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The US 'voodoo' scare: why 19th-century racists spread fake news about Haiti
From sexual orgies to Satan incarnated as a snake, lurid depictions of ‘voodoo’ in North America long titillated and shocked readers. As David G Cox explains, they were also wielded as justifications for racist oppression during the social and political upheavals of the 19th-century US
On 2 January 1893, the black American abolitionist and reformer Frederick Douglass delivered a lecture on Haiti to an audience in Chicago. It was widely alleged, he reflected, that the Caribbean republic was riddled with “voodooism, fetishism, serpent worship and cannibalism”, and that “little children are fatted for slaughter and offered as sacrifices to their voodoo deities”. Such claims, Douglass declared, were false. He told his listeners that, while serving as US minister (effectively, ambassador) to Haiti between 1889 and 1891, he found no evidence of ritual sacrifice, despite diligent investigation. By the time Douglass spoke in Chicago, the idea of Haitian ‘voodoo’ as a murderous cult was lodged in the American public consciousness. As he noted, the features of this myth would have been familiar to many. According to scores of white writers at the turn of the 20th century, ‘voodoo’ was an imported African religion devoted to the worship of Satan incarnated as a snake. ‘Voodoo’ ceremonies, it was claimed, consisted of frenzied dances, sexual orgies and the ritual sacrifice of animals or humans followed by the consumption of their bodies or blood. The priests and priestesses of this imaginary faith were said to be the real rulers of Haiti, holding all its citizens – from presidents to peasants – in the grip of terror. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/12/GettyImages-556636225webready-f31fffd-e1765183494712.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A painting of a black man dressed in a suit with a small bow tie. He has short hair and a thick moustache" title="Ebenezer Bassett denounced claims that the black-led Caribbean nation was a hotbed of ‘voodoo’ cannibalism and human sacrifice (Image by Getty Images)" /> In 1901, claims about Haitian ‘voodoo’ coalesced in a widely reprinted newspaper report on the “demoniacal orgies” of this purported “devil’s cult”. Supposedly reproducing the findings of the famous American geologist and traveller Robert Hill, the author of the piece claimed not only that “large numbers of young children are offered up annually in Haiti as sacrifices to the Great Yellow Snake” but also that “mothers frequently dedicate their infants at birth to this purpose”. The article provoked an incredulous response from Ebenezer Bassett who, as US minister to Haiti between 1869 and 1877, was the first black American diplomat. Having lived there for more than a decade, and speaking fluent French, Bassett – like Douglass – could claim authority on the question of Haitian religion. As Bassett knew, “the whole story about cannibalism in Haiti is no more than a myth which, like other myths, has gained credence by persistent repetition”. Casting doubt on the veracity of the report, he noted that Robert Hill had refuted the existence of Haitian cannibalism in his recent Caribbean travel narrative, and that the claims of the article were “in full accord with – it is better not to say that they are probably based upon – Sir Spenser St John’s book”. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/12/GettyImages-152197629webready-4da9320-e1765183520674.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="Two stone figures, tied together by a metal chain around their necks" title="Chained bocio (protective figures) of the Vodun religion of the Fon people of southern Benin. The chains are symbolic both of slavery and of Gu, the vodu (spirit) of iron and war (Image by Getty Images)" /> Lurid inventions Spenser St John was a British diplomat and former chargé d’affaires in Haiti, and the book in question was Hayti, or, The Black Republic. First published in 1884, it made a deep impression on US journalism, providing the blueprint for a plethora of articles that, though claiming originality, did little more than summarise, in increasingly lurid terms, its lengthy chapter on “Vaudoux Worship and Cannibalism”. Up to this point, I have placed ‘voodoo’ in quotation marks, not only to suggest that it was a figment of white imaginations but also to differentiate it from Vodou, the African-derived religion genuinely practised by Haitians. Much of this religion can be traced to west and west-central Africa. It contains elements of the religions practised during the era of slavery by the Aja and Fon peoples of the Bight of Benin (vodu is the Fon word for spirit), as well as of others from the kingdom of Kongo. Read more | Frederick Douglass escaped enslavement in 1838 – but here's why he was still far from true freedom However, Vodou was not, as 19th-century white commentators claimed, a direct African import. It was a product of the New World melting pot – a dynamic blend of the religions of enslaved Africans and the Christianity of their European enslavers. In this respect, Vodou has much in common with other black diasporic religions including Cuban Santería, Brazilian Candomblé and Jamaican Obeah. Like those, Vodou helped people of African origin survive the brutality of Atlantic slavery. In the Victorian age, white people on both sides of the Atlantic ignored the vibrant realities of Vodou, dwelling instead on its demonic imagined double: ‘voodoo’. Why were they so keen to defame Haitian religion? Frederick Douglass had the answer. “Haiti is black,” he declared in Chicago, “and we [Americans] have not yet forgiven Haiti for being black.” Between 1791 and 1804, enslaved and free people of colour rose against the French colonial government of Saint-Domingue. The revolution resulted in the abolition of slavery and independence for the colony. Renamed Haiti, it became the world’s only black republic. Desperate to demonstrate that people of African descent were incapable of self-government, white supremacists spent the next century defaming Haiti, presenting it – in the words of Douglass – as a “very hell of horrors”. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/12/webready-9c7ef73-e1765183675345.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="The 1791 uprising in the French colony of Saint-Domingue that ended with the founding of the black-led republic of Haiti in 1804, shown in a later engraving amplifying fears of black violence (Image by Getty Images)" title="The 1791 uprising in the French colony of Saint-Domingue that ended with the founding of the black-led republic of Haiti in 1804, shown in a later engraving amplifying fears of black violence (Image by Getty Images)" /> As the 20th century approached, the idea that the world could be divided into races whose members shared the same essential traits was widely accepted. Thus, to opponents of black freedom in the US, Haitian ‘voodoo’ became proof that, without white control, black Americans would degenerate to savagery. As Douglass reflected, the black American could “never part with his identity and race”, meaning that the denial of Haitian civilisation was a denial of the “possibilities of the negro race generally”. This backlash against black freedom explains why ‘voodoo’ first entered the American popular consciousness during the 1860s and 1870s, just as a series of constitutional amendments secured the abolition of slavery, along with the establishment of black citizenship and the enfranchisement of black men. As the author of an 1866 article in the Memphis Appeal proclaimed, ‘voodoo’ was “beginning to take hold among the negroes. Free them from the check which was once held over them, they have unlimited control over their baser passions, and now and then it bursts out, and proves that the worship of their barbaric fathers still runs in the blood of the Americanised negro.” Deluge of discourse Initially, Americans writing about ‘voodoo’ focused on Louisiana and, particularly, New Orleans. A former French colony, Louisiana had a sizeable French-speaking population well into the 19th century. In the 1790s and early 19th century, this population had been bolstered by the arrival of up to 25,000 refugees from the Haitian Revolution, well over half of whom were enslaved. It is thus unsurprising that a reference to “an African deity called Vaudoo” appeared in a New Orleans newspaper as early as 1820. However, from the 1880s onwards, thanks to Spenser St John, attention turned to ‘voodoo’ in Haiti. The press was swiftly saturated with reports depicting the Caribbean republic as a “land of blood” – with articles bearing headlines such as: “Haiti, a Brooding Nightmare of Savagery, Bloodshed, Cannibalism”. It is tempting to see this deluge of discourse as a reflection of US imperial designs on Haiti, which it occupied between 1915 and 1934. However, at the turn of the 20th century, Haitian ‘voodoo’ was most often invoked by white-supremacist Democrats who argued that Jim Crow laws and regulations – which, enacted from the late 19th century, disenfranchised black Americans and enforced their segregation from white people – were necessary to prevent similar savagery at home. The peak of interest in Haitian ‘voodoo’ coincided with legal efforts to destroy the black vote in the South. Beginning with Mississippi in 1890, and ending with Georgia in 1906, southern legislatures drew up new state constitutions containing a plethora of voting restrictions. These were intended to disenfranchise black Americans without contravening the 15th Amendment of 1870, which made it unconstitutional to deprive the vote on the basis of race. In the halls of Congress, Democrats, including the Mississippi senator Hernando Money, cited the work of St John as supposed proof that the black American was no more than a “veneered savage”. To the architects of Jim Crow, ‘voodoo’ was an ideological weapon. Depictions of Haitian ‘voodoo’ worship, a potent brew of sex and violence, helped to sell newspapers in an age of sensationalist journalism. At the same time, they reinforced racist notions that everybody of African descent was inherently bestial, criminal and hypersexual. Depictions of orgiastic worship chimed with the myth that white women were in constant danger of the black ‘beast rapist’, which was used to justify Jim Crow and fuel violence against black Americans. Read more | The Haitian Revolution: the enslaved Africans who rose up against France In a 1914 speech to Congress, the notoriously racist Mississippi senator James Vardaman made the connection explicit. St John, he claimed, had presented a “disgusting story of the worship of the voodoo and cannibalism, which he says is as common as [black] sexual crimes in the southern states of this republic”. Frequently portraying black worshippers as beasts and demons, the language used in depictions of Haitian ‘voodoo’ was dehumanising in the extreme. Written portrayals were sometimes accompanied by lurid illustrations, such as A Voodoo Sacrifice, published in the Los Angeles Herald in 1905. A depiction of child sacrifice, the illustration included a worshipper with grotesquely ape-like features as well as a reptilian figure fixing the newspaper reader with an accusatory gaze, suggesting that she or he was an unwelcome witness to secret black rites. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/12/GettyImages-1426141403webready-352c952-e1765183778614.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A black and white photograph of a white man, wearing a white shirt and black cowboy hat, looking towards the right" title="Mississippi senator James Vardaman, who in 1914 told Congress that in Haiti “cannibalism… is as common as [black] sexual crimes in the southern states of this republic” (Image by Getty Images)" /> Fears of black resistance While ostensibly justifying Jim Crow, American depictions of Haitian Vodou betrayed acute white fears of black resistance. African-derived spiritual beliefs and practices played a part in almost every slave uprising in North America and the Caribbean. In 1822, protective charms were allegedly distributed among those involved in South Carolina’s Denmark Vesey conspiracy, named after a free black man convicted of planning a major uprising of enslaved people. In Jamaica a little over 60 years earlier, the use of similar charms during the massive slave insurrection known as Tacky’s Revolt prompted a British crackdown on Obeah. For late 19th-century white Europeans and Americans, however, the dangerous character of black religion was most associated with the Haitian Revolution. By the end of the century, the idea had been enshrined in Haitian mythology that the revolution began with a Vodou ceremony in a forest named Bois-Caïman, during which a pig was sacrificed and a blood oath sworn. Though Vodou certainly galvanised the Haitian Revolution, the reality of the Bois-Caïman ceremony has been debated by scholars, some of whom question the sources upon which the story is based. White supremacists, however, had no interest in questions of historical accuracy, instead portraying Vodou as a death cult bent upon the annihilation of the white race. This accusation chimed with the widespread view that political equality in the US would lead to race war. In 1908, the San Antonio Light published what it claimed was a genuine Vodou chant invoking racial extermination, but which was almost certainly the product of a journalist’s fevered imagination. O-he! Papa Damba! Down with whites and with mulattoes! Burn them, shoot them, drown their women! Help your blacks, your poor black children Circulated by those seeking to justify Jim Crow, tales of ‘voodoo’ sacrifice and cannibalism were shot through with white anxiety. These sanguinary stories may have facilitated a kind of psychological displacement. In other words, real white violence against African Americans was projected as imaginary black murder in the service of Satan. