Beachcombing's Bizarre History Blog

Late medieval cannibalism

Get thee gone, Demon!

There have recently emerged a selection of Edwardian mugshots from North Shields, an industrial town in the grimiest part of the industrial north: lots of Beach’s ancestors came from this part of the world and had to fight to get out. Leenks has put up the individuals in question with the following comment: ‘When looking […]

  Dickey Chapelle celebrated American photographer has just trod on a mine.    

This story combines three Beachcombing interests: first, mesmerism, and second, the practical joke framed, third, in an immortal meal, one that many readers would have killed to have attended. We are in the town of Hexham in the north of England in 1871. Mr Morgan, a professor of mesmerism has come to town to impress […]

Strangehistory recently ran a post on death by joke and Beach was surprised by just how many late nineteenth-century joke victims died by poison. Perhaps the strangest thing is that anyone would ever even dream of bringing poison to a joke, after all you don’t load the gun you use for a fake duel, do […]

Loved this!

Allegedly the walls of the gas chamber at Auschwitz. not been able to confirm…

Pheidippides enters the history book because he could run fast and far, and because in 490 BC, with angry Persian immortals just outside their walls, the Athenians decided that they needed help. They looked for assistance in the most violent of all Greek polis, the Spartans to the south. Sparta, though, stood 150 miles from Athens […]

Netherlands, a Protestant, Catholic couple divided in death…

Ancient mounds and barrows evoked mixed feelings in your average yokel in the medieval and modern period. On the one hand you, might find treasure: gold, silver and coins from the Empire or even before. On the other, though, you were likely to get flattened by whatever dragon or spirit guarded the hole in question: […]

Beach ran several years ago a series of spying commandments from the end of the Great War. He thought he would follow this up today with some espionage commandments from the Second World War. These come courtesy of Bernard James Barton or (aka ‘Killer’ Barton or John Barton), a twenty-four year-old British major who, in […]

By far the best Einstein picture I know…

  ***Dedicated to KMH who came up with this link*** A recent post looked at Bible sandwiches, the idea of eating the Bible to cure yourself from ills or poison. The average reader might raise their eyebrows and wonder what the scriptural basis for that is. This was Beach’s residual-protestant reaction but, then, to his shock, […]

Zanjeer was a detection dog who saved tens of lives at Mumbai in 1993. He is honoured here with a full state funeral at his death in 2000.