Are there ghosts haunting the antiquities of the British Museum?

Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2020/05/11/are-there-ghosts-haunting-the.html

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No. No there aren’t.

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Or are there…?

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There better be: how else can we justify keeping them all in such an elaborate ghost prison?

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No. That weird vibe is, or at least should be, Looter’s Guilt.

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Betteridge rides again

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Sometimes the supernatural turns out to be pretty mundane.

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Or does he…?

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It’s understandable that people would suspect that there are ghosts at the British Museum, considering the incident that transpired in the Reading Room on June 3rd, 1997, but they can rest assured, because that apparent apparition was no ghost, but merely Enoch Soames, the unfamous Faustian fin-de-siècle Catholic-Diabolist poet time traveller!

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I’m not sure that this is the right time to trash museums-- especially those museums with a large online presence.

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perhaps the ghosts of colonialist pillaging.

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Spoilsport! :wink:

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When I was a kid, before the “recent” Dinosaur Hall update of the Carnegie Museum of Nat’l History in Pittsburgh, the docents used to explain that the t-rex’s actual fossil skull was no longer mounted because of its weight and that when it had been mounted, they would sometimes find it gently swaying. I imagine that to be fairly alarming in an empty museum!

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Every museum I’ve worked in seemed like it should be haunted.

When I was in college I did a graduate course that involved cataloguing objects in the university’s collection of Egyptian artifacts. The storage area was dark, had low ceilings, and was dusty and musty. On one occasion, I stumbled across this horrible giant 19th-century painting in the back 40 of the storage area depicting a little boy praying over the body of a little dead girl. It really added to the atmosphere.

One day, I went back into storage to grab some artifact or another and accidentally went down the wrong row of shelves. This meant that I couldn’t find the light switch which I knew had to be around somewhere. In the half-dark I went to the shelf unit where the I expected the pottery or whatever it was to be, pulled the plastic dust sheet back, and there, instead of what I was expecting, was the museum’s most gruesome, horrible mummy, the one where all the flesh and bandages were half off the face so it was a partial grinning skull. I’m not sure how far I jumped, but I’m sure it would have been impressive to any witnesses, had there been any.

Edited to add: Of course I was thinking “Ha, couldn’t find the light switch, this is what happens in horror movies, right?”

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What they don’t say in that video is that all the buses on that line no longer run, and it’s GHOST BUSES that are causing the vibrations

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Thanks for posting this. Dr. Finkel is new to me, and his presentation has a lot to love.

Ooooh hey look such a nicely furnished rabbithole!

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CORRELATION IS NOT CAUSATION!!!111!1one!

Correlation doesn’t imply causation, but it does waggle its eyebrows suggestively and gesture furtively while mouthing ‘look over there’.

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It is the world’s longest ongoing active crime scene.

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If there isn’t a Nicholas Cage movie in all of this then I have no fucking idea how this world works.

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