MUSEUM OF EAST DORSET

The Museum of East Dorset is a place steeped in history—and perhaps a few lingering spirits. In 1953, Hilda Coles inherited the ironmonger's business from her late father, Tom Frank Coles.

Seven years later, she closed the shop to fulfil his wish of transforming the building into a museum.

By 1962, Hilda and the Wimborne Historical Society had turned three rooms into galleries. She envisioned the museum as a cultural hub, blending education and entertainment for all ages.

The collection grew to include items once owned by local figures like Sir Ernest Kaye Le Fleming, and eventually expanded to cover the towns and villages of East Dorset.

Hilda personally ran the museum for 25 years before her death in 1987, leaving the building and its endowment to the Governors of Wimborne Minster with the wish that it remain a museum.

In the 1990s, major renovations and expansions took place, with ten rooms showcasing the area's rich past, from domestic life to the building's own eerie history.

The museum continued to grow, adding a new Garden Room and Learning Centre in 2012, and by 2020, following further renovations, it became the Museum of East Dorset.

The museum’s collections are as intriguing as the building itself, with 35,000 objects spanning from the 1700s to the 2000s. Highlights include Roman artefacts from Tarrant Hinton, an Iron Age skeleton showing the earliest evidence of tuberculosis in Britain, and even a collection of Victorian Valentine cards—both sweet and sinister. 

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As for the spirits that haunt the Museum of East Dorset, there have been unsettling occurrences that send shivers down the spine. Echoing footsteps have been heard wandering the silent galleries, while eerie anomalies have been captured on camera. Perhaps most chilling of all are the reports of books mysteriously tumbling from the shelves, only to be found lying on the floor—despite the museum being completely unoccupied at the time.