Is the British Museum a giant colonial prison for left-wing foreign ghosts?

Steven Tucker

November 11, 2024 5 Reactions

“I never did care much for museums,” the author confides at one point, and it shows – although, whenever such profoundly immoral institutions offer him any financial grants, such objections seem to mysteriously disappear like a vampire at cock-crow. Upon his dust-jacket biography, we are told that Angell’s work “has led him to collaborate with the Polar Museum in the North of Norway”, all of whose kidnapped colonial-era in-house ghosts must presumably be quite content to dwell therein.

The British Museum, though, is different – like purgatory, it is nothing more than one giant custodial suite for the captured dead. Its external gates and railings shockingly being tipped with sharp points, Angell dubiously identifies the entire site as “a place of fortified knowledge”, in which case so must my own local park be “a place of fortified duck-feeding”.

According to his introduction, “It’s an open secret among museum workers that colonial and ethnological museums are prone to hauntings” as, by acting to separate mummified corpses, coffins and funerary urns from their rightful burial sites, “museums breed ghosts”. Now movements like BLM have arrived, however, the ancient dead have finally begun to “stage revolts against keepers and warders”, a non-white anti-colonial rebellion in which Angell is eager to play his own propagandistic part, like Jane Fonda in Vietnam; with his book “I try to trumpet their cries”, he proclaims.

On the side of the Angell?

Assessments of this book tend to have fallen into two camps, depending upon reviewers’ politics. The left-wing New Statesman took the side of Tutankhamun & Co, acclaiming it as “a complete takedown of the British Museum project”, and calling for the captured spirits to “Bring it down … Let communities reclaim what is theirs, and let the house of spirits fall.”

The right-wing Daily Telegraph disagreed, complaining of how “the absurdity of having written Ghostbusters for post-colonialists” seemed to have passed the author by, before calling it “a tired polemic”. The author may have been called Angell, said The Telegraph, but he certainly didn’t write like one: “Like so many people on the “progressive” side of the museums debate, [Angell] seems to dislike the modern world so much that he would rather empty the museums, put everything back in the ground, and seek to know nothing of the human past – just as long as the spirits are happy.”

Personally, I stand somewhere in the middle here. I also found the text’s political aspect to be “a tired polemic” but, being both a fan of ghost stories, and a believer in such things, who has written books about poltergeists and suchlike myself in the past, I did find plenty to enjoy in here. The author deserves credit for having performed numerous interviews with British Museum staff, both current and former, and unearthing and recording several fascinating tales which would otherwise have remained perpetually lost to history – ironically, this fact undermines his thesis that museums themselves are inherently worthless enterprises, but never mind.

Amongst my favourite yarns Angell collected was that of the visitor who photographed the ghost of “a wrapped, mummified, Mexican baby [floating] in mid-air”, antique prints and drawings which “fly through the air like bats that came in a window circling for a way out”, and an ancient c.1800BC relief of the Demon Queen Lilith possessing such an evil aura of “demonic attachment” that curators refuse to touch it, whilst enraptured visitors sit around leering at the image for hours on end, under Lilith’s possessive spell of “erotic adoration”.

And that’s not to mention the ancient mummies who ripple their bandages in annoyance at being dusted down too friskily, or the assorted modern-day grave-robbers who turn up depositing bits of cursed skeletons to escape their vengeful attached wraiths, or the semi-regular nutters claiming to be the living incarnations of ancient gods and goddesses who walk into reception loudly announcing they’re Anubis or Zeus and want all their pilfered sarcophagi and statues back: if Angell was in charge of the place, he’d probably hand them straight over, no questions asked.

Whether you find such tales to be plausible or laughable, uncanny or comic, they are at least interesting. They deserve to be recorded somewhere, and I am glad Angell has done so. It is the highly and dubiously partisan ideological interpretations he has then placed upon them that I find objectionable and, when repeated ad infinitumacross the course of the entire book, rather tedious. Comments, made with an entirely straight face, like “Imagine having lived in Neolithic times, being mummified over millennia in a shallow swamp among songbirds and amphibia, and then [waking] up in a refrigerator in West Kensington” as an explanation for a Museum poltergeist banging storage-drawers struck me as unintentionally amusing. 