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/12/AKG9430442webready-9ba2b82-e1765183804180.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A painting of a group of people seated on the ground of a cemetery, with large black and red trees arching over the top of them" title="A Vodou scene in Haiti, by renowned artist Hector Hyppolite. Lurid reports in US newspapers of ‘voodoo’ ceremonies were cited as proof that white control was necessary to prevent black Americans from degenerating into savagery (Image by AKG)" /> In the turn-of-the-20th-century South, racial violence assumed unimaginable dimensions in the form of spectacle lynching: black Americans were tortured and murdered before white crowds that could number in the thousands. According to statistics compiled by the NAACP (the civil rights organisation founded in 1909 as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People), at least 1,902 black Americans were lynched between 1890 and 1910. The affinities between these all-too-real rituals and fictional ‘voodoo’ ceremonies seem more than superficial, especially if we note – as many historians have – the religious symbolism and sacrificial dimensions of spectacle lynching. Read more | Suing for equality: how Sarah Mae Flemming began the legal fight against segregation This reign of racial terror troubled many white people, undermining their sense that they stood at the summit of human civilisation. Condemning the 1904 lynching of Luther Holbert of Mississippi, one newspaper editor wrote that “[t]he negroes, in their most bestial state of voodooism, could be guilty of nothing more savage and brutal.” The editor’s conclusion deliberately inverted the racist language of Democratic politicians such as Hernando Money. “The white man is given to much boasting,” that journalist reflected, “but in many instances he is but a thinly veneered savage.” ‘Voodoo’ gripped the public imagination because, while fuelling the violence upon which Jim Crow was built, it allowed many white Americans to imagine that it was not themselves but others who lived in a “land of blood”. David G Cox is a lecturer in modern American history at the University of Southampton. His research for this article was supported by a British Academy Mid-Career Fellowship This article was first published in the December 2025 issue of BBC History Magazine
Let’s think before we flush, with Dr Christopher Harding
We can take lessons from Edo Japan about how we deal with our waste, Dr Christopher Harding tells Dr David Musgrove
There is a campsite at the foot of the South Downs which has tremendous toilets. In a corner of the field, you’ll find a gaggle of handsome timber cubicles, boasting rustic carpentry and impeccable cleanliness. Each cubicle has a raised box inside, with a hole in the middle framed by a comfortable wooden seat. Obviously that’s where you do your business. Then you throw in a handful or two of sawdust from a bucket to the side, and that’s the job done – no flushing involved (obviously you wash your hands, but there are taps outside for that). It’s a relaxingly rural experience that would encourage anyone to dwell on the merits of water-free composting toilets, for that is what they are. You can even educate yourself on what happens to the waste you and your fellow campers are producing because there is an informative handout explaining how it’s turned into a rich compost rather than being washed away to a sewage treatment works. It’s the sort of thing that the residents of Edo period Japan would have been at ease with. I spoke to Dr Christopher Harding, a scholar of Japanese history at the University of Edinburgh, and his Life Lesson from History is that we could learn a thing or two from the way that the Japanese historically dealt with their waste. Peace, prosperity and the problem of poo The Edo period runs from the early 1600s to the middle of the 19th century, an era of peace overseen by the Tokugawa shogunate based in Edo, now Tokyo. With peace came prosperity, and Edo grew to be the largest city in the world at the start of the 18th century. That urban explosion also meant an explosion of excrement, which had to be attended to. You might imagine that the Edo solution was to build sewers and flush it away, particularly as the Japanese at the time were big innovators in municipal water management. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/11/GettyImages-640505355-2a09790.jpg" width="2654" height="2114" alt="A photograph showing a town square with a well in the middle. All around there are ramshackle buildings and there are many stone steps leading up from behind the square far into the background" title="A water well in a public square in the town of Ikao, Japan, c1890s. The well would have been shared by ordinary townspeople (Image by Getty Images)" /> “They created this huge aqueduct, the Tamagawa Aqueduct, which took water from the Tama river all the way into what’s now Tokyo,” notes Chris. “They used uncut water channels first, and then as the water comes closer into Edo and starts branching out, you have underground water pipes, mostly made of wood, sometimes made of masonry, which if you’re lucky enough to have a big samurai home, brings water straight into your house. Or if you’re one of Edo’s more ordinary townspeople, it’ll take it into row houses where multiple families would live. You’d have a shared well fed by these wooden waterways where you could draw water from. So, I think it’s amazing that they did that and these services were provided not just to the elite of Edo but to everybody.” Read more | Is this toilet the ultimate Anglo-Saxon status symbol? Inside Harold II’s ‘ensuite’ With all the effort to get fresh water into the city, the residents were very mindful of not wasting it. They used it several times over – cleaning rice first, then bathing in it, then watering their plants – before it was channelled away into moats or rivers. What it wasn’t used for was flushing away sewage. The citizens of Edo knew that their poo was a valuable commodity, to be gathered and used, rather than just removed. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/11/GettyImages-2181019793-92fa448.jpg" width="3642" height="3444" alt="A photograph showing three Japanese women washing rice in large wooden barrels. Two of them are pouring rice from smaller barrels, while the other stands astride one of the large barrels" title="Water was used several times over in Edo Japan, beginning with washing rice, as shown in this image from c1873-83 (Image by Getty Images)" /> People did their business in shared cesspits, and then on a regular basis, collectors would come and empty them and take the waste away in buckets, oxcarts or sometimes on canal-boats. It would be stored in huge pits outside the city, mixed with rice straw, and allowed to decompose, before local farmers took it to manure their fields. Vegetables were returned from the fields to the city in return for the human fertiliser coming the other way. This was valuable stuff, and the waste from the samurai was particularly prized because of the perceived better quality of the poo they produced, given their richer diets. In Osaka, Chris explained, “fights used to break out between different groups of farmers because they wanted access to the fertiliser – or the night soil – from samurai”. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/11/2BDYG4P-14aee0b.jpg" width="3053" height="4500" alt="An illustration showing a group of samurai soldiers: one is in the toilet, while the other three squat outside it, reacting to the bad smell" title="This 1834 example of toilet humour depicts squatting samurai in Japan. Their ‘night soil’ was particularly prized as fertiliser for farms (Image by Alamy)" /> The economics of excrement According to Leicester University’s Dr Richard Jones, talking to me recently about the history of manure on the HistoryExtra podcast, this was not unique to Japan. “It has been traditional, in Asia in particular, to make more use of human excrement than has been the case in Europe. There are a number of reasons why that should be the case. The great global historian Alfred Crosby argued that Europe came to economic dominance in the medieval period because the continent had a lot of large domestic animals, and they provided power and protein, but above all, they provided manure. So we have animal manure in large quantities in western Europe. By contrast, in Asia, where there is an absence of these large ungulates, capturing human excrement and using that in the fields is an economic imperative.” Read more | A brief history of the toilet: wiping, washing – plus, who invented the flush? <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/11/W2749E-61737c0-e1763454353863.jpg" width="1190" height="1295" alt="A Japanese farmer, c1880s, wearing a mino (straw raincoat) carries buckets of (probably) night soil, collected from private homes for use as fertiliser (Image by Alamy)" title="A Japanese farmer, c1880s, wearing a mino (straw raincoat) carries buckets of (probably) night soil, collected from private homes for use as fertiliser (Image by Alamy)" /> In Edo Japan, the value of human waste as fertiliser was definitely recognised, and according to Chris Harding, there wasn’t a strong sense of disgust or taboo associated with handling it. When European visitors arrived in Japan towards the end of the Edo period, they often remarked that the streets of Japanese cities did not have the unpleasant smells found in cities such as Paris or London. This was attributed to the efficient and systematic collection and removal of waste. Part of the reason that the streets were clean was that in Edo Japan, there was strong social pressure from the local community to stick to the rules and use shared facilities like toilets in the proper way. Embarrassment would come not from being in close proximity to excrement, but rather from not acting in a socially approved way. Edo citizens knew where their poo was going, and they were happy to have a close relationship with their waste, because everyone knew that it would be removed quickly and then perform a valuable service as fertiliser. The sewage question In the end, it was western influence in the Meiji period, which followed the Edo, that brought to an end this sustainable circle of human manure farming. Sewers were built that were in part modelled on the infrastructure projects that were being developed in the likes of London and Paris. In Europe, there was much more impetus for the swift removal of sewage from urban centres, through waterborne systems, and much less interest in using human waste as manure. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/11/GettyImages-2673360-6ce8c9d.jpg" width="3692" height="2560" alt="The foundations being built for a London sewer. What to do about the ‘sewage question’ was much debated in UK newspapers (Image by Getty Images)" title="The foundations being built for a London sewer. What to do about the ‘sewage question’ was much debated in UK newspapers (Image by Getty Images)" /> Incidentally, it wasn’t a foregone conclusion that Britain would adopt waterborne sewage networks. The ‘sewage question’ was much reported on in the newspapers, as commentators considered what could be done to rid Britain’s growing urban cities of the stuff that was causing a great stink and polluting the rivers. Even though Joseph Bazalgette’s magnificent waterborne sewers were demonstrably cleaning up mid-19th century London, at the same time Reverend Henry Moule of Fordington was advocating use of his patented mechanical earth closet. This was essentially the Victorian equivalent of the composting toilet enjoyed on glamping sites today. Sewage farms were also developed, with raw excrement pumped onto fields, but it was basically the volume of poo that caused the waterborne system to win out over these other ideas because that was the only way to shift the material out of town quickly enough. Read more | What did Victorians do with their poo? The battle over the 19th-century excrement explosion Here in the UK, we’re still tied to that Victorian sewer network, with most of our waste going to chemical treatment plants. As Richard Jones explained, “People might be surprised to know that sewage is still being used in modern day agriculture: it just happens not to be in a liquid form. But the solid materials that are precipitated out at wastewater treatment plants, the so-called sewage sludge, when treated and dried and turned into what is euphemistically now called bio-solid, is still spread in significant tonnages across large areas of agricultural land today”. Nowadays, as we once more struggle to manage the increasing volumes of waste flowing into our sewers, it’s a moment to reflect on whether we might benefit from a closer relationship to our waste today. Edo Japan offers an interesting comparison to our current situation, and a different way of doing things. Rather than flushing and forgetting, it’s a good time to think about whether there are more sustainable ways to deal with our waste. Sewage today comes complete with micro-particles and other hidden nasties, so I’m not suggesting we should all have composting toilets fitted in our houses, but maybe we should at least have the conversation about it. This article is part of HistoryExtra's Life Lessons from History Substack newsletter. Subscribe to the newsletter for more articles and podcasts exploring the ways in which history can help us live better, happier, healthier or more productive lives.
Spectral beasts and hounds of hell: a spooky history of Britain's ghost dogs
From infernal black dogs attacking churches to ravening, red-eyed brutes on remote roads, Britain has long been haunted by fearsome canine phantoms. Karen R Jones explores what these stories can tell us about societies past
On the morning of 4 August 1577, the good Christian folk of Bungay assembled in St Mary’s Church for their regular Sunday service. But more sinister forces were also gathering in the Suffolk town. Dark clouds massed above, then “there fell from heaven an exceeding great and terrible tempest… not simply of raine but also of lightening and thunder”. This storm was only the prelude to a “straunge and terrible Wunder” described by Abraham Fleming in a pamphlet published soon after the event. For the church was plunged into darkness and a “black dog, or the divel in such a likenesse” burst in. It wrung the necks of two worshippers then “passing by an other man of the congregation… gave him such a gripe on the back, that therewith all he was presently drawen togither and shrunk up, as it were a peece of lether scorched in a hot fire”. The story of the Black Dog of Bungay is extraordinary, but far from unique in the region – East Anglia is the primary hunting ground of the spectral beast named Black Shuck – and, indeed, across the country. Britain is, famously, a nation of animal lovers, with 36 per cent of households having at least one dog. The UK canine consumer market is worth around £10bn a year, while millions of us tune in to watch dog-centric television programmes. These animals have become our trusted aides and loyal companions since domesticated dogs arrived on this island with the first human migrants during the Stone Age. It’s not surprising, then, that Britain’s population of paranormal pups is more diverse and widespread than anywhere else in the world, according to Mark Norman, a folklorist specialising in black dog apparitions. Such creatures reputedly stalk villages and lonely roads from Aberdeen to Penzance, and the British landscape echoes with their chilling howls. Hellhound is round the corner Dogs and humans have lived and travelled together in Britain since the Mesolithic age. Archaeological surveys place dogs at the UK’s oldest excavated house – at Star Carr, Yorkshire, dating from around 9000 BC – and at the oldest site of journeying, a camp at Blick Mead near Stonehenge. Dogs accompanied pastoralists rounding up sheep in grasslands and joined hunters tracking deer in forests, before settling down to snooze in front of the communal fire. No wonder they also populated ghostly tales. In story and song, from whispered yarn to local gazetteer, ghost dogs bound across the folkloric and literary record, with perhaps the most famous fictional example being the Hound of the Baskervilles investigated by Sherlock Holmes. In many reported cases, a factual explanation remains deliciously elusive. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/11/GettyImages-1137155402-CMYKWeb-Ready-56e37c4.jpg" width="2501" height="1667" alt="A black poster showing a large wolf with his mouth open. In front of his face, the words "The Hound of the Baskervilles" are written in red" title="A poster for the 1959 Sherlock Holmes film The Hound of the Baskervilles. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was inspired by tales of ghostly dogs on Dartmoor (Image by Getty Images)" /> All manner of spirit dogs have been reported. Some are devoted pets pining for lost masters and mistresses, padding eternally along the walks they took in life, carrying with them the textured reportage of hearsay, tradition and family fortunes. Some are seen as portents of doom, some relate particular cultural coordinates of injustice, wrongdoing or violent ends, and others just are. Some people who are convinced by such tales claim that these are beasts appearing to us from ancient days – messengers demonstrating the existence of a time-slip or a ‘thin place’. The unconvinced retort airily that we like to tell tales – Booker Prize-winning author Graham Swift called humans “storytelling animals” – and that of course those yarns frequently invoke our long-standing companions of homestead and hearthside. Most of Britain’s ghost dogs are connected to specific sites of historical significance where long-standing relationships between humans and canines have been written repeatedly into the material and imagined environment. They haunt village streets, ancient camps, burial mounds and graveyards, historic houses and castles. Read more | From the headless 'Blemmae' to a flesh-eating wolf: a 500-year history of monsters Road ragers Ancient trackways, roads and paths seem to attract a special breed of spectral beast – black dogs that leap out at unsuspecting travellers on dark, lonely nights. These are the most prolific canine apparitions, accounting for about a third of British sightings. Most of them are large and sport flaming eyes; some clank chains, while others can talk. All are fearsome. One of the most striking highway hauntings was reported on the road between Tavistock and Okehampton on Dartmoor. Here, on dark nights, the ghost of Lady Howard rode out from her home at Fitzford House in a grisly coach made from the bones of her dead husbands, heading to Okehampton Castle. Running ahead was a hellhound with blazing eyes and a demonic disposition. Sometimes she offered a lift to lost travellers: accept at your peril. Also on Dartmoor, you might encounter the Wisht Hounds kennelled by the devil in Wistman’s Wood. And at the East Dart Hotel, a former coaching inn near Postbridge, a ghostly bloodhound appears each night at 3am to snuffle eagerly at the road outside, hoping to lap up the remnants of discarded booze poured into the gutter by the guilt-ridden landlord, John Webb, over a century ago. The dipsomaniac dog follows the road down the hill to a clapper bridge, eternally searching for the long-discarded grog in the early hours. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/11/GettyImages-1911350831-CMYKWeb-Ready-23adf67.jpg" width="2967" height="1978" alt="A black and white illustration of a large, naked man, standing and holding onto a chain that is around the neck of a three headed dogs" title="A 16th-century engraving shows Hercules dragging the three-headed dog Cerberus from the gates of Hades (Image by Getty Images)" /> Dartmoor epitomises the kind of place where ghost dogs congregate: bleak, lonesome spots where the hairs on the back of your neck stand on end. Dark copses. Craggy peaks. Desolate moors. These are environments that inspire awe and even fear. No wonder they host such beastly apparitions as the Gytrash – a massive dog-spirit frequenting the remote highways of the West Riding of Yorkshire – and the Barghest, a demonic hound with huge teeth and claws roving the darker stretches of the Yorkshire Dales. One Barghest near Whitby sometimes dragged chains behind it, and could vanish into thin air by walking backwards. All were best avoided, auguring bad fortune or death – though they reputedly could not cross rivers. In Wales, the Cŵn Annwn, or ‘hounds of the underworld’, were often seen or heard before a funeral, baying mournfully. Typically, they sported glowing red eyes but their appearance otherwise varied depending on where they were seen: they might be huge and white, small and liver-coloured, or even red-coated, dripping with blood. They might rove lonely roads in a pack but sometimes travelled singly, often accompanied by Arawn, Lord of the Underworld and leader of the ‘wild hunt’. They were particularly associated with crossroads, enjoyed haunting graves, and often frequented mountains. Read more | The child-eating Christmas Yule Cat: what are the origins of this Icelandic folklore? These examples reveal much about our complex relationship with wild spaces. Sure, today we seek out these places for forest bathing, wild camping and an escape from modernity. And yet the vestigial unease they inspire in some people is a psychological throwback to our ancient past, when wolves and bears dwelt in uncharted spaces, and when wilderness connoted chaos, a descent into feral madness and devilry. They are places where Canis familiaris might revert to its lupine ancestor, Canis lupus, transforming from strong and trusty aide into a savage, malevolent assailant. Not all ghost hounds are out for blood, though. Though most tales about Black Shuck portray his appearance as an omen auguring imminent death or ill fortune, on occasion he struck fenland folk as friendly, and even had a penchant for helping women travellers. And the Gurt Dog of Somerset’s Quantock Hills was an entirely affable apparition: a shaggy Samaritan that appeared from the fog to guide lost children safely to their homes. Good or bad omens? Inhabited places, too, harbour their share of spectral hounds. Not one but two black dogs are said to wander the grounds of Leeds Castle, Kent (coincidentally home to the world’s largest collection of dog collars). One, a portent of doom, first appeared in the 1440s, after Eleanor Cobham, Henry VI’s aunt, was tried for witchcraft and incarcerated in the castle. The second, a more benign spectre, is said to bring good luck, and once reputedly saved a visitor from falling out of a window, having attracted their attention by barking. Both are curly coated retriever types, so anyone encountering such a spectre here might struggle to determine whether it is a good or bad omen. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/11/J4X3AR-CMYKWeb-Ready-826fb01.jpg" width="2952" height="1968" alt="An illustration showing a large black dog standing on its hind legs, with snakes on its head. To the right, there is a man in jacket and tall hat is holding the dog's muzzle" title="A woodcut of the phantom Black Dog of Newgate. The canine apparition reportedly haunted the precincts of the notorious London prison, attacking inmates who’d killed and eaten a new arrival (Image by Alamy)" /> The story of the Black Dog of Newgate was popularised in a sensational 1596 pamphlet describing a canine phantom that stalked the notorious prison. During the reign of Henry III, the yarn goes, inmates of the prison were so hungry that they killed a new arrival, a scholar, and devoured his body. His ghost then wandered the confines of the prison – as did the spectre of a huge black dog. Some prisoners died of fright upon seeing the beast. Others were ripped to pieces by its fearsome jaws in retribution. Even those who escaped the prison were pursued by the avenging animal. Friend or foe? Why are dogs the creatures most commonly cited in accounts of animal apparitions? Partly, it’s because of their long relationship with and proximity to humans. The dog’s alter ego, the wolf, also adds that sense of the fearsome wild into the psychological scare-scape. There is also a biological factor at play: an awareness that dogs are gifted with extraordinary sensory powers. A dog’s nose is equipped with about 300 million olfactory receptors – far more than a human’s paltry 5–6 million. Their hearing, too, is vastly superior to our own. These endow them with almost ‘supernatural’ abilities, reflected in their roles in the beliefs and legends of various cultures worldwide. The Aztecs believed that their Xoloitzcuintli dogs could ‘smell’ ghosts, and thus protect their owners from spirits. In Norse mythology, Freya, a god linked with death, rode a chariot pulled by huge cats – thus a household dog might alert the residents to her approach by howling and barking, potentially averting a fatal incident. And in ancient Greek legend, the three-headed hound Cerberus guarded the entrance to Hades, suggesting that dogs were equipped to patrol the boundary between the living and the dead. Such beliefs in the extrasensory abilities of animals persist: in a 2019 survey for the Blue Cross animal charity, 63 per cent of owners said they believed that their pet had seen (or had the capacity to see) a ghost or other supernatural presence. Indeed, perhaps the most intriguing part of spectral dog stories is the fact that in many places they are still thriving today. Ghost dogs are seen through the windscreens of cars, stalking major roads just as happily as they did ancient trackways. Take that infernal assailant in Bungay in 1577. Black Shuck became – and still is – a widespread legend across East Anglia, written into regional folklore by Reverend ES Taylor in a 1850 issue of Notes and Queries, describing “Shuck the Dog-fiend… this phantom I have heard many persons in east Norfolk, and even Cambridgeshire, describe as having seen as a black shaggy dog, with fiery eyes and of immense size, and who visits churchyards at midnight”. Read more | When a Victorian ghost hunter investigated Britain’s most haunted house, this is what he found Paranormal investigators documenting reports of Shuck sightings found that the majority of alleged encounters occurred after 1900 – so, in fact, his presence in the regional psyche appears to have burgeoned rather than receded in the modern age. Reflecting the continuing salience of this legend, and a broader revival of interest in all matters folkloric, in 2022 a Black Shuck Festival was launched in Bungay to celebrate the town’s famous fiendish beast. Perhaps these tales of Shuck and his phantom canine kin have even more relevance in our polarised and fractured society today. They speak of the importance of roots, of the storied pasts that bind humans to other species. And in a time when anthropogenic change threatens us in far-reaching and fundamental ways, they speak of the importance of acknowledging the limits of what we, as humans, can know and control in the natural (or supernatural) world. Karen R Jones is professor of environmental and cultural history at the University of Kent. Her latest book, Beastly Britain: An Animal History, was published in May by Yale University Press This article was first published in the November 2025 issue of BBC History Magazine
Who should decide the stories museums tell?
