I survived the UK’s most terrifying museum

But may have scarred my children for life.

My house was too small to contain my children’s energy and, in desperation, I’d Googled ‘things to do with kids nearby’.

In between suggestions of crazy golf and bowling alleys was the Powell-Cotton museum, part of the Quex Estate. Located near Margate, a coastal town in Kent that’s been ‘up and coming’ for as long as I’ve been alive, it was described as ‘the most inspiring museum in the UK’.

Perfect, I thought. What parent doesn’t want to inspire their kids?

We started our visit in the mansion, constructed through the profits of the East India Company, England’s first lucrative attempt at global capitalism/colonial exploitation. Four rooms, not including the reception with a staircase taken from an Agatha Christie mystery, were open to the public.

My first impression was that this was not an obviously kid-friendly attraction. Looking back, I see the house as the calm first act, designed to put an audience at ease before violently ripping the rug from under their feet. An adult audience.

In a display case was a lock of Napoleon’s hair. My three-year-old was unimpressed. His reaction was to lie on the floor, screaming ‘car shop’, something he often does.

The tour of the house gave two big hints as to what might come next, the utter horror of the museum. I think this is known as ‘foreshadowing’ in the horror genre.

There was the Oriental room, which, to give it its due, silenced my three-year-old’s screaming and, in its place, made him shake with fear. Of particular note was the dragon chair, a piece of furniture I couldn’t imagine sitting on for reasons to do with both comfort and the fear that my soul might be stolen.

As we left the house for the museum proper, the guide on duty at the front door asked if we’d told the kids what to expect. Of course, we hadn’t. We hadn’t visited before. We didn’t know what to expect. But … I mean … it was only a museum. How bad could it be?

‘Yes,’ I said, not wanting to enter into conversation.

My wife stayed silent.

‘Head straight for Gallery 6,’ said the guide. ‘They can dress up and draw. Tell them not to look at the other galleries as they pass through. It’ll be fine.’

Outside, in the bright summer sun, D, my eldest, asked what the scary lady had meant.

‘She’s trying to build anticipation,’ I replied. ‘What could be scary about a museum? Maybe it’s so boring it’s scary?’

Instantly, J, the three-year-old, said that he didn’t want to go to the museum. He knew.

Major Percy Horace Gordon Powell-Cotton was as English as his name suggests. An explorer and big game hunter, he travelled to Asia and Africa between 1887 and 1939, collecting “zoological and ethnographic samples”. By 1896, he realised he needed somewhere to store all this. Instead of putting it in the attic, he opened a museum in the grounds of his estate.

The museum was instantly successful. Of particular note were the dioramas Powell-Cotton put together with the help of Rowland Ward, Victorian England’s go-to guy for taxidermy. Advertisements boasted of there being no better in the world, not even in Chicago’s Field Museum.

Dioramas. It’s difficult to explain why they’re so terrifying. Did Victorian visitors or inter-war guests experience the same reaction as me and my family? A quick look at the guestbook on the way out suggested I wasn’t the only one to be affected.

But before we visited the dioramas, we headed for Gallery 6, distracting the kids from the many animal skulls by discussing Napoleon’s hair again. Gallery 6 was bright and lined with desks for drawing. It was fun, although, looking back, it definitely suggested the horrors to follow. Aside from a small group of Spanish tourists, we were free to drape the ‘dress up’ animal skins over our shoulders and to stroke stuffed hedgehogs, a small alligator even, without any supervision.

And so we were soon acclimatised to dead animals.

Or so we thought.

A display case of bugs reminded me of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, a reference lost on the kids. It’s a film, though, that’s been accused of glorifying a white saviour, something Powell-Cotton wouldn’t have worried about. On more than one information board, the museum was clear that, at least by the standards of his age, he was respectful of local people, of local customs. The artefacts that he brought back to England were either bought at a fair price or were gifts from people that liked and respected him. Supposedly.

The same couldn’t be said for the animals. Their corpses were enough to turn you vegetarian. One room was packed with heads, pinned to the wall as if a truck carrying a party of African animals had crushed through the side of the museum.

(In truth, the kids weren’t scared by these, just disappointed by the discovery that dioramas had nothing to do with dinosaurs.)

Not all the heads were furnished with skin and fur. One wall was decorated with columns of skulls. I felt as if I were in a horror movie about zombie antelopes. My wife was busy taking photos, my kids looked aghast at the ranks of death.

You stood there, not sure where to look, because something about the place was obscene, but … funny at the same time. Laughing, I guess, is what you do when you don’t know how to react. Or you take photos. Through my phone’s lens, a room of heads lost its power. How many Instagram ‘likes’ was it likely to accrue? I’ve posted some beautiful shots and they’ve never once broken past the small group of family and friends that like everything and anything I publish.

But Powell-Cotton knew what he was doing. The room of heads was only a starter, a prelude to the main course served in the next room.

These were the headline dioramas. Loads of stuffed animals, behind glass, all frozen in the same fixed poses suffered through the twentieth century. The amount of animals was the amazing thing. There was no subtlety here — this was cram-it-all-in entertainment, something familiar to fans of Marvel movies.

The lighting made the whole thing extra creepy. The rooms were dark, no doubt to protect the exhibits, but the dioramas were lit from below. Anyone who’s held a torch under their chin while camping understands the uncanny effect.

By the time I’d moved to the second diorama, through a door framed by horns and topped by an elephant’s head, my children had run away to play in the garden. They would, no doubt, talk of today as adults in therapy.

In 1907, during an expedition taken in lieu of a honeymoon, Powell-Cotton was almost killed by a lion. He’d thought the animal dead, so approached it. The lion jumped up and attacked the explorer. Go, lion!

A display in the museum, containing the outfit Powell-Cotton wore that day, explained that the protection provided by a rolled up copy of the satirical magazine Punch bought the Englishman sufficient time to be rescued. And the lion shot. This magazine was in the case too.

The most striking display was that of a lion attacking a wildebeest.

Credit is due to the taxidermist for capturing the terror, the absolute pain, drawn across the poor animal’s face. The lion’s pose suggests an almighty power. You’d not want to mess. And, as I tried to work out a way of removing my reflection from the photos, I got to thinking whether all this was any worse than your latest BBC natural history documentary.

Yes, it was.

David Attenborough didn’t kill many hundreds of animals.

Not to my knowledge, anyway.

I joined my family in the garden. My youngest had thrown off his shorts and was running around in his pants. My wife wanted me to catch him because his behaviour was ‘embarrassing’. (A family were having afternoon tea nearby.)

‘What did you think of the animals?’ I asked.

‘Sad,’ she said. ‘Creepy.’

I stalked the three-year-old, taking him down before he’d even noticed I was there. When I asked what he thought of the museum, he said that he liked the giraffe but found the lion scary.

‘Fair enough,’ I said.

The museum’s musty scent followed us home. We didn’t eat our planned burgers that night. We’d lost our appetite.

In this way, the visit had changed us. Maybe the deaths of all those animals hadn’t been in vain?

And if that’s not inspiring, I don’t know what is.

(We ate the burgers the following night.)