Interpreting unquiet looted objects as the revenge of the colonial dead is one legitimate possible guess about what may be behind such reported phenomena, but only one amongst many, and Angell would have been better off merely including a discussion of the idea in a concluding “What’s Going On?”-type chapter which would have considered other potential options alongside it, too. Whilst I personally believe ghosts and poltergeists do exist, I am also well aware that nobody truly knows what such things actually are: the popular notion that they are the returning souls of the dead is really just an unproven, if fairly natural, automatic assumption.  

Recording Angell

Angell’s basic thesis revolves around something known as the “Stone Tape Hypothesis“. Although Angell gives no proper history of the idea, its substantial origins lie with people like the English scholar, antiquary and ghost-theoriser T.C. Lethbridge (1901-71), one-time Keeper of Anglo-Saxon Antiquities at the Cambridge Archaeological Museum. Whilst he did not coin the theory’s name, and others had devised similar ideas both before and after him independently, men like Lethbridge felt that objects made from certain materials, such as some types of stone, might possess the hitherto-unrecognised quality of storing strong human emotions within them like antique videotapes.

Imagine a murder playing out in front of a wall made from such materials: the immense emotional distress released by the event will be “recorded” in the wall, then “replayed” like a clip from a TV show in front of any future visitors to the original site, or handlers of removed bricks, who happen to be psychic enough to perceive it. Thus, ghosts are not really the spirits of the dead at all, just replays of previous events which would possess no more consciousness to them than normal video-clips do.

Angell prefers a variant of this thesis, however, in which the actual sentient spirits of the dead become attached either to such objects, or to the bones of their looted corpses, before returning with specific intent to haunt and harangue their current academic imprisoners – otherwise, his main bizarre political thesis could not function. Yet, examined properly, several of the cases in this book don’t really fit properly in with this notion at all.

One of the weirdest stories Angell documented came in a temporary travelling exhibition concerning the history of Germany. Here, CCTV cameras captured curious electromagnetic light phenomena, or “massive balls of light”, which showed up nightly to numerous astonished security staff. When they sent guards down to check it out, in the exhibition room itself nothing could be seen, even though in the CCTV room the spooklights remained clearly visible on-camera. Angell traces their Stone Tape origin back to a figurative “gate to Hell”, taken from the Nazi concentration-camp of Buchenwald, the implication being the luminous orbs were the souls of dead Jews, exterminated by the very epitome of Evil White Supremacism. The only problem is, the gate was not actually from Buchenwald at all, just a replica. So how could it have operated as a Stone Tape for Buchenwald’s Jewish dead?  

Had Angell been more interested in discussing his subject matter in light of previous paranormal history, as opposed to obsessively using it as a convenient platform for condemning all white people of the past as being irredeemably racist, he could usefully have compared this to one of the strangest stories from all ghost lore – that of the Hexham Heads. Dug up in the garden of a council-house in the English town of Hexham in 1971, the Heads were two small, but rather evil-looking, spherical stone items identified by scholars as being of ancient Celtic origin. Like the unearthed crowns of Anglia in the old M.R. James story, they seemed to come complete with a threatening ancient spirit-guardian attached: poltergeist phenomena occurred wherever the Heads went, accompanied by sightings of an apparitional werewolf-type creature it was speculated had been stored inside the objects as a primitive supernatural security measure, in classic Stone Tape style. The only problem was, exactly  like the Buchenwald gate, the items turned out to be apparent modern fakes; they were seemingly carved by the house’s previous occupant as free toys for his daughter in 1956.

Presuming for the sake of argument these stories to be true, an honest assessment of such cases would have to conclude that something very complex we simply do not understand is going on during them, not simply that certain ancient objects come with angry anti-English ghosts attached – but Angell’s argument has to be kept simple, because the true main point of his book is to condemn British imperialism, not to advance knowledge in the field of the Fortean at all.

Angell’s delights

Even accepting ancient objects do somehow have ghosts of their original owners living inside them, Angell’s automatic interpretation of their motives as being anti-imperialist in nature is entirely debatable: other parsings are possible. He mentions, for example, the conversion (perhaps literally) of the Medieval Christian Relics Gallery into a new Islamic Gallery in 2005 sparking poltergeist activity culminating in an attendant being hurled through the air by an invisible force.