Increasingly, museums are being challenged on how they select, display and interpret their collections. Six historians explain how these institutions can adapt to suit 21st-century audiences
“If museums truly want to be inclusive, they should tell the full life history of every object in their collection” – Justin M Jacobs It has become fashionable today for critics of major western museums to call for a ‘reckoning’ or ‘coming to terms’ with the imperialist and racist histories of some institutions. This approach is rooted in the idea that, every time a museum chooses to tell a particular story, this story inevitably reflects the unconscious biases of the curators who tell it. There’s much to recommend this approach – but there’s also a problem. Too often, institutions simply replace the bygone voices of long-dead white men with the present-day voices of people descended from the communities or nations that originally produced the artefact on display. But is this really a more inclusive approach? Scholars who study the history of artefacts in museums are acutely aware that nearly every object on display has served different functions and had a different symbolic value down the years. In addition, many diverse peoples have owned or interacted with these objects. It follows that choosing to tell only a single story closely associated with present-day ideological agendas does a great disservice to the museum-going public. Take the Parthenon (or Elgin) Marbles, for instance. Over the course of the past 2,000 years, they have played an integral role in embodying the political power and cultural beliefs of the ancient Athenians, Romans, Christians, Muslims, British and modern Greeks. Yet according to current intellectual fashions and political sympathies, only one of these stories is deemed legitimate: that promoted by the modern Greeks. This, of course, is merely a reflection of the unconscious bias of our own day and age, which consistently promotes the alleged authenticity of nation states that didn’t even exist prior to the modern era. This is the very antithesis of an inclusive approach. If museums truly want to be inclusive, they should tell the full life history and evolving symbolisms of every object in their collection – even when these stories don’t reflect the ideological trends of the present moment. Justin M Jacobs is a professor of history at American University in Washington, DC, and the author of Plunder? How Museums Got Their Treasures (Reaktion Books, 2024) “There is something colonial about leaving decisions on displays to only those who can afford to work in museums” – Christienna Fryar Few institutions teach more people about the past than museums. Historians may wish otherwise, but more people pop into a museum or National Trust property on a day out than read the latest scholarship. It’s their importance that has made the question of who decides what stories museums tell so vexed in recent years. These questions are necessary, because museums are colonial institutions. They flourished in the 18th and 19th centuries as repositories for the so-called curiosities European collectors had purloined from territories abroad. Museums in the west still claim to be the best protectors of treasures that countries of origin want back. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/11/J4X823-CMYK-80ca370.jpg" width="3286" height="2190" alt="A painting showing a group of people crouched down in a large forested area, poised to attack" title="A painting shows members of the Maroon community of formerly enslaved Africans during an ambush in Jamaica, 1795. Christienna Fryar argues that museums should cover their story more (Image by Alamy)" /> Then there’s the matter of who works in museums. Entry-level museum jobs are often poorly paid and based in expensive cities – not very attractive to people whose families cannot subsidise their lives. There is also something colonial about leaving decisions on displays to only those who can afford to work in museums and who received traditional university educations. Museums must work more consciously, consistently and collaboratively with descendant historians (those who research people they descend from), curators, artists and storytellers. Many institutions now cite co-production as a key value, but employing these experts and paying them appropriately is as important as working with local volunteer groups to design exhibitions. Descendant experts often use family histories and community knowledge to tell stories ignored by traditional scholarship. Read more | "Museums are magical places": Kavita Puri on a new initiative encouraging close encounters with history Take the history of enslavement. Too often, the focus in Britain is on the goods that circulated the Atlantic basin in the so-called ‘Triangular Trade’ (often sidestepping the brutality of the trade in humans) and the money that changed hands. But what about the swamps and the mountains where fugitives from slavery established Maroon communities? Museums are also responsible for telling these stories of survival, daring, skill, environmental know-how and community. Christienna Fryar is a historian of Britain and the Caribbean, and CEO of the Liverpool charity Mary Seacole House “In the 21st century, there need to be multiple stories in and about the museum – and multiple storytellers” – Adam Mosley The origins of today’s museums lie in pre-modern princely and scholarly collections. Historically, the collectors – along with the curators they employed and those who followed them – exerted considerable power over the museum as a space in which the world was represented and knowledge was produced. Curators still play a key role in choosing and shaping the stories their institutions are best positioned to tell. Many are enormously knowledgeable about the objects in their care, and it would be a tragedy to disregard their expertise, or that of academics, when using heritage collections to illuminate past, present and future. However, most curators and scholars know that they cannot and should not monopolise the generation of stories. It would be futile, in any case, for curators – let alone politicians – to attempt to dictate absolutely the message conveyed in any exhibition. Visitors bring with them their own memories, insights and perspectives. Their knowledge can supplement or correct that of ‘experts’. They may connect with displays emotionally in unexpected ways. They have stories of their own to tell about what they find in a museum. Increasingly, museums work in partnership with the public to tell new stories with their collections, to give a voice to those historically under-represented and excluded, and to unlock the meaning of their holdings for diverse audiences. Histories get rewritten in the museum, just as they do in universities. Sometimes these fresh interpretations can cause discomfort to those who would prefer museums to retell familiar stories. New perspectives can also challenge the very grounds on which a museum claims the right to hold particular objects. The ways in which museums are responding to these kinds of dialogues constitutes an evolving story in itself – one concerned with whose views matter and how to deal with problematic legacies from the past. In the 21st century, there need to be multiple stories in and about the museum – and multiple storytellers, too. Single-voice stories are no longer sufficient. Adam Mosley is an associate professor in history at Swansea University “Two-thirds of curators in the UK are women – but museum leadership is still largely an old boys’ club” – Caroline McCaffrey-Howarth Henry Cole, the first director of the South Kensington Museum (now the V&A) from 1857, once declared that museums should be a “schoolroom for everyone”. But that begs a question: who sets the curriculum? Who is making the decisions on which stories museums tell, and why? Is it the curatorial team, senior management, external funding bodies or the gift shop? And what is the demographic of these groups? Although two-thirds of museum curators in the UK are women, museum leadership is still largely an old boys’ club. Recent reports by Art Fund and the Museum X project have shown that cultural diversity across the sector is at an all-time low. Can we ever truly diversify the stories that museums tell without first achieving greater diversity in the museum workforce? Read more | Kavita Puri's hidden histories: "A UK museum that tells the long, rich history of migration is long overdue" My own research focuses on art collectors, particularly the agency of women, non-binary and trans people. This topic is being explored across more museums thanks to schemes such as Katy Hessel’s audio series Museums Without Men. The National Gallery, too, is conducting research into female benefactors, noting the fact that only 27 out of its 2,300 paintings are by women. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/11/MP38ER-CMYK-a676a50.jpg" width="1899" height="1266" alt="A 1782 self-portrait by French artist Élisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun – one of only 27 works by women among the National Gallery’s 2,300 paintings (Image by Alamy)" title="A 1782 self-portrait by French artist Élisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun – one of only 27 works by women among the National Gallery’s 2,300 paintings (Image by Alamy)" /> It’s 140 years since Lady Charlotte Schreiber, one of the greatest Victorian collectors, split her trove of 5,000 objects between the V&A and the British Museum. Charlotte was determined that the artworks she spent decades researching should become the property of the nation. Honouring the spirit of that act of generosity, surely we have a duty to be in dialogue with the public and to keep them at the forefront of the stories that museums choose to tell? I believe that the future lies in collaboration and co-creation through public engagement. Museums are most successful when they reach out and establish meaningful dialogues with local communities, artists, academics, PhD students, schoolchildren, youth groups and more. Museums should be places of curiosity, creativity and connection that are always changing and evolving – just like the stories they should tell. Caroline McCaffrey-Howarth is a senior lecturer in the history of art at the University of Edinburgh, and the author of Lady Charlotte Schreiber (Lund Humphries, 2025) “Museums need to be alert to the risk of a fragmentation of culture and history” – Jeremy Black Museums should inform, educate, inspire, entertain and preserve – but this says nothing about how best to do this. Which objects in the permanent holding should be shown? How should museums drum up interest? How should holdings be curated, and how best explained? What temporary exhibitions should be commissioned? How should collaborations be organised? Who should be guest curators? What role should the public or government play? In 2024, Birmingham Museums established a Citizens’ Jury. This summer, the National Gallery announced the launch of NG Citizens – the first time a UK gallery or museum has set up a national citizens’ assembly. These bodies will presumably question the aesthetic judgment of curators. There will be lapses and controversies. Nevertheless, it is always good for an institution to find out what its potential audience wants. Of course, not everyone is happy about such initiatives, but their legitimacy is difficult to deny in a democracy. The National Gallery has a clue in the name: it is supposed to be national. More generally, developing processes that promote and support public involvement puts institutions in a solid position when defending the way they present their collections, put on and organise exhibitions or justify funding applications. An institution is harder to criticise if a cross-section of the population has advised it. In pursuing such public involvement, it is necessary to avoid ‘pillarisation’ – a term borrowed from the Dutch verzuiling, which describes a society in which different groups have their own distinct social institutions and organisations. Apply this to museums and there’s a risk of different interest groups, however defined and represented, putting on exhibitions or organising collections to reflect what they prefer. Museums need to be alert to the risk of a fragmentation of culture and history, which can in turn create an endless spiral of groups spawning sub-groups, and museums becoming mired in controversy. Yet, though democratic processes of consultation pose many problems, the alternatives are worse. Jeremy Black is a historian, formerly a professor at the University of Exeter, and the author of more than 180 books “Ideas once thought impossible, such as the return of the Parthenon Marbles to Greece, are now frequently discussed” – Mirjam S Brusius For a long time, museums have suggested that each object has just one official story – the one written on its label. Large institutions such as the British Museum often present themselves as neutral spaces that show the world simultaneously from ‘nowhere and everywhere’. Yet this approach rarely acknowledges how these objects were collected, nor how museums reshape the objects’ presentation to fit particular narratives. So who really speaks through the labels we see in museums? Is it a team of curators, one individual or the institution as a whole? And why do labels usually rely on expert voices instead of including personal accounts by those who used these objects, or the histories of how the objects entered the collection in the first place? These questions feel especially urgent today. Museums are under growing pressure to confront their colonial legacies, to consider returning certain objects, and to tell stories that include more perspectives. Ideas once thought impossible – such as the return of the Parthenon Marbles to Greece – are now frequently discussed. Still, while demands for repatriation have been voiced for decades, many communities remain unheard, many stories untold. Read more | The Bayeux Tapestry is finally coming home to Britain – and you can see it next year It is time for museums to rethink how they frame their collections. This means creating space for voices from the global south where many of these objects originated, and acknowledging their cultural and historical significance beyond western narratives. We have an opportunity today to reimagine these institutions as spaces for dialogue, reflection and accountability. One way forward is through even more participatory approaches, involving both visitors and source communities in shaping museum narratives. New tools – digital platforms, interactive displays, labels that offer multiple perspectives – can help objects tell more than one story. This approach could not only enrich our understanding of the past but also transform museums into more inclusive, honest and engaging spaces. Mirjam S Brusius is a historian and one of the initiators of 100 Histories of 100 Worlds in 1 Object (100histories100worlds.org)
