London Fortean Society: Haunted London: Ghosts of The British Museum and Bloomsbury

London is an old and ghost ridden city. Join the London Fortean Society for an evening of talks on the ghosts that haunt some of London’s most famous landmarks: The British Museum and Senate house.

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

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.

Noah’s book, available on the night, 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.

Roger Luckhurst – The Priestess of Amen-Ra: The British Museum Mummy Curse

This talk will take us back to stories about a cursed object in the Egyptian rooms of the British Museum that began to circulate twenty years before Tutankhamen fever. The true story of how the object was acquired by the Victorian gentleman Thomas Douglas Murray in the 1860s and its adventures in London drawing rooms before arriving in the Museum in 1889. The cast of this odd story includes occultists, Egyptologists, theosophists, psychical researchers, stuffed Pekingese dogs and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

Sarah Sparkes – The Ghosts of Senate House

Sarah Sparkes will talk about The Ghosts of Senate House, a creative research project, which collects and archives tales of hauntings and other unexplained happenings, centered at Senate House, University of London and its immediate surrounds. Sarah was a Research Fellow at the SAS UOL and also an artist and curator. Her talk will include examples of some of the stories collected by herself and Christopher Joseph as well as actual recordings she collected for the project.

She will also illustrate how research material was developed into a series of collaborative, public artworks “The Magical Library Presents: Ghosts of Senate House” for The Bloomsbury Festival in 2011 and ‘The Electric Girl’ 2014, for Seance Month at Senate House Library. Sarah Sparkes runs the GHost project which she initiated with Ricarda Vidal in 2008. She is currently painting 101 GHost Stories, inspired by her research.