Beachcombing's Bizarre History Blog

Looks hopeful, a lot will depend on how many of the major powers are covered: The Secret War

Beach was innocently looking for stories about human bodies in trees. This one has no human body, but it seemed too good to waste. A correspondent of the Horticultural Times contributes the following account of the so-called snake tree, which is said to exert such a terrifying influence upon the natives of the Mexican Wilds. […]

Cunliffe’s new book: his vision gets ever larger…

A nice folklore/ghostlore story from the English Midlands. The peaceable village of Wolstanton, near Newcastle [Lyme], vulgarly called ‘Hoositon,’ has, the last four or five weeks, been disturbed by a very ill-behaved ghost, which, (it is confidently said), has been knocking, scratching, &,c. at a most tremendous rate; and not driven away in the mean […]

1956?

Here is part of an occasional series on crazy couplings: sexual encounters between individuals who, by rights, should never have had anything to do with each other, let alone undress in one another’s presence. To kick start the series two rather unpleasant people whose intimacy is thankfully beyond this blogger’s imagining: Simone de Beauvoir and […]

The NKVD allegedly asked their prisoners wedding rings before killing.

We have looked here before on several occasions at the bosom serpent, the notion that certain animals and particularly reptiles and amphibians could dwell in the stomach or elsewhere in the human body after entering through the nose, mouth or in some rarefied cases the vagina. Usually you get bosom-serpented because you have it coming […]

South African HIV wars

What makes a good historian? Here are a few thoughts that have come up in reading and conversation. A good historian is someone who reads so much in his or her period that they can anticipate what this or that writer will write next. (The present blogger having published on several different periods recognizes this phenomenon well. […]

Winter War

How do you get rid of supernatural worries: call the priest, the alienist or the local bobby? Why no, you buy a tube of nineteenth-century vitamin pill, of course! This at least was the solution offered by one Irish newspaper in 1840. The belief in supernatural appearances has generally prevailed during the superstitious ages has […]

An old favourite…

Paul Flewers, The New Civilisation? Understanding Stalin’s Soviet Union, 1929-1941 (2008) There is a strip in Tintin in the Land of the Soviets (1930), where the intrepid boy reporter spies out some British leftists who are visiting ‘the new civilization’: the Soviet Union about five years after Stalin had ascended the blood steps to the iron throne. […]

Britain plans should the worst come to the worst: Fighting Nazi Occupation