Beachcombing's Bizarre History Blog

  These were some footnote funerals from Beach’s project, some months ago, to record bizarre 19C funerals. How our Victorian ancestors got excited about alcohol. Here is a nice whisky bottle scene, by now a stock of many films. It is difficult not to sympathise with the defendant in this 1897 case. At Lichfield Police […]

Beach introduced before the term ghost riot: we also need another expression for the occasional ghost flaps, when entire communities go ghost crazy. Here is a nice one from 1858 for Great Hucklow. Hucklow is in the hilly Peaks. The village of Hucklow, situated between Eyam and Tideswell, has been of late thrown into a […]

The whole Victorian theme of the live burial is well known: there are several doctorates to be written in this vast theme. Here are some real accounts from the nineteenth century. Of course most of the time these revivals were rumours rather than reality, like this one from 1891 Wales. The Welsh newspapers report an […]

The Victorians did so many things better than us, but close to the top of the list are funerals. Here are some ‘angry’ Victorian funerals, most from the second half of the nineteenth century. The most common scenes just involved family arguments. Here is one from 1875 with a dispute over a will: On Thursday morning […]

Over the years Beach has offered several Welsh ghost stories: remember the ghostly rabbits, or the jumping Welsh ghosts. Welsh ghost stories as, indeed, with almost all things Welsh are just better. A strange ghost story comes from the Principality. There is a friendly society at Pontardowe, in the Swansea Valley, among whose rules is […]

David Hufford’s study of nightmare is well known. Many of us have had the experience of feeling a crushing weight on our chest while sleeping. This experience is often associated with a creeping sense of menace and often the presence of some supernatural bogey in the room: it is even sometimes claimed that the supernatural […]

A couple of fine art urban legends. We live in a world where painting no longer has the same social value: what would be the modern equivalents of these? Drbeachcombing At yahoo DOT com A man who was furnishing saw in Wardour-street an old portrait which he admired, but for which the dealer asked, as […]

Charles Fort was a fiercely eccentric and independent individual who collected, in the early twentieth century, anomaly reports, as some of his contemporaries collected cigarette cards. He described and lovingly collated these anomalies in five books he published between 1906 and 1932: after thousands of visits to libraries, most in New York. These books are […]