Beachcombing's Bizarre History Blog

There is lots of interesting burbling about technology and ghosts. How long does it need for a new technology to become hauntable? When will the first call centres or internet hubs get their poltergeists? To us today that wonderful Dickens story ‘The Signal Man’ is a straightforward ghost tale. But part of its daring back in […]

  Those daring men in their flying machines: on the Russian front

Jan Harold Brunvand is the Urban Legend man, he has been writing books, since 1981 on modern folklore narratives, those curious stories that get passed from relative stranger to relative stranger or that are discussed earnestly at sleepovers among close friends. Three years ago JHB brought out his most important compendium yet, The Encyclopedia of Urban […]

The picture above is a horrific one. The bodies of seventeen individuals, eleven of them children (the youngest two years of age) who were, at some point in the Middle Ages (dating 1150-1300), thrown down a well in the East Anglian town of Norwich.  The bodies were discovered in 2004 and various years of careful […]

  Well, actually it is supposed to be Nero and his mother, but this could be the King in Camelot CSI.

What is the earliest instance of an exotic animal (gator etc) in a sewer? Well, go online and you will read about New York legends from the 1920s and some isolated cases from other cities in the US from the second half of the nineteenth century. But a couple of years ago, in a fascinating […]

Forget the Iron Age, the Nuclear Age, the Internet Age. There are three periods of human endeavor: nomadic hunter-gathering before history; agriculture, which began about 8000 BC and ended in most parts of the west in the last one hundred and fifty years (when a majority of citizens had left the land); then finally industrial […]

  The Mughal Emperor marries. Fireworks explode.

There are endless tales about twentieth-century Italian military ineptitude and more importantly the perception of the same. Churchill said to Ribbentrop of the Italians just before the last war: ‘We had them last time, it is only fair you take them this time.’ In a meeting between British and German WW1 veterans in 1937 or […]

Lincoln is dead: a nation (or at least a good part of half of it) in black.    

The whipping boy needs little introduction. He was the child, brought up with a prince or with a young king, and punished on his behalf, when the prince or king was naughty: crucially the royal and his proxy were friends so any pain was vicariously felt. And why not just hit the royal in question? […]

Leni Riefenstahl’s coming face to face with Nazi brutality as 22 Polish civilians butchered, 1939.

Reading anomalous material there is sometimes an overlap of tiny details that are perplexing. Consider this description of three different North American wild men (who would certainly be called Big Foot today). In 1905 an article in the Washington Post described a Maryland wild man: ‘When it shrieks it sounds much like ‘Ya-ho! Ya-ho! Ya-ho!’ […]

  the Devil carries (a plaster cast?) Christ away

Some sad news via email today. Ray Girvan, a very old friend of this blog, died 30 June 2015, after a three-year fight with lung cancer. He was 59 (a victim of these speedbumps that hit 15-20% of us in late middle age), witty, knowledgeable, and had, of course, never smoked, something that tempts me […]