‘Objects hold energy’: Author posits that British Museum in London is full of ghosts

In the summer of 2015, Noah Angell was at a loud East London pub for a friend’s birthday when he noticed that some of the people gathered were having an animated conversation about the ghosts at the British Museum.

The group had all worked together at the museum as students, and just about everyone had their own experiences to share, Angell recounted, speaking from Treadwell’s, an esoteric occult bookshop a few blocks from the museum.

Angell, who lived in London at the time, was intrigued.

“I still wasn’t sure if I was hearing correctly, so I said, ‘Do you mean the museum itself is haunted?’ And [my friend] said ‘yes,’” he explained.

For Angell, an author and artist who already had an interest in ghost stories and collected books of local lore, especially from his native North Carolina, it was the beginning of a long journey to hear these stories himself. 

In his new book, “Ghosts of the British Museum: A True Story of Colonial Loot and Restless Objects,” he shares some of these stories — and his conclusion — that the ghosts are there because of the way that many of the museum’s artifacts were acquired.

One of the first people he spoke to was former collections manager Jim Peters who told Angell about a labor dispute at the museum in the early 2000s. Apparently, the cleaners refused to clean the glass cases where the mummies were kept, he said, because the bandages on the mummified human remains were said to be rippling like waves.

Angell was electrified — if workers had gone on strike because they believed something supernatural was going on, then there hadto be something there. One story led to another and then another. Soon, Angell was meeting everyone from curators to overnight security staff. 

He learned about how one autumn night in 2014, an overnight security guard was in the control room when a certain feed from one of the cameras caught his eye.

“What you could see on the CCTV screen were massive balls of light,” Angell said. “Some of them were hovering in midair, completely still; others were chasing each other in circles. Some of them would zip vertically into oblivion.”

When guards went to investigate, Angell said, they found nothing there, even while the orbs could still be seen in the control room. 

“People would say objects hold energy,” Angell said. “And this, to my mind, both bypasses and encompasses questions of belief. You don’t have to believe in ghosts, so to speak, or be religious in order to somehow understand that objects hold energy.”

‘Something has been left unresolved’

The British Museum claims to have at least 8 million objects. 

And it’s had a while to amass all of it. The imposing, Greek-columned structure at the museum in central London opened back in 1753. It became the world’s first national museum, which people sometimes joke has nothing British in it.

“It was born from British colonialism,” Angell explained. “While they were extracting wealth from India and China and Ireland and many countries around the world, they were also crating up and shipping their material culture to London, to the seat of the empire.”Many of the objects that ended up in the museum were looted from their original sites. One of the most well-known examples is the Benin Bronzes — intricate carvings that tell the foundational stories of the Kingdom of Benin, located in present-day Nigeria.

In 1897, British forces attacked Benin City. It’s likely that thousands of people were killed. 

“In the ashes of this kingdom, which burned for 10 days straight at least, the Benin Bronzes were looted,” Angell said. “And many of them now sit in the African Gallery” of the British Museum.

Angell said one museum worker, who went on to become a curator later in his career, had come across tall, ghostly figures standing guard over these powerful and sacred objects.

“I think the artifacts regain some sort of autonomy at night,” Angell said.

He added that he thinks where there are ghost stories, there is a message.

“Hauntings usually occur because something has been left unresolved,” he said. “And the haunting points us toward that thing, which somehow needs to be made right.”

Calls to return objects to their rightful homes 

In recent years, there have been increasing calls for objects — and remains — at the British Museum to be repatriated. 

UK laws make repatriation difficult, but workarounds have been found in the past. For example, a 2009 law allows British institutions to return objects related to the Holocaust and the Nazi era.

British Museum officials say they can share or lend the collections, but they also argue that objects are generally safer at the museum than in the countries they were taken from.

Greece, for one, doesn’t agree. The country has been fighting for years to get the British Museum to return the Parthenon marbles — sculptures that a wayward British diplomat named Lord Elgin hacked off the Parthenon in the early 1800s and shipped back to Britain. 

In 2009, Greece built a state-of-the-art museum to house the stolen statues. But more than 15 years later, the Parthenon marbles still remain in the British museum. In 2024, news broke that a British museum curator in the Greek and Roman department had been stealing objects from storage for the past 10 years and selling them online.

Meanwhile, Angell said he’s heard stories of the Parthenon statues weeping. What if the objects want to go home, too?

Ghosts behind storage

During a recent visit to the museum, a worker there looked closely at Angell before exclaiming, “You’re the ghost person, aren’t you?”

Angell was surprised to be recognized. He’s spent years slipping in and out of the museum, interviewing workers, to the museum’s frustration. He doesn’t think they are big fans of his work, probably because of the conclusions he draws about the artifacts’ restlessness.

But he caught wind recently that the museum had actually told staff to read his book — in case visitors had questions.

And, whatever the administration has to say, museum workers still seem to be having experiences. 

“There are ghosts behind storage,” the museum worker said, just as Angell was beginning to walk away. “I’ll say that.”