There is a place beneath Waterloo Station where the city seems to breathe differently—where the air grows heavier, shadows linger longer, and history feels close enough to touch. This autumn, those tunnels will become the gateway to a hidden world. On 11 October 2025, The Vaults will open its doors to Dark Secrets – The Esoteric Exhibition, an unprecedented exploration of the occult, folklore, and the supernatural.
The exhibition unfolds like a descent: 27 themed rooms stretched across 1,200 square metres, each a chamber of marvels and unease. More than a thousand objects are gathered here, many revealed to the public for the first time. They are fragments of lives lived on the edge of belief—haunted relics, ritual instruments, manuscripts that once carried the weight of fear, authority, or forbidden knowledge.
One of the most unsettling spaces houses Europe’s largest assembly of cursed dolls. They sit behind glass, their cracked porcelain faces staring with eyes that seem to follow. Among them is the Weeping Doll, isolated in its own chamber, a figure whispered to move and murmur in the night. From there, the path winds into stranger realms: shrunken heads from the Amazon, their features drawn into an eternal grimace; a Jewish Dybbuk Box said to contain a restless spirit; and ritual skull cups from Tibet, fashioned as offerings to gods of death and rebirth.
Yet Dark Secrets is not merely a catalogue of curiosities. It is also a library of the forbidden. A complete 1620 edition of the Malleus Maleficarum—the notorious witch-hunter’s manual that justified centuries of persecution—sits alongside papal missals, occult manuscripts secured with iron clasps, and a reproduction of the Codex Gigas, the so-called Devil’s Bible, infamous for its towering portrait of a horned demon. Nearby, scientific instruments once wielded by 19th-century scholars in their pursuit of proof of the paranormal stand as evidence of an era when reason and superstition collided.
The exhibition also shines a light on figures who made darkness their art. Aleister Crowley, the magician, poet, and provocateur once branded “the wickedest man in the world,” appears here through his personal artefacts: a ceremonial staff, the Thoth Tarot deck, and fragments from his Abbey of Thelema in Sicily. Modern superstition is not neglected either. The jacket worn by Jimi Hendrix—a relic from the myth-laden “27 Club”—hangs near objects of sporting misfortune, cursed jerseys and equipment that testify to how deeply myth weaves itself into even the most secular of arenas.
What sets Dark Secrets apart is its refusal to indulge in mere spectacle. Fraudulent séances are dissected with scientific clarity; myths are weighed against historical truth. This is not a freak show but an act of cultural archaeology, unearthing the fears, fascinations, and fabrications that have shaped human imagination for centuries. Visitors emerge not only entertained but unsettled, provoked into questioning how much of the unknown is invention—and how much still lingers, unexplained.
The setting itself feels part of the narrative. The Vaults, with its damp brick arches and subterranean corridors, is a place where theatre, ritual and secrecy seem natural. Italmostre, the cultural organisation behind the exhibition, previously brought London face-to-face with the macabre world of serial killers. Now they have turned their gaze toward the occult, transforming the tunnels beneath Waterloo into a temple of shadow and symbol.
The Dark Secrets exhibition runs until 31 May 2026, with evening openings on weekends and an average visit lasting around ninety minutes.
For those with press credentials, a preview will be held on 10 October 2025. Highlights include a Victorian séance led by Professor Matteo Borrini, a forensic anthropologist whose expertise spans vampirism, exorcism and the paranormal, and conversations with Christian Alpini, the exhibition’s scholarly guide through the labyrinth of esotericism.
Dark Secrets is not an exhibition one simply views. It is something to be entered, absorbed, and endured—a walk through the hidden chambers of history and belief, where fact and myth merge, and where the line between curiosity and dread grows exquisitely thin.
