Beachcombing's Bizarre History Blog

A WIBT (Wish I’d Been There) episode from the wars between Greece and Persia in 480/479. The Athenians, save some brave warriors who attempted to defend, futilely the Acropolis, have fled from their city. The unstoppable Persian army has fired the temples and the holy places of Athena: and the Persian fleet has moved down […]

1937 the Golden Gate Bridge opens and pedestrians get to enjoy themselves before the cars arrive.

Enjoy this short extract from a Sheffield newspaper about a folk practice in Devon in south-west England: 28 July 1899. Bells it will be remembered were for the supernatual like alcohol for bacteria: they drove away witches, fairies and, of course, storms… There is a curious survival in that pretty, quiet little south country place, […]

29 Sept 1909 Wilbur Wright takes a breeze around the Statue of Liberty. Note the human ants at the bottom, looking up.

Burial customs are always interesting and often mysterious. Consider this one. In early medieval Britain, particularly, it seems in Anglo-Saxon regions, fetuses and children were regularly buried up against church walls or extremely close to the same. Archaeologists have long recognized that strange constellations of bodies appeared in Christian cemeteries in Anglo-Saxon England; there are […]

Amazing photograph, first publication thanks to Leif. ‘Burtonwood US Army Air Force Base, Cheshire, England on 8 May 1945. The newspaper is the ‘Stars and Stripes’, published by the US Army.’

  ***Thanks to Chris from Haunted Ohio Books for putting me onto this story*** There are many uncertainties about the letters that follow, so let’s give the orthodox version, then the letters themselves and move on from there. In the 1670s the Sultan of the Ottoman Empire in cooperation with the Khan of the Crimea […]

The wild man was a staple of nineteenth-century circuses and penny shows. This personality was typically black, mostly undressed and the possessor of a cannibal’s grin. He (and it was invariably a male who took on the role) would stomp back and forth in his cage every so often lunging at some unwary child, allowing […]

Not sure what this is about, but the image from 1835 is clearly slanderous…

Hortatory names were names given by Puritans in South-East England and, to a much lesser extent, in New England in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. A hortatory name exhorts correct Christian behaviour with the few syllables of the first name available. A tame example might be Hope Smith, a more dramatic example might be Nicholas If-Jesus-Christ-Had-Not-Died-For-Thee-Thou-Hadst-Been-Damned Barbon, […]

There follows a jury panel list from Sussex in the UK dating to the seventeenth century. A simple question: what is wrong with it? Beach has placed the forenames in bold and the surnames in italics: the final names are the local towns. Accepted Trevor of Norsham Redeemed Compton of Battle* Faint-not Hewit of Heathfield […]

The models….

Herodotus was fascinated by Egypt, a kind of topsy-turvy version of his Greek world, and above all, in the second book of the Histories, he shows that he was fascinated by the Nile that ran through Egypt. The great mystery with the Nile for Herodotus and his readers, though it seems to have little bothered […]

A myth? This photograph is supposed to be the iceberg that ‘did it’ to the Titanic. See the paint along the side… 25 May 2015: NH has strong feelings… Not, I suggest. This photograph was up for sale in 2012 It is similar but marked as taken from a different ship. The entry says there […]

Human beings have long showed remarkable ingenuity at getting rid of their fellow human beings, especially perhaps human beings that they do not like. Once the cannon was invented it was only a matter of time before someone tied a prisoner to the front and lit a fuse, blowing his body into a constellation of pain, the […]