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

An artist investigates strange goings on at the British museum - and uncovers a maelstrom of disquiet within its corridors, galleries and vaults

＂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.

Noah Angell is a writer and artist who works with orally transmitted forms such as storytelling and song. This work has led him to collaborate with the Polar Museum in the north of Norway, while working in North Carolina on a documentary film on gospel singer Connie B. Steadman, and in London, where he has collected testimony of the ghosts that haunt the British Museum.

Born in the US, he was resident in London for over a decade and now lives in Berlin. This is his first book.