Bruges (Brussels Morning Newspaper): Dirk Van den Bossche has opened a Witchcraft Museum in Bruges, transforming an escape room into an educational space on witch trials and superstition. He drew inspiration from the 2016 Bruegel exhibition. The museum aims to illuminate the dark history of witchcraft and its representation in art and culture.
Dirk Van den Bossche, the curator of the torture museum De Oude Steen in Bruges, has opened a new museum about witchcraft in the same building. This area used to be an escape room, but he transformed it to focus on the myths and history of witchcraft. He spent a year creating the museum, but the idea started years earlier after he visited The Witches of Bruegel exhibition in Bruges in 2016. This visit inspired him to explore the complex history of witchcraft.
How does Dirk Van den Bossche’s witchcraft museum explore historical misunderstandings?
The museum gives visitors an experience, showing how superstition and fear led to witch trials and unfair treatment of people. Van den Bossche’s museum focuses on teaching about this dark history and how misunderstandings caused people to accuse others of being witches. He wants visitors to understand why these stories exist and how they affect society. With this new project, he hopes to highlight the lasting effects of these false beliefs and the strong fears that have influenced history.
It has been said that the museum shows how witches are represented in art and modern culture. It discusses the witch hunts that happened in Bruges and other cities, where many women were killed. One important item is a set of scales from 1638, which might have been used to see if a woman was a witch if she was too heavy, people thought she couldn’t fly on a broom. There is also a ducking stool, which was used to hold women underwater until they admitted to being witches. Throughout history, many women have been wrongly blamed, and this still happens in some places today.
