Beachcombing's Bizarