I was exposed to the legend of Jack the Ripper at an early age. I remember reading about the murders in the Time Life book Strange Stories, Amazing Facts which I was obsessed with in early grade school, and also seeing David Warner as the Ripper himself committing a murder and escaping in H.G. Wells’ time machine in the fictionalized Time After Time, released in 1979 and a regular HBO staple. As a child I didn’t grasp all the implications or brutality of the murders. At that age, Jack the Ripper was just another unsolved mystery, no different than Bigfoot or the Loch Ness Monster.
Back when we were originally planning our time in London, I asked Susan if there was a Jack the Ripper museum and, if so, could we visit it. As it turned out, the official Jack the Ripper museum is in Whitechapel (where the murders took place) which was only three miles away from our hotel.
To be fair I don’t know what I was expecting to find at a Jack the Ripper museum… but it definitely wasn’t this.
The museum is nestled into a Victorian townhouse in Whitechapel. It consists of six rooms, each relatively small and each on its own floor. For those of the faint of heart (or in our case, bad knees) there’s also an accessible lift.
Each room of the museum represents one facet of the murders, beginning with the one you see above which depicts Catherine Eddowes’ body being discovered by a police officer (with a bit of help from your truly).
While the museum has replica newspaper articles and information about the crimes seemingly everywhere you look, it doesn’t take long before you begin to realize that a few liberties have been taken along the way. Along your journey you’ll get to see what Jack the Ripper’s study “might have looked like” along with what the police investigation “could have been like” and what a room for rent “mostly looked like.”
After climbing up four flights of stairs and then back down to the basement you’ll find a recreation of a local pub several of the women frequented. Some people suspect that Jack the Ripper may have met some of his victims in the pub. In the “pub” there’s a mannequin bartender and another of the Ripper’s victims sitting at a table, whom I decided to join because I’m silly.
It was actually in this room that I had the most fun. For the majority of our visit, Susan and I were the only people inside the museum. While I was sitting in the dimly-lit pub, another group of visitors entered and so I immediately froze stil, acting like one of the mannequins. It wasn’t until one of the men approached the table that I spring up and shouted “HELLO!” The guy was startled but quickly laughed and I told him it was now his turn to sit there and wait for the next group to come by.
I read online that the museum can take up to two hours to fully explore, but within half an hour we felt like we had seen everything. The fake props didn’t interest me all that much and although the replicas of Jack the Ripper’s letters and newspaper clippings were interesting, if you have more than a passing interest in the case, you’ve probably already seen them. In the museum’s defense I will say that many people rave about the additional walking tour that takes visitors to some of the crime scenes (none of which exist in the same way they did 140 years ago), but we weren’t able to fit that into our schedule.
Despite hopes and the occasional claim that DNA testing will someday reveal the identity of Jack the Ripper (including one that happened while we were in London, which has already been debunked), the crimes remain unsolved to this day. If you want to take a stab at solving the murders, check out the Jack the Ripper museum in Whitechapel, London. They could use the help.