, which the author himself must have written, were mispronounced. W.B. Yeats (pronounced Yates, not Yeets) appeared more than once. Even more perplexing were the mispronunciations of words that must be fundamental to Museum studies, such as Louvre (1 syllable), Nereids (3 syllables) and Ptolemaic (P is silent). This aside, the book critically and colourfully anatomizes the colonial principles that underpin such massive acts of cultural despoliation and constitutes a rallying cry for change.

Incisive, entertaining analysis of colonial hubris

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