Beachcombing's Bizarre History Blog

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 […]