Angell enlists a psychic to unravel the mystery, who claims to speak to a spectral Knight Templar bound to one of the displaced Christian relics, who complains about having been pushed out of his display case for the icons of an invading infidel religion. From a right-wing, as opposed to a left-wing, perspective, could that not be viewed as a ghostly complaint about the ongoing Great Replacement of the traditional white native Christian population of London with brown Muslims? God only knows what the undead Templar now thinks about Sadiq Khan.    

Then there is this exceedingly forced interpretation of phantom music emanating from a 380BC Turkish tomb decorated with stone Nereids, or sea-nymphs: “These curious tones sound to the passing guard [who heard them] “like Ancient Egyptian music”, evoking a time when migration and musical exchange between Greeks, Turks and Egyptians was fluid.” How infatuated with your own politics do you have to be to hear music from another world and your first automatic reaction is to think “I bet this ghost approves of mass immigration!”

Plus, several of the haunted objects with tragedies attached may conceivably have been filled with Stone Tape emotions not by the malign British, but by other, wholly non-white, empires. An ancient Aztec double-headed snake carving once supposedly trapped a BBC film crew inside its gallery, Angell says, before paranormally increasing the room-temperature to the point where they thought they would be cooked alive. A psychic who enjoys “the gift of smelling in deep time” is then wheeled in to sniff out the local ghosts, scenting phantom smoke in the air which he guesses must come from Spanish conquistadors burning down native Aztec villages and the temple within which the sacred snake once dwelled.

But, as Angell admits, “the burning of shrines and temples was also a strategy of Aztec imperial warfare, prior to Spanish colonisation”, so how do we know these weren’t bad stone-stored memories of locals being burned alive by the Aztecs in the name of the snake-god, rather than of Aztecs being incinerated by invading white Europeans? We don’t, but that would be to confess that foreigners with duskier skins are capable of doing bad things in service of their own historic imperialisms too, and that sending such objects back home might not necessarily propitiate their indwelling ghouls at all, thus undermining Angell’s wholly one-note message.

On and on it goes: a stolen caryatid cries for its return back to Greece together with the Elgin Marbles, ancient statues magically cause fights to break out amongst the public when moved across the room without being asked permission by their arrogant colonial overlords, dust-coverings levitate from the top of crystal skulls, irritated at being thus covered away like the sins of Britain’s past. The British Museum is so evil, it even repeatedly drives its staff members to suicide: one scholar shoots himself at his desk, his callous superior’s only response when told being to ask “Did he damage the book bindings?” As such, former employees’ souls wander the hellish building too, thus implicitly moaning about the unacceptably low quality of the place’s working conditions. Do such shades yet have their own trade union, I wonder?        

But there is hope for ultimate undead anti-colonial rebellion. Certain objects contain not mere piddling ghosts, but outright ancient pagan gods, who are able to manipulate the powerless local white natives into worshipping them. Statues of the Egyptian deity Sekhmet receive offerings of flowers from enraptured females, who photograph “gold light, literally pools of gold in her lap”, which does not indicate that the goddess has wet herself after drinking liquid plutonium, but that she is filled with awesome magical power – so awesome that some worshippers are inexplicably compelled to leave propitiatory “Ferrero Rocher chocolates at her feet”.

As Angell speculates, “it’s possible that deities in the gallery can initiate certain visitors in subtle ways by their mere presence. If we accept that these so-called objects have agency, then it may be that their mere presence compels visitors to reprise old rites in ways that aren’t readily understood.” Checking online, I find that a box of Ferrero Rocher costs as much as £10.99 these days. So who’s really exploiting whom, here? The evil neo-colonialist white people, or the expat African goddesses with a taste for expensive chocolately nutty brown goodness?

“Nutty”, some would say, is the operative word with this book. Personally, I found some of the ghost stories to be fairly convincing. It was the politics I thought utterly unbelievable.  

How about your local museum? Any ghosts there?  

Steven Tucker is a UK-based writer with over ten books to his name. His latest, “Hitler’s and Stalin’s Misuse of Science”, comparing the woke pseudoscience of today to the totalitarian pseudoscience of the past, was released in 2023.

Image credit: Brendan Fraser and Rachel Weisz confront the terror of the undead in 'The Mummy' (1999)