Michael Wood on China's immense suffering in the Second World War
"China suffered horrendous losses, second only to the Soviet Union", writes Michael Wood
The Second World War still plays a massive role in our national mythology in Britain. But if I were to ask you: “Who was the fourth ally?” I imagine that most readers would have to think twice. The answer is China. China fought the entire war – and longer – and suffered horrendous losses, second only to the Soviet Union. Frank Capra’s Why We Fight documentaries, which included a 1944 film called The Battle of China, saw the war with Japan as part of “the struggle of freedom against slavery, civilisation against barbarism”. Films in the series close with the hope that a victory for the democracies – Republican China in the 1930s, don’t forget, had been a fledgling democracy – will bring about “the utter defeat of the war machines of Germany and Japan”. Today, history is a big deal in China. Since 1949, the Chinese view of modern history has centred on the ‘century of humiliation’ following the First Opium War (1839–42), when foreign powers carved up the country. But more recently, the Second World War has assumed a powerful new role in Chinese nationalism. There’s a museum to the war in Beijing, the Museum of the War of Chinese People’s Resistance Against Japanese Aggression, and a harrowing memorial to the 1937–38 Nanjing Massacre. At the China Modern History Museum in Nanjing, you can dress up in nationalist Kuomintang or communist uniforms and have your photo taken in wartime dioramas. The Chinese view of the conflict has shifted towards showing the country as a heroic participant in a war that was moral and just. The Chinese had been engaged in hostilities with Japan since 1931, when the Japanese invaded Manchuria. The conflict proper lasted from July 1937 until 2 September 1945 – the 80th anniversary of the conflict’s end is being marked this year. So the Second World War effectively started earlier, and lasted longer, here than in Europe. And without China, the course of the wider war might have been very different. Read more | Michael Wood on amazing insights into medieval daily life The Chinese lost a million soldiers, but civilian deaths numbered somewhere between 10 and 15 million, maybe more. Hitherto enemies, the Kuomintang and the communists both resisted the invader, but afterwards fought a deadly civil war that was won by the communists, whom the war had turned into a national liberation movement. (Mao later claimed that the communists might never have won victory without the Japanese.) So China played a leading role in the creation of our postwar world. As one of the four victorious powers, they should have been able to articulate their own vision of east Asia. The problem, of course, was that in 1949 China became a communist country – and in the Cold War, communism was an enemy of the so-called ‘Free World’. The Chinese Communist Party was not formally recognised as the country’s government by the US till 1979. Read more | Why were these British Second World War burials draped with Nazi flags? There are many incredible stories of wartime China. One involves a young British hero, who is also being celebrated on the 80th anniversary this year. George Hogg was an adventurer who, in January 1938 – shortly after the Nanjing Massacre began – travelled to Shanghai. He helped a New Zealand nurse, Kathleen Hall, smuggle medicine and food to the communist resistance. Witnessing first-hand the brutality of the Japanese imperial army towards the Chinese people, on impulse he decided to stay and help – a story he told in his book I See a New China, published in 1944 and adapted into the film The Children of Huang Shi in 2008, starring Jonathan Rhys Meyers. In Hogg’s most famous adventure, he saved 60 Chinese boys orphaned during the war and led them west to Gansu, mostly on foot – 700 miles through dangerous passes, on snow-covered mountain roads. In the end he commandeered six trucks to complete the journey to Shandan county where he created a safe haven for war orphans, founding a school that still exists. Hogg died in Gansu on 22 July 1945 after contracting tetanus. His tomb in Shandan has a traditional Chinese grave stele with four lines of a poem Hogg loved: Into Battle, by the First World War poet Julian Grenfell, who was killed on the western front in 1915, the year of Hogg’s birth. Recently there has been huge interest in China about the Briton who selflessly gave his life for the Chinese people. Just one story – but what a story. So, as China commemorates the anniversary of the end of the Second World War in September, should we not invite our Chinese friends to join us in the rituals at the Cenotaph, to lay a wreath on behalf of our forgotten ally? It would be high time. This article was first published in the October 2025 issue of BBC History Magazine
“A tidal wave of digital material will overwhelm recordkeeping institutions”: the future of history
If you’ve ever posted a comment on social media, you’ve created a potential source for future historians. But what problems does this mass of new material pose? Matt Elton asked historians Jane Winters and John Wills about how recent archives differ from those of the past – and how experts might make sense of them
Matt Elton: How do the kinds of records created now and in the recent past differ from those left in previous centuries? Jane Winters: Records and sources now come in a whole range of formats. In some cases, they are very familiar analogue sources that have become digital, whereas in others they are in a completely new format. Newspapers offer a great example of how this has changed: we used to read them only in physical form. Then those physical newspapers were digitised, keeping essentially the same structure. We now have both physical and digital newspapers, which differ in both form and content. An issue of The Guardian published in print today will not contain the same information as the online version: there will also be multimedia material and lots of online comments and conversations, whereas in the past you would have had only letters to the editor, for instance. And to take the example of people’s reflective writing, that’s a type of source that has also moved into new formats. A diary is not exactly the same as a blog entry or a post on social media, for instance. John Wills: One example that offers an interesting way of thinking about some of these issues is the ‘Barbenheimer’ phenomenon – the point in 2023 when the movies Barbie and Oppenheimer were released at the same time. That’s a very recent instance of the kind of cultural moment that’s really interesting to research – but doing so is not easy, because you’re dealing not just with the films themselves but also the digital content produced by the films’ fandoms, the actors’ response to that content, and the wider public responses to those two movies, in a way that we’ve never been able to do before. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/10/2RKFGYE-8d3d650.jpg" width="4475" height="2983" alt="A movie poster shows characters from the films Oppenheimer and Barbie, creating a layered montage to promote "Barbenheimer". That word is written in pink across the bottom" title="A poster by graphic designer Sean Longmore celebrating the simultaneous release of Barbie and Oppenheimer in 2023. Today’s wealth of online content is a boon and a challenge for historians (Image by Alamy)" /> Jane Winters: An important characteristic of a digital archive that doesn’t have an analogue or print equivalent is the mixture of formats it contains. It’s not just text, images and moving images, but also all the other novel elements and forms of communication – memes, gifs, emojis – and they’re not all always available in an easy-to-search format. The Wayback Machine (web.archive.org) is one of the major online archives, and it contains a huge amount of this kind of material – but in a very unstructured form. Focusing on the new kinds of sources that emerged in the late 20th and 21st centuries, are there particular examples that reveal new things about society? John Wills: One of the areas I explore is the history of video games, which we still tend to see as a recent phenomenon despite it dating back at least 50 years. It’s a medium in which the huge volume of material can be both a great opportunity and faintly overwhelming. There are a few ways in which video games can be useful historical sources. First, a game set in the past can reflect cultural views about that period of history at the time the game was made. Read more | Artificial intelligence: a modern advance or an ancient nightmare? Second, they can also provide ways for the public to get into history: the Red Dead Redemption game series [set on the US frontier in the late 19th and early 20th century], for example, has proved to be an entry point to ideas about and narratives of the American West for many people in the same way that TV or film can. And finally, you can sometimes go into the online world of a game itself and talk to its players about their memories and experiences of that game. That’s so different from how we would have worked on the history of memory in previous decades! These kinds of unique opportunities are why we’ve started to build video games into our understanding of history over the past few decades. Jane Winters: Another recent source of data that’s particularly exciting for historians is social media, because the voices and stories of people who would never have previously ended up in archives – unless they encountered the state at some point –are now doing so. It’s easy for anybody with access to the internet to create all kinds of content, and there are chances that at least some of it will end up in a national archive. That brings its own problems, because people aren’t always considering this when posting an angry Instagram comment! But that really rich conversation is something we haven’t had before, and has huge potential. There are substantial social media archives already, and they are going to grow. This presents a few challenges. One is an issue of preservation and storage: how much do we want to keep, particularly given the environmental impact of digital archiving? We often think of digital records as existing in the ‘cloud’, but that’s in many ways a very unhelpful term, because of course they exist in physical infrastructure. Another key issue is that this is often not a truly global record: there is inequity in terms of who has access to the internet, and therefore who is able to have their voices recorded in this way. As a concrete example, an exercise led by the International Internet Preservation Consortium collected the websites and other digital media produced in response to the Covid pandemic. It’s a pretty diverse collection, but there’s almost nothing from Africa and very little from China. So it skews in its story about that pandemic – which was, of course, a global phenomenon. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/10/GettyImages-2666817webready-aee0983.jpg" width="3458" height="2305" alt="A black and white photograph shows four men huddled around a newspaper" title="Men read a newspaper during the UK general strike, 1926. Historian Jane Winters highlights print media as a particularly revealing example of how online records have changed across recent decades (Image by Getty Images)" /> Despite these limitations, is the depth and extent of this inclusion in the historical record unprecedented? Jane Winters: I think so, and certainly in the sense that people are now creating the material themselves rather than being described by someone else, such as a state body. That ability to tell your own story, and the fact that different kinds of people will routinely end up in archives, is exciting. John Wills: I agree – particularly about the issues of inclusivity and diversity. Historians have always been making those kinds of choices about how to process that historical record, so in some ways that’s nothing new. What potential issues face historians using records created with, or stored on, more recent forms of technology? Jane Winters: A key issue is that digital records are often embedded in systems and structures, and we need to navigate those in order to replay them. Indeed, it’s very striking that the word ‘replay’ is used a lot in relation to web archives – it’s less about accessing material, and more about replaying content. I think this is only going to increase as we move as a culture towards using more and more multimedia platforms, so we need to collect the information that lets us understand the structures and systems used to store this content. One really useful way of framing this is the idea of the ‘material culture’ of these records. We need to preserve the original form of these digital records so we understand how to work with them and how to reuse them. Memory institutions – places such as the British Library and the National Archives – are making sure they have rooms with equipment and versions of particular computers to replay floppy disks, for example. Things like digital forensics come into play, too, to make sure that you are not altering a file when you open it. Read more | "Museums are magical places": Kavita Puri on a new initiative encouraging close encounters with history John Wills: Video game consoles, for example, have very short lifespans. Even one that sells well might be publicly available for only 10 years, and will then degrade. An emulator can show what a game was like, and you can watch people playing it on YouTube, but that will give you only one view of that game world – what one player did, rather than a wider sense of what the game’s about. Institutions have been set up to preserve video games and their history – for example, Sheffield’s National Videogame Museum. But this is a vast history – one console might play a few thousand games – and there are questions about who’s responsible for preserving the technology, and how. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/10/ACNSCREENSHOT141206230815PMCESTcmykwebready-6b6395b.jpg" width="1924" height="1283" alt="A soldier wearing gold and red armour and mask and a red and black headdress holds a sword up, fighting an unseen opponent" title="A scene from 2023 video game Assassin’s Creed Nexus VR. Such electronic forms of entertainment can prove to be useful historical sources, argues John Wills (Image by Games Press)" /> So for these sources to be as useful as possible, we need to preserve and understand the context in which they were made and used? Jane Winters: Yes – and there’s a concern that context disappears very easily from digital records. ‘Context collapse’ is something that gets talked about in relation to social media – the idea that it doesn’t take long before something is completely decontextualised and reused. It can become hard to trace where a digital record started, particularly if a crucial piece of information has gone – for example, if the original account was closed, it might exist in a very different context from that in which it was created. Because so much of this is happening in commercial platforms, there isn’t the attention to public documentation that you would get in a library or an archive. Talking about commercial platforms, there’s been a recent phenomenon of TV and film companies deleting material from their archives – or, in some cases, not releasing films at all. Does this point to any specifically 21st-century issues? John Wills: This is something you could call ‘digital demolition’, because it can be very conscious and deliberate. It’s sometimes the result of restricting access to archive material in order to create a paywall and charge for access. The online archive of MTV News, which is an incredible resource for people trying to understand the entertainment of the 1980s and 90s, was removed from the internet last year, for example. But it’s important to remember that this isn’t new, and that TV and film records have often been lost. We’ve got very few of the silent movies of the early 20th century, and Charlie Chaplin destroyed one of his own movies [as a tax write-off], for instance. One of the dangers is that we often don’t see TV or film productions as useful or valuable. A classic example is the tranche of Doctor Who episodes that went missing in the late 1960s and early 70s. Jane Winters: We also have a tendency to think about online platforms and content-creation companies as archives. They’re not, and they don’t have an archival remit or responsibility – they think of that data in very different ways from historians. In 2019 [social media site] Myspace lost years of photos, video and music because of a faulty server migration, for example. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/10/B261CNwebready-e53ca76.jpg" width="5102" height="3401" alt="Social network Myspace hit headlines in 2019 for losing 12 years’ worth of user content. Such platforms should not be seen as archives, says Jane Winters (Image by Alamy)" title="Social network Myspace hit headlines in 2019 for losing 12 years’ worth of user content. Such platforms should not be seen as archives, says Jane Winters (Image by Alamy)" /> Another issue is the vast volume of records. How will experts make sense of all of the data being created and stored? Jane Winters: The National Archives described this volume as a “tidal wave of digital material… which in its scale, diversity of format, and complexity of structure will overwhelm many existing recordkeeping institutions and practices”. And the scale is mind-boggling: The Wayback Machine has more than 946 billion web pages, largely accessed through keyword searching. You can find what you’re looking for, but you may have no sense of how vital or representative it is because there’s so much material. We will have to develop strategies to find out what’s in some of these digital archives before we can start to dig into them and do the kind of research we want to. We talk about ‘web archives’, but they’re not archives in a traditional sense, and that creates interesting challenges for researchers, both now and in the future. Read more | Eastern promises: the long and troubled history of Britain's relations with China Can we identify a moment when this avalanche of records began? Jane Winters: It’s not been the same in different sectors: the British Library was collecting millions of websites as early as 2013, so that’s already a huge collection. But I think the anticipated digital deluge of government records hasn’t really happened yet, though it is coming. John Wills: It does depend on the area. If you’re working on events in the 1980s or 90s, which saw the advent of 24-hour news coverage, the volume of visual culture can sometimes seem overwhelming. And that information may be supplied in an unreliable way. One of the big new challenges facing historians and other experts is the way that platforms and algorithms work, because they can potentially mislead us as scholars by pushing the most common citation or the view that’s been promoted hardest. We’re not necessarily getting an open, full picture of the past – we are getting a version shaped by artificial intelligence (AI) and other forms of machine learning. The data has already gone through a level of selection and adaptation – and that’s a real issue for us. Is AI going to become a growing problem for historians? Jane Winters: It will be a huge issue. That’s not to say there isn’t already misinformation in archives – we need only think about fraudulent medieval charters, for instance! But the scale is different, as is the entanglement between trustworthy information and misinformation. It’s not the role of archives to say if material can be trusted, but as historians we need enough information to make judgments for ourselves. We have the skills – we spend our time assessing information – but we need to have enough contextual material to judge its validity. Finally, considering all these challenges, how might historians in the future make sense of the late 20th and early 21st centuries? John Wills: It’s interesting to think about the image we have of future historians. An episode of recent Star Trek series Discovery features an ‘eternal gallery and archive’: a beautiful repository of items and books from around the universe, all presented uncritically as completely reliable information. It’s an example of the idea that we’ll have access to sources in a utopian way, whereas the reality looks like being one in which, as Jane says, things are complex and entangled, and historians have to negotiate increasingly problematic routes to access material. Jane Winters: Historians thrive on challenges: having to put together evidence and perhaps take it in a different direction because you found a new piece of information. We’ve only ever been able to tell partial stories; the challenge for us now is to think about how partial those histories might be. That’s why discussions like this are so important – to think about how we can ensure that as much of the material as possible is preserved, where the conversations around that need to happen, which organisations should be involved, and really work together. So many communities of practice are developing around this, and I have confidence that the work happening in our national libraries, archives and other places will ensure that historians of the future will have enough material to work with. Jane Winters is professor of digital humanities at the School of Advanced Study at the University of London John Wills is professor of American media and culture at the University of Kent This article was first published in the October 2025 issue of BBC History Magazine
This ancient goddess commanded a Wonder of the World – but why did she have thirty breasts?
The strange and powerful symbol at the heart of one of history’s greatest temples reveals the importance of the goddess Artemis in ruling fertility, childbirth and nature
When we think of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, the Great Pyramid of Giza or the Hanging Gardens of Babylon may be the first examples that come to mind. However, the oldest-known versions of the list start with a landmark that is often forgotten: the Temple of Artemis. Located in the ancient city of Ephesus (near modern-day Selçuk, Turkey), this remarkable place of worship was renowned for its size and scale, standing at least 20 metres tall and boasting an enormous tile-covered roof supported by 127 marble columns. With a floor plan of some 6,000 square metres, the temple was also nearly three times as large as the famous Parthenon in Athens. But some of the most startling archaeological evidence from Ephesus isn’t concerned with the dimensions of the temple, nor its complicated history of destruction and rebuilding. Instead, much attention has been directed towards a collection of statues depicting the temple’s patron deity, Artemis. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/10/BAL957668-36357fc.jpg" width="7715" height="4533" alt="A large temple with a triangular roof and many columns holding it up. It sits on top of a large flight of stairs. The roof has a mural of the goddess sitting in the middle and surrounded by crowds of people and two golden horses" title="A 20th-century depiction of the Temple of Artemis, dedicated to the goddess Artemis (Image by Bridgeman Images)" /> Rather than portraying the goddess as a conventional Greek beauty, the sculptures display Artemis in an altogether different guise. And, according to classicist and broadcaster Bettany Hughes, these statues bear a particularly striking physical characteristic. Read more | On the steps of a sacred temple, Cleopatra's feud with her sister came to a blood-soaked end “[This] is not the Artemis that you probably have in your heads… this image of a beautiful young woman in a tiny Greek chiton, artfully pulling a bow and arrow,” reveals Hughes on an episode of the HistoryExtra podcast. “She is a huge, towering figure, covered in birds and bees, goats and curious figures. But what none of you will miss… is that she looks as though she has 30 or so breasts.” Thirty breasts… or testicles? What need did Artemis have for 30 breasts? As well as being the goddess of hunting and the moon, Artemis was also revered as a deity of fertility and childbirth. Having a multitude of breasts would therefore be a fitting attribute for a goddess so intrinsically connected with fecundity and womanhood. In fact, even alternative theories – which suggest that the ‘breasts’ are actually bulls’ testicles or sacks of honey – bolster Artemis’s association with abundance. Both motifs have also been used as symbols of procreation in Greek art, so the ambiguity was likely deliberate. “These ancient craftsmen are likely playing a game with us,” says Hughes. Ultimately, the ancient Greeks believed that Artemis was so potent in her fertility that “she didn’t need anything as mundane as sex to procreate”. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/10/M42ADD-2-4bc4f79.jpg" width="5560" height="3707" alt="A large statue of a woman with black hands and face, and covered in light brown bulbous growths. On her head, there is a well-shaped crown" title="A second-century AD interpretation of Artemis, with the head and hands cast in bronze added in the 19th century. Artemis is an enduring symbol of fertility (Image by Alamy)" /> A goddess of power and procreation It’s not just the features on the statue[s] itself that suggest Artemis’s importance – the location where they were discovered is notable too. Ephesus was situated on the eastern edge of the ancient Greek world, where Artemis’s association with fertility and childbirth was perhaps stronger than elsewhere. Read more | Wanderlust: Bettany Hughes on the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World “The Artemis who was worshipped in Ephesus was an ‘eastern Artemis’ – a direct descendant of the great nature goddesses of the eastern world,” says Hughes. “Any ancient traveller who went to visit the temple would have been left in no doubts of how extremely strong and potent she was.” While Artemis was regarded as a powerful goddess for all, she was particularly important to women. Care of the temple was entrusted to high priestesses, a system that Hughes likens to a “hive buzzing around, serving the queen bee”. Overall, maleness was not well tolerated at the site; it was intended to be devoted to female presence and power. An offer of sanctuary But it wasn’t just the high priestesses who devoted themselves to Artemis. Countless ordinary women also dedicated themselves to this bastion of fertility, travelling from far and wide to give offerings. “Poor female pilgrims would beat a path to Artemis’s door, and some of them would leave extraordinary gifts [and] beautiful gold offerings,” says Hughes. “They were left as temple dedications and then buried as hoards.” In some cases, the poorest pilgrims would simply leave a seashell for Artemis instead. They merely offered whatever they could, in the hope that the goddess would provide protection and preparation for marriage and childbirth. Crucially, the Temple of Artemis wasn’t solely a place for worship – it also functioned as a place of refuge for the oppressed. Hughes adds, “If you were being persecuted politically, and even if you were a woman escaping domestic abuse, you could go to sanctuary at the temple.” Read more | The gods and their whims: your guide to ancient Greek religion <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/10/WHA0108722-2-0d5f3b2.jpg" width="5000" height="3542" alt="A brown terracotta jug with a circular spout and no handle lays on its side on the left of the image. On the right, there is a pile of small gold-coloured coins" title="A round-mouthed jug and an assortment of Electrum coins, discovered in the foundations of the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus (Image by TopFoto)" /> A forgotten legacy The Temple of Artemis was one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World for good reason. Its sheer scale and beauty were matched only by the power of the goddess it honoured. To the modern eye, her many breasts might seem slightly mystifying. But – whether seen as symbols of fertility, abundance or simply a playful riddle set by ancient craftsmen – they remind us of the complexity and depth of her worship. Bettany Hughes was speaking to Rachel Dinning on the HistoryExtra podcast. Listen to the full conversation.
Tales of alien sightings and government cover-ups have captured American imaginations for decades – but few with such global appeal as the Men in Black. David Clarke introduces the ufologist who popularised these shadowy space-age legends
One night in 1953, three mysterious men sporting black suits reportedly arrived uninvited at the home of Albert K Bender in Bridgeport, Connecticut. The menacing trio, who reportedly identified themselves as agents of the US government, threatened Bender with prison if he told anyone about a secret he had discovered – information relating to the source of the flying saucer mystery. They scared him so badly that he was physically sick for three days. Bender was no mere disinterested civilian. An obsessive ufologist, he was the founder of the International Flying Saucer Bureau (IFSB), the world’s first civilian UFO investigation club. Shortly after that ominous visit, and on the orders of those ‘secret agents’, he shut down the IFSB. At least one person was both disappointed and intrigued by this development: Gray Barker, only recently recruited as the IFSB’s chief investigator and a contributor to its magazine, Space Review. “He was 6ft 4ins tall, with a gentle southern accent and a sly sense of humour,” recalled his friend John Keel, a fellow investigator of UFOs and monster stories. “And it can truly be said that he knew too much about flying saucers.” It was Barker’s exploration of the ‘men in black’ (latterly abbreviated as MIB) that had a long-lasting and global impact on ufology and wider popular culture. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/10/GreyBakerHRillowebready-cdc7915.jpg" width="2232" height="1488" alt="A photograph shows a man in a dark shirt, sitting at a type writer with a black phone next to him. He is smiling widely up at the camera. In the background, there are the opening pages of a book called BOOK OF SAUCERS" title="Writer Gray Barker shared reports of UFOs in his books and journal The Saucerian Bulletin, but also “launched hoaxes, joined others’ deceptions, and manipulated people’s beliefs”, according to a friend and co-author (Images by TopFoto, collage by Rachel Dickens)" /> Born in West Virginia in 1925, in his youth Barker worked in the theatre industry, then began publishing, writing and editing stories about UFOs, monsters and the paranormal. He graduated from Glenville State College in 1947 – the year in which the phrase ‘flying saucers’ was coined to describe a formation of strange batwing-shaped objects reported by a private pilot, Kenneth Arnold, in Washington state. Arnold’s sighting was quickly followed by the Roswell incident, when wreckage of a flying object was recovered from the desert in New Mexico. This story would later become a central element of the most popular UFO conspiracy theory, which claims that the US government is hiding crashed alien spacecraft. Read more | The Roswell incident: Did the US Government cover up an alien crash in 1947? The real history that challenges the conspiracy Barker enjoyed blurring the line between fact and fiction, and in his 1956 book They Knew Too Much About Flying Saucers he dramatised and embellished his account of Bender’s story to capture the public imagination. It worked: his retelling of the episode launched the legend of the ‘men in black’ into the paranoid world of ufology at the height of the Cold War. Silent alarm Written around the time of Senator Joseph McCarthy’s infamous campaign to expose alleged communist infiltration of the US government, They Knew Too Much… became the best-known title in a series of books that Barker edited and published from his home in West Virginia. The book charted the activities of what he called the ‘Silence Group’, whom he claimed had warned Bender and other IFSB members to end their investigations. In it, Barker quotes Bender: “Just as the three men were leaving, one of them lingered for a moment and said, ‘In our government, we have the smartest men in the country. They can’t find a defence for [UFOs]. How can you do anything about it?’” As rumours about the ‘Silence Group’ spread following the book’s publication, other enthusiasts and people who claimed to have witnessed UFOs came forward, insisting that they’d also received visits from men in black. Like Bender, many appeared genuinely terrified – yet none suffered any reprisals after talking about their experiences. The menacing ‘agents’ often, but not always, travelled in groups of three, wore black suits and drove large, brand-new automobiles, usually Cadillacs or dark sedans. Bender’s encounter occurred in the same year that the CIA convened a top-secret panel of scientists to decide how to deal with the growing number of unsolved sightings reported to the US Air Force. UFO writer Jerome Clark speculates that the men who visited Bender might have been genuine secret agents who were following the panel’s recommendations that civilian UFO groups should be closely watched. The legend blurred with science fiction in 1962 when Barker published a book, Flying Saucers and the Three Men, written by Bender – who had now emerged from hiding, and promised to reveal the truth about his visitation. Even the more open-minded UFO believers found it hard to swallow one extravagant addition to Bender’s story – an account of his abduction to the south pole by monstrous aliens from the planet Kazik. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/10/0902455webready-4f3e69e.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A black and white photograph showing a young man in a suit, standing next to a large drawing of a UFO" title="Albert K Bender, pictured with a sketch of a flying saucer. The visit of shadowy ‘men in black’ to his home in 1953 sparked the enduring legend that spawned comics and films (Image by TopFoto)" /> Aliens in disguise More enticing to the UFO industry was the revelation that the ‘agents’ who visited Bender were aliens in disguise – a fresh theme that imaginative writers and artists could develop further. Barker continued to promote the legend, alongside UFOs and other mysteries, via the magazine he edited, The Saucerian (later The Saucerian Bulletin), while rival authors also began creating their own folklore. The Silver Bridge, a creative fiction book published by Barker in 1970, linked the collapse of the bridge in Point Pleasant, West Virginia in December 1967 with a frightening creature called the Mothman. His friend John Keel, another occult journalist, expanded on the legend in a book-length account, The Mothman Prophecies. Published in 1975, it featured Barker and was adapted into a 2002 Hollywood film starring Richard Gere and Laura Linney. In his book, Keel – the first to use the acronym MIB – detailed visits to the homes of witnesses who had reported encounters with both the Mothman and UFOs before the bridge tragedy that claimed the lives of 46 people. From the late 1960s, accounts of MIB visits were becoming ever more bizarre and surreal. Stories described MIB moving robotically, or having telepathic powers, odd hairstyles and shaved eyebrows. Their weird demeanour placed them alongside depictions of gangsters, fictional terrorists and spies in contemporary films and TV shows. They resembled, for example, the SMERSH agents pursued by James Bond in novels and films. Meanwhile, MIB links with conspiracy theories were cemented by ‘sightings’ in Dallas soon after John F Kennedy’s assassination in 1963. Believer or sceptic? Barker died in 1984, aged just 59, having contracted HIV. A decade after his death, the Men in Black launched onto the global medial landscape. They appeared in The X-Files TV series, then the first of four Men in Black movies was released in 1997 – the 50th anniversary of Arnold’s report of the first ‘flying saucers’. Based on a comic by Lowell Cunningham, the first three of these comedy sci-fi films follow the exploits of two agents, played by Tommy Lee Jones and Will Smith, who work for a secret agency that polices extraterrestrials living secretly on Earth. Read more | Watergate is the ultimate American conspiracy – but what if we’ve been misunderstanding it all along? Did Barker really believe the stories that he promoted? Or was he purely motivated by financial gain? Evidence suggests that he was a sceptic: he told his friend (and fellow UFO writer) James Moseley that he “pretty much took all of ufology as a joke”. After Barker’s death, Moseley confessed that in 1957 the pair had written a fake letter, on US Department of State stationery, sent to George Adamski – who claimed to have met aliens from Venus and Mars, and travelled in their flying saucers. The letter appeared to corroborate Adamski’s fantastic tales. In 2002, another of Barker’s circle, journalist John C Sherwood, published an exposé that revealed the MIB creator’s ‘dark side’. “He launched hoaxes, joined others’ deceptions, and manipulated people’s beliefs,” Sherwood claimed in Skeptical Inquirer. Gray Barker laid the foundations for the modern belief that the US government is actively involved in a cover-up. In 2019, a Gallup poll found that 68 per cent of Americans believe “the US Government knows more about UFOs than it is telling us”. That came shortly after an online campaign called Storm Area 51, which drove support for breaking into the secret military base in the Nevada desert where many believe the US government is flying captured alien craft. In July 2023, US intelligence officer David Grusch testified before a congressional hearing that the Pentagon was involved in reverse-engineering non-human spacecraft, and had recovered their dead pilots. He also claimed that people had been threatened and killed in order to conceal what has been called the ‘Cosmic Watergate 2.0’. If Grusch is to be believed – and his claims have been challenged by numerous experts – then the ‘men in black’ are more than a mere fantasy conjured up by Gray Barker.
Why we should be better about talking about death, with Dr Helen Gittos
For our ancestors, death was part of daily life. We can learn from their open conversations about this taboo topic, says Dr Helen Gittos, and create modern rituals to help us cope
We don’t know how to talk about death. It’s a modern taboo. Search the topic online and you’ll quickly find people who deal in end-of-life matters arguing that we need more transparent, more honest conversations about an event that is, after all, going to come to us all. Charities like Hospice UK definitely want us to be better about talking about it. It wasn’t always this way. In fact, it’s only really in the 20th century that we’ve actively disassociated ourselves from death. The process has been institutionalised and medicalised. The palliative care physician and author Kathryn Mannix wrote about it in a Guardian article a few years ago. In the 19th century, according to the historian Judith Flanders, discussing Victorian death and mourning on a recent episode of the HistoryExtra podcast, “ it was part of daily life. It wasn’t tucked away neatly in hospitals where you go in and visit for an hour, but you don’t see all the day-to-day stuff, you don’t see people die”. She continues: “Many people go happily through their whole lives without ever seeing a dead person, which is simply not possible in the 19th century. Then, hospitals were very limited in the kind of diseases or illnesses they cared for. They were very specifically for certain things only. If you could afford it, you were looked after at home. Hospitals were a place of last resort for people who were too poor, too desperate, so everybody saw death.” <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/09/GettyImages-464472069-ccb7e8d.jpg" width="5204" height="3383" alt="A bracelet with two gold edged picture frames on it. In each, there is a photo of a girl with brown ringlets and wearing a purple dress" title="This Victorian bracelet has a band of woven hair and may have been a piece of mourning jewellery, which was in fashion during that era (Image by Getty Images)" /> Past and present rituals I went to a funeral the other day. It was of a dear friend who had died far too young, of cancer. She knew it was coming and had been able to prepare, and had, I think, had frank and open conversations with her husband and daughters. I don’t think that’s the norm, but that did mean that the crowded crematorium felt more like a genuine celebration of her life. There was also a modern ritual as we wept through a slide show of her greatest hits, set to music. Obviously my thoughts were drawn to this when I was talking to Dr Helen Gittos, a medieval historian at Oxford University. Her Life Lesson from History was that rituals really matter, and that we can learn from the past to make better use of them. It can be hard to identify what medieval people were doing by way of rituals, because that sort of activity isn’t necessarily documented. We’re talking about things that might be more informal and familial. That’s where archaeology comes to the fore. Helen told me about her research into a collection of 12th-century lead crosses that had been discovered in the grounds of the monastery at Bury St Edmunds. They all had scratched inscriptions on them. Read more | “There was a general perception that Queen Victoria’s mourning was neither normal nor acceptable” Helen worked out that the inscriptions related to a ceremony of consecration of a new church, and they were the words the bishop would say as he stepped over the threshold of the building. But these crosses had nothing to do with new church foundation – they were found with the remains of dead monks. Helen concluded that this was evidence of some sort of protective ritual for the monks, to keep the devil away and Christ close. We wouldn’t know that without her close detective work and leap of imagination to tease out the ritual underlying the artefacts. Navigating grief <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/09/GettyImages-132703805-1e3ce2e.jpg" width="2710" height="3840" alt="A painting shows a woman leaning over the edge of a bed, holding the arm of an unseen person. She has her head resting on it and a sad expression on his face" title="A 13th-century fresco by Giotto shows St Clare mourning St Francis, one of the many depictions of lamentation in the Middle Ages (Image by Getty Images)" /> Rituals and death are close bedfellows. End of life is a time when we need a support structure to navigate the grief. Helen’s academic experience sadly collided with her everyday as she coped with the death of her young daughter, Harriet, and the challenge of finding the right way to say goodbye. “At the time at which she died, I was writing that piece about the Bury St Edmunds crosses. I was in the middle of it and it’s hard sometimes to be a historian and not to turn off your historian’s head. So all the way through, I was watching and contrasting the way in which we now deal with death, with what I was looking at in the 11th and 12th centuries,” she explains. “Harriet died in hospital and the staff there wanted to try and help us, to wash her, to give her the kind of care that would have happened at home in the period that I was studying. Real efforts were made to try to include families, but there were also bits of it that were just so far away from what I’d been seeing that these monks were doing.” Helen described the perfunctory experience of being handed a “cool bag and a chit, which was a bit like the kind of thing you might get if you’d taken your shoes in to be mended” for her daughter’s body in a hospital. She felt “the contrast between thinking of those monks who were employing such care, love, attention, effort and craft to help their loved ones. That was one of those sudden moments of shock, a reminder that history isn’t a linear progression of things getting better. Sometimes the contrasts are really, really stark.” Death as part of life <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/09/GettyImages-2198979076-d1954a9.jpg" width="4960" height="3364" alt="A group of people dressed in smart Victorian clothing (waistcoats, white shirts and long coats) stand around fresh burial spot" title="A painting of a peasant burial in the 19th century, an era when the realities of death and dying were not hidden away (Image by Getty Images)" /> The medieval world, like the later Victorian period, was, as Helen points out, a place where death was a close reality, not hidden away. People died at home, surrounded by family, and the community came together to mark the passage from life to death. Helen told me this ritual process started before the death. People got ready for the inevitable: “One of the most striking things is that you have these ritual texts that are about guiding you to a good death.” It seems that people in the Middle Ages strove to make death a community activity, to create “a moment in which people were coming together to commemorate and note what’s passing, and also to manage the change that comes with that”. Fascinatingly, and I’d agree that this is something we really don’t do enough of today, Helen explains how there were rituals designed to follow up after someone’s death. “There were rituals for the deathbed, for the moment of death, for the funeral, and for the months and years that followed,” she says. “We’re all very good at contacting somebody in a moment of crisis. Many of us are less good at contacting them a month later, three months later, a year later. One of the things that was really characteristic about the Middle Ages was this formal way in which there were rituals that followed death that helped people to negotiate the aftermath, not just the moment itself.” <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/09/GettyImages-2188132656-f7fb776.jpg" width="3803" height="5369" alt="An illustrated page that shows a small yellow skull on a green table, surrounded by a pink letter O and several flowers" title="A 15th-century illuminated initial with a skull, a symbol of death, found at the start of the Office of the Dead, a Christian prayer read in spiritual preparation for death (Image by Getty Images)" /> Reclaiming ritual and conversation So what can we do? How can we learn from the past to face death more honestly and compassionately? Read more | What do we know about Viking funerals? Helen believes that we need both structure and flexibility. “Ritual often gives us a sort of framework for how to act at moments in which we feel lost, shocked and uncertain, and when we want a map for how to navigate some period of major change and a way of doing that collectively. But I think what rituals also do, and we have increasingly understood this, is to give a sense of freedom, flex and scope to create anew within that framework. That allows these improvisations to feel right and appropriate.” She describes how, in planning her daughter’s funeral, she drew on both historical knowledge and personal intuition. “I was glad that what we crafted in a very short period of time did end up feeling really right. We dispensed with all of the formality and we simply put together things that involved real music and musicians playing live. A friend found a wonderful pianist and we had a whole series of family members who read things that mattered to them. And then afterwards we took everybody and we walked back to the hospital where she died because there was a playground there, and we all gathered there among these play things and were able to be in an environment that felt right for me and right enough for the people who were close to us.” Moving forward <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/09/GettyImages-2188126796-c3a9a0b.jpg" width="4361" height="6408" alt="An illustration of a group of people dressed in green and brown robes surround a body wrapped in a shroud and rope, which they are burying" title="A burial scene from the Middle Ages, as shown in 15th-century illustrated romance in verse titled Barlaam und Josaphat (Image by Getty Images)" /> So I’m getting a couple of really good lessons here from Dr Helen Gittos, and from our medieval forebears. Firstly, we should be better about talking about death: with our families, our friends, and our communities. Secondly, we should be open to claiming and creating the rituals that help us to mourn and remember, and we should not be afraid to improvise, to make them our own. As Helen put it, “Rituals are things that we can use creatively in order to be able to manage. I think that we can be braver about creating rituals that work for us, even with the institutional context that so often surround major moments in our lives. We don’t have to simply accept the impersonal, formulaic, 30 minutes in and out of the crematorium.” She points out that there are people who are “creating new ways of doing things, burying people in woodland, making services which are a bit less formulaic, a bit more creative”. This can be “enormously beneficial for feeling like these are moments that we have managed, that we can dare to navigate ourselves – that we don’t need to rely on outside professionals to do them for us.” Let’s embrace rituals that help us cope with times of grief, and let’s be creative about them. Let’s talk about death. It’s going to happen to us, and our loved ones. We can make things easier on ourselves, and everyone around us, by just being a bit more honest and open about it. This article is part of HistoryExtra's new Life Lessons from History Substack newsletter. Subscribe to the newsletter for more articles and podcasts exploring the ways in which history can help us live better, happier, healthier or more productive lives.
Kavita Puri's hidden histories: "A UK museum that tells the long, rich history of migration is long overdue"
Kavita Puri on explorations of the migrant experience
If you gaze up at the skyline in Rotterdam, in the Netherlands, you might spot a new addition. Made from stainless-steel panels and shaped like a rollercoaster, the Tornado sits on top of the city’s newly opened Fenix, a museum that tells the story of human migration. Visitors climb to the distinctive Tornado up a sweeping staircase at the museum’s entrance, along a meandering route that represents the many different journeys people take to reach their destinations. On arriving at the viewing platform, you can take in a panoramic view of the city and its waterways where millions of Europeans once boarded ships in Europe’s largest port, many of them leaving for a new life in the US. Today, Rotterdam is home to more than 170 nationalities. It’s an interesting choice to open a museum to migration at a time when the subject has become so toxic, not least in the Netherlands. Designed by the Chinese firm MAD Architects, the museum displays have exhibits including thousands of suitcases, images of refugees, and a life-sized city bus. Perhaps reasoned discussions about migration can be inspired by art. Read more | "Museums are magical places": Kavita Puri on a new initiative encouraging close encounters with history This is not the first European museum dedicated to migration: they exist in many countries, including Germany, Sweden, Greece, Italy, Poland and France. So it is surprising that the UK does not have a permanent migration museum, only one that has spent years in makeshift venues. After all, millions of people have left Britain over the centuries, not least during the building of its empire, while inward migration – particularly during the postwar years – has shaped our language, culture, cuisine and art. Until recently, you could visit the Migration Museum in its temporary home in Lewisham Shopping Centre, housed in a former H&M store between Foot Locker and TK Maxx. Outside the entrance stood a sculpture entitled Wall, comprising two panels from the Berlin Wall painted by artists. During its five years in Lewisham, the museum displayed significant exhibitions including Taking Care of Business: Migrant Entrepreneurs and the Making of Modern Britain. In listening booths (repurposed H&M changing rooms), visitors could hear oral histories recounted by local businesspeople, including one Italian who ran a delicatessen and described how different Lewisham was from Puglia. More well-known voices including Lord Bilimoria who, frustrated by the lagers on offer at Indian restaurants, created his own hugely successful beer, Cobra. There was also an impressive installation replicating a Chinese takeaway. Read more | How has migration changed the world? Lewisham has a hugely diverse population, and in 1977 saw members of the far-right National Front clash with anti-racist protesters on its streets. It’s fitting, then, that the Migration Museum was embedded in the heart of that community – a place where anyone could feel comfortable, especially those who may never have crossed the threshold of a museum before. It has now closed, though, and the mall is being redeveloped. A permanent Migration Museum is planned for a new site in the City of London, which has been donated by a British Sikh entrepreneur. It’s due to open in 2028. The new space will span three floors, covering nearly 3,000 square metres. Members of the curatorial team are currently discussing how they might approach the project, including how they can co-curate with local communities. Subjects for temporary exhibitions might include local migrant stories from around the City, climate refugees, the role of humour in the migrant experience, and how protest has driven change. The story of migration in these islands is a long one, written by those who left and those who came. Britain today has been shaped by movements of people in both directions. A museum that tells this long and rich history – a shared story, one of interconnectedness – is long overdue. It does not need to be divisive, but can be a reflection and recognition of who we are today. This column was first published in the August 2025 issue of BBC History Magazine