Opening in time for Spooky Season and running through to May 2026, ‘Dark Secrets’ is a massive new exhibition of esoteric artefacts in Waterloo’s appropriately dingy Vaults – and a cracking day out for anyone into the occult, macabre or bizarre.
A sprawling labyrinth of 27 rooms, ‘Dark Secrets’ is fundamentally an exhibition of stuff: more than 1,000 individual artefacts, many of them (apparently) displayed for the first time outside of private collections.
Ritual masks, cursed dolls, leather-bound Renaissance books on witchcraft, a fragment of Aleister Crowley’s Thelema temple… if your idea of fun is gawping at weird and creepy shit (and mine certainly is), there’s a lot of it here – and it’s a refreshing change from the wave of immersive ‘exhibitions’ which often don’t amount to much more than a blank room with some projectors in.
There is a vaguely chronological structure, running from Celtic druids through to the influence of the esoteric on Hollywood and comics. Horror-movie fans, look out for the original screenplay of Suspiria signed by Dario Argento. Along the way there are rooms dedicated to folkloric creatures, shamanism, voodoo, zombies, satanism, spiritualism, witch trials, Freemasonry, curses, miracles, divination, astrology, tarot… it’s like an occult bookshop brought to life.
My favourite item in the show was an (ostensibly genuine) Victorian vampire-hunting kit. But I was also fascinated by a room about the collision of technology and science with the occult, featuring images of ghosts captured in TV static; human hearts and frogs’ legs reanimated with electrical pulses; a (stuffed) two-headed fox created by a Soviet surgeon that lived for almost a month; and a radio-like device, the ‘Spiricom’, designed to communicate with the dead.
A fair few items are reproductions rather than originals, but there are some genuinely grisly objects on display, including at least two actual human skeletons and a calcified foetus. The show has a global scope, with artefacts from Tibet, the Congo, South America and Siberia as well as Europe and the US – though I’m not sure that enlightened postcolonial anthropologists would be into the inclusion of African masks and Amazonian shrunken heads alongside the schlockier items in the show.
There are some genuinely grisly objects on display
Other objects have some undoubtedly icky associations, like paraphernalia relating to the Ku Klux Klan and Hitler’s SS. There’s a particularly gruesome room on ritual murder which, let’s just say, definitely won’t be to all tastes. (The organisers, Italmostre, have form when it comes to courting controversy: last year, in the same venue, they hosted a blockbuster exhibition on serial killers.)
That said, there is a solid attempt at education here, with lengthy reams of wall text on occult practices. The commentary on most items is based solidly on fact and reason – generally sensitive, non-sensationalist and even sceptical. In fact, substantial parts of the show are devoted to debunking quasi-magical skulduggery, whether it’s fraudulent Edwardian mediums, fake unicorn horns or Uri Geller’s spoons.
There are also sly reminders of how common magical thinking is today, from sporting superstitions to TikTok astrology and the exorcists still employed in the twenty-first century by the Church of England. I loved learning about the US military’s Stargate Project, which spent almost two decades working to harness the supernatural in the name of national security.
‘Dark Secrets’ walks a fine line between education and entertainment, and – maybe because of the sheer volume of stuff here – it isn’t always super-coherent. (It’s very cool to see one of Jimi Hendrix’s funky jackets, but why is it in the same room as a bunch of cursed sports memorabilia?) It’s also not cheap at £23 for a standard ticket – though hey, that’s still less than the London Dungeon. And it’s definitely not kid-friendly, though morbid teenagers might love it.
Still, this is an unparalleled cabinet of curiosities that’ll easily eat up 90 minutes – longer if you hit up the freaky themed bar at the end. Come with an open mind (and a strong stomach) and you’ll leave entertained, informed and more than a little creeped out.
