Beachcombing's Bizarre History Blog

E.R. Bills, Black Holocaust: The Paris Horror and a Legacy of Texas Terror (Eakin Press Aug 2015). ‘From 1891 to 1922, Texans burned an average of one person of color at the stake a year for three decades. These burnings typically featured carnival atmospheres with thousands in attendance, including men, women and children who later […]

‘I’ve… seen things… you people wouldn’t believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion; I watched c-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate… All those… moments… will be lost, in time, like… tears… in… rain.’ Famous lines from Bladerunner. But what if instead of an exotic replicant at his death, we […]

  A. G. Lewis DFC, July 1940 in the middle of the Battle of Britain. Dominion pilot (South Africa) who came, fought and survived the war.  

Beach is not sure why he finds this meal so appealing, but it is probably something to do with the disregard for frontier law and the ability of Texans to improvise entertainment out of a goose, a shack and some eggs. Sherman is and was the capital of Grayson County in Texas. In 1858 a […]

1976, a US flag becomes an unlikely weapon in a demonstration.  

This is a short story published some 90 years after the event it supposedly described: Chester is a city on the northern Welsh borders. This story is frequently retold in miscellany of the bizarre, local histories and Francis Wheen includes it in his marvelous The Chatto Book of Cats, 1993. There are three interesting points: […]

The Kaiser meets the most presumptuous Briton of his generation: love Churchill’s boyish face.

In a recent post Beach looked at the extraordinary survival of the Waldensians, a courageous proto-Protestant sect, which  managed to weather the full rage of the Church in the Alps between France and Italy. The history of the Waldensians is a long catalogue of courage and atrocity: the courage of the Waldensians and the violence of the […]

Summer is over, sigh: first class tomorrow. I’ve put the very best 10,000 words below for posts from this month. Happy September! Beach American Wild Men: Bruce T. on banging stones, and Luke on a Texas wild man… Anticipating the Telephone: Sam has come across a supposed ancient telephone… Baby Loving Snakes: David M brings up […]

The Index Biography is a new form of biography pioneered by this blog and introduced in a previous post. The writer must find a biography of a famous individual from history, they must turn to the index and write down eight peripheral facts about the indivdual’s life. We offered up previously here Sheridan le Fanu and Joseph […]

One of the nice things about running a blog is that you can ask people things and as Beach is now at a point of nervous desperation on this issue he is going to open this obsession to a wider public. In 1993, 1994 or possibly 1995 Beach was walking down a street in a […]

Here is a silly story from nineteenth-century Wales followed up with a serious point: or as serious as this blog ever gets. Mrs. Braithwaite [of Caergwrle, Flintshire] supplied a Mrs. Williams with milk, but a short time ago refused to serve her, and the cause was as follows: Mrs. Braithwaite had to that time been […]

While recently writing on the Tower of London ghosts Beach learnt something. Sentries see ghosts: there was the case from 1817 and the second case from the 1850s. The following list is limited to the British newspapers from 1875-1900 and represent a very quick survey: 1877 Aldershot: a ghost was repeatedly seen by sentries at […]

Best read of the summer? For Beach an easy choice, Richard D. Altick, Victorian Studies in Scarlet: Murder and Manners in the Age of Victoria. OK it was first published in 1970 but what is forty years between friends? Altick, who died in 2008, was a maverick academic: it would be great to induct him, sooner […]

Imagine this. You wake up one morning in 1216 and say ‘to hell with it’. You walk into the local square of piazza stand on an upturned wheelbarrow and talk to your neighbours about the cosmos. Perhaps you’ve learnt that Christ married Mary Magdalene and had twins; or that the angels are worms in universal […]