A spooky museum exhibition in Bristol full of exhibits to send a shiver down your spine

A museum in Bristol is putting on a show called 'Do you believe in magic?' which, should you answer in the negative, will do its very best to change your mind...

A lucky black cat that's part of the exhibition at Bristol Museum
A lucky black cat that's part of the exhibition at Bristol Museum.
(Image credit: David Emeney / Courtesy of Bristol Culture)

From Ancient Egyptian artefacts, charm walls and a witch’s altar to amulets carried by First World War soldiers, ‘Do you believe in magic?’ — an exhibition at the Bristol Museum & Art Gallery — explores our belief in gods, ancestors and both healing and harmful magic.

Some 200 objects, including paintings, plants, clothing and figurines, have been selected from the museum’s collections to show how witchcraft and the supernatural have overlapped with both science and religion for centuries.

Initial I with Witch by Eric Gill

Initial I with Witch by Eric Gill,
(Image credit: Courtesy of Bristol Culture)

One spooky example is ‘Little Mannie’, a west African sculpture found in a cellar in Derbyshire in the 1970s. ‘You may scoff,’ says Prof A. J. N. W. Prag, former keeper of archaeology at Manchester Museum, which owns the sculpture, ‘but even now, no one in the museum really wants to handle him’.

This is down to the unexplained situations that people who come into contact with the figure find themselves in — car and bicycle accidents, even trousers suddenly falling down.

‘The more we investigate our world, the more questions arise,’ adds Bristol’s deputy mayor Craig Cheney, mysteriously.

The exhibition runs until April 29, 2020 — visit www.bristolmuseums.org.uk for more details.

An Ecstasy by Fred George Swaish

An Ecstasy by Fred George Swaish. Picture courtesy of Bristol Culture.
(Image credit: Courtesy of Bristol Culture)

Annunciata Elwes

Annunciata grew up in the wilds of Lancashire and now lives in Hampshire with a husband, two daughters and an awful pug called Parsley. She’s been floating round the Country Life office for more than a decade, her work winning the Property Magazine of the Year Award in 2022 (Property Press Awards). Before that, she had a two-year stint writing ‘all kinds of fiction’ for The Sunday Times Travel Magazine, worked in internal comms for Country Life’s publisher (which has had many names in recent years but was then called IPC Media), and spent another year researching for a historical biographer, whose then primary focus was Graham Greene and John Henry Newman and whose filing system was a collection of wardrobes and chests of drawers filled with torn scraps of paper. During this time, she regularly gave tours of 17th-century Milton Manor, Oxfordshire, which may or may not have been designed by Inigo Jones, and co-founded a literary, art and music festival, at which Johnny Flynn headlined. When not writing and editing for Country Life, Annunciata is also a director of TIN MAN ART, a contemporary art gallery founded in 2021 by her husband, James Elwes.