Peering keenly at towering acid containers as her mum reads from the nearby information boards, a young girl in a sing-songy voice says: ‘The lady’s head has gone. The acid has made it all go into sludge.’
‘Sludge?’ her mother asks. ‘Yes, sludge,’ the little girl replies.
The huge barrels the pair are looking at are displayed in the True Crime Museum in White Rock, Hastings, and once belonged to the fearsome John George Haigh. The British serial killer, who claimed to drink the blood of those he ensnared, would dissolve his victims in vats of sulphuric acid.
After agreeing Haigh was ‘a naughty man’, the young girl and her mother continue on their merry way around what could well be Britain’s most eerie museum, located in the seaside town of Hastings.
‘Parents know whether their child is going to be sensitive to this kind of thing,’ Joel Griggs, the museum’s curator, tells Metro. ‘It’s reality, part of history. I don’t think you can wrap someone in cotton wool and pretend none of this stuff happens. There are bad people out there.’
The True Crime Museum, surrounded by a sprawling beach and squawking seagulls, is an unexpected treasure trove of grizzly items on Britain’s coast… if you like that sort of thing.
It holds love letters sent by US serial killer Richard Ramirez to British author Ricki Thomas, the bath used by contract killer John Childs to dismember his victims, the skull of murderer and rapist Louis Lefevre.
Despite the dark past of many of the items – which are obtained via donations or bought via auction – Joel says he doesn’t want to make light of the terror they caused. He points to the museum’s most recent exhibit, a pair of large white underpants worn by killer Rose West in prison which were bought for £2,500 at auction.
‘We’ve tried to present the exhibit in a tasteful – which admittedly does seem a bizarre word to describe knickers – way, with the whole story of her crimes alongside it, rather than be frivolous and just go “oh my god, it’s Rose West’s knickers!”’ he explains. ‘The revolting crimes she commited with her husband had a huge impact on people’s consciousness. Do we celebrate those crimes? No, certainly not.’
The pants were obtained by a former prison officer who worked at HMP Bronzefield – Europe’s largest female prison, now home to Lucy Letby – where West lived for four years until 2008.
As part of the purchase, Joel was also offered some letters sent between West and the former prison officer. But he decided against displaying them as they were ‘mundane’ and ‘very dull’, with questions from West about EastEnders plotlines and a scribbled recipe for piccalilli among the pages.
Joel has also politely declined donations from crimes which could be triggering for local people, such as items from the Billie-Jo Jenkins case [the schoolgirl was murdered in Hastings in 1997.] ‘It’s very fresh and very local,’ the curator explains.
There’s only one ‘normal’ room in the True Crime Museum; and that’s the staff room where creepy collections and grizzly gadgets make way for blue roll, a couple of desks and various paperwork. But amid the rotas and calendars are also hand-drawn pictures of the Kray twins, London’s infamous gangster brothers, watching over employees.
There’s also a large white sheet of paper with a strange blue scribble which, it turns out, was done by a local paranormal group during a seance.
‘I’m not into it [the paranormal myself],’ Joel admits. ‘I have to work here and it’s already creepy enough without thinking of ghosts. I remember I came to lock up at 1am after one paranormal group and the guy said “you won’t believe this, we’ve made contact with Jack the Ripper.” I couldn’t help myself and asked “well, did you find out who he actually was?”’
With the True Crime Museum celebrating its tenth birthday today, Joel has overseen several paranormal nights, crime walks from the museum and even a special ‘Mother’s Day’ celebration – which highlighted killer mums from across history – over the last decade.
His own interest in crime stems from his late father John, who died in January, and worked alongside the Metropolitan Police. The Londoner was an ‘archetypal collector of anything slightly macabre’, which means Joel has stumbled upon everything from vintage pinball machines to taxidermy seagulls to autopsy books while clearing-outs of his father’s attic.
The curator himself moved from East London to Hastings 20 years ago, where he worked in the seaside town with young offenders and children with challenging behaviour. After he was made redundant from the role in 2011, Joel set his sights on a cluttered cave area on the seafront, which he hoped could house some of his family’s unique collections. He plunged his £6,000 of redundancy money into the dream.
‘It was blocked floor to ceiling with rubbish we had to clamber past,’ Joel recalls. ‘There was old furniture, billiard tables, everyone from the locality had dumped stuff there. I contacted the landlord of the building to which the caves are connected as it was going to auction and, at the 11th hour, he came up with a deal at a very low rent, as the space really was just uninhabitable at that point.’
When the museum first launched in 2014, Joel wrote in his business model that it would be ‘mostly blokes’ walking through the doors. But the 56-year-old has been pleasantly surprised to find that, in fact, 75% of the museum visitors are women.
‘When I look at crime magazines in shops, they seem to be by the soap magazines and celebrity magazines, so they are seen as a form of entertainment in a similar way,’ he explains. ‘I think women perhaps have a keener interest in psychology and what makes people “tick”, I don’t want to generalise but that perhaps is a reason so many [women] do like true crime.’
He adds with a chuckle: ‘We get laddish, rugby blokes who come in with their girlfriends, she’s the one in there devouring things where he’s a bit shaken and saying he doesn’t like anything to do with blood.’
Today, Joel knows each corner of his cavernous museum like the back of his hand. While walking around the exhibits, the curator highlights ‘fun’ items like a tiny phone – just larger than a thimble – favoured by criminals who try to smuggle them into prison in their bottoms.
He also points to a 2015 article from the Hastings & St Leonards Observer in a case, which tells of a ‘shocking robbery’ at the True Crime Museum itself. The thieves made off with electronics rather than anything from the museum collection, however.
As he gives Metro a tour of the museum, he briefly stops beneath some cobwebs on the ceiling, and muses: ‘I should probably do something about them, but they do add a certain something, don’t they?’
Moving onto the ‘Death Chamber’ exhibit, which features different methods of killing, there’s a surprising sight behind a lethal injection deathbed. Small green leaves sprout from the cave wall.
‘That little flower always amuses me,’ Joel says. ‘There’s no natural daylight here at all, so it is quite weird.’
In fact, there’s no windows at all and the air is cold this deep in the cave – yet, somehow, life is still possible amidst the constant reminders of death in what is arguably Britain’s eeriest museum.
Find out more about the True Crime museum by clicking here.
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