“Are ghosts haunting the British Museum?” So asks a recent essay from the Economist’s 1843 magazine. “Inexplicable noises, spectral sightings, sudden drops in temperature — something strange is going on at the British Museum. As the clamour over colonial restitution grows, Killian Fox investigates the collection’s restless objects.”
Betteridge’s law holds that “Any headline that ends in a question mark can usually be answered by the word ‘no.’” And I can confirm that Betteridge’s law holds true for this piece. However, despite rolling my eyes at the headline, which I’m sure quite a few of you did just now, I have to admit I was still enticed to read it. How often do you get a pseudo-serious piece built on the ludicrous admixture of ghost stories and colonialist guilt?
The essay has some terrific laugh lines, unintentional though they may be. Scores of security guards and staff and cleaning crew, who work boring, lonely, late-night shifts, share stories of floating orbs or creaking doors or sudden drops in temperature. This is, to be fair, pretty normal, and fully understandable in the context of their job. Repetitive, routine work makes my mind wander, too. But according to one museum historian favorably cited in the piece, “These stories seem to suggest that the objects themselves are restless.” Ahh, they suggest that, do they?
And the restlessness in question, it’s important to understand, comes from the artifacts being stolen by the British Empire centuries ago. Another great line: “When confronted with the plethora of ghost stories from the museum, an obvious interpretation is that they are manifestations of disquiet about the institution’s heritage.” Well, it might be an “obvious interpretation” for the plot of a new, politically correct Night At the Museum sequel, but “the objects are haunted because of imperialism” is not really a take I expected someone to attempt to offer in serious conversation.
My favorite character in the essay is Irving Finkel, a curator in the British Museum’s Middle East department and the owner of a downright terrific name for a museum curator. Finkel explains that many cultures throughout history have considered ghosts to be just a fact of life — our modern skepticism toward supernatural specters is relatively out of the norm. “He argues that the belief in some form of spiritual lingering after death is deep-seated in the human psyche,” writes Fox.
And Finkel is correct. Wikipedia informs me that there are many references to ghosts in the religions of ancient Mesopotamian states such as Sumer, Babylon, and Assyria. And it’s well established that belief in ghosts was prevalent in ancient Egypt. The Bible even includes a scene in 1 Samuel where King Saul attempts to summon the soul of the prophet Samuel.
In the first century, Pliny the Younger recorded one of the earliest ghost stories in his letters, reporting that “the specter of an old man with a long beard, rattling chains, was haunting his house in Athens.” One of the most frequently reported ghost sightings was apparently in 16th-century England, where many claimed to see Anne Boleyn’s ghost (hopefully the Natalie Dormer version) in the Tower of London where she was executed. Ben Franklin was also said to haunt the Philosophical Society in Philadelphia in the late 19th century, which sounds less enticing.
Where Shakespeare had Banquo’s ghost and that of King Hamlet, we have Casper, and Slimer, and Patrick Swayze from that one movie (and all credit to Shakespeare, but he never wrote the line, “Lemme tell ya something. Bustin’ makes me feel good!”). And, apparently, haunted carvings and mummies and medieval suits of armor that go bump in the night in order to raise awareness about the issue of decolonialization and antiquities restitution.
One last kicker from the Economist: “To his great annoyance, Finkel has never actually seen a ghost himself.” Don’t you just hate that for him?
