Noah Angell is a writer and artist who works with orally transmitted forms such as storytelling and song. His work has taken him to the north of Norway, in partnership with Polarmuseet, to work with first hand accounts of Inuit who performed in live ethnographic displays organised by local sailor Adrian Jacobsen, to North Carolina to shoot his forthcoming documentary film on gospel singer Connie B. Steadman of the Badgett Sisters, and to the British Museum in London, where for years he has collected museum workers' testimony of the ghosts that haunt the notorious colonial museum. Angell has written lecture-performance works which have been performed internationally at spaces all around the world. Born in the US, he was resident in London for a over a decade and now lives in Berlin. This is his first book.
A fascinating and illuminating account of some curious incidents at the greatest museum in the world. -- Peter Ackroyd Filled with artifacts wrenched from graves and stolen from shrines, the British Museum is undeniably haunted. In this brilliantly delicate, pointed, shivery book, Angell reveals which of the museum's many angry spirits have managed to be the loudest. You could read it as a guide to which galleries to avoid - or to where the push for repatriation should be most urgent. -- Erin L. Thompson, professor of art crime at the City University of New York With its shelves of dusty fetishes, objects literally poisoned, conserved mummies, stone mirrors and giant recumbent deities, the British Museum is ripe for haunts both academic and supernatural. When I wrote A Natural History of Ghosts in the British Library both at the British Museum and its new home in Euston I made friends with many security guards who seemed to me more interesting about ghosts, more deeply involved in the emotion of them, than the librarians. Here is a book that actually gives them voice! Achieving the near-impossible of a marriage between paranormal pop-culture and developing folklore and the academic notations of hauntology, American scholar Noah Angell has a cultural predisposition for haunted objects and consequently understands the concept well. Where even the fakes are spooked-up, Angell has found an untapped resource - the unmediated haunt in a highly mediated environment. -- Roger Clarke, author of A Natural History of Ghosts An absorbingly creepy travelogue through the shadowy corridors, echoing tunnels and musty basements of our most famous repository of cultural treasure. With Noah Angell as our guide, the British Museum seems less like a temple dedicated to ancient grandeur, more a haunted prison filled with imperial plunder and restless spirits clamouring for attention, insisting that we remember differently. Next time you visit, I guarantee you'll be glancing over your shoulder, ears pricked up to catch the murmured laments of the dead. -- Malcolm Gaskill, author of The Ruin Of All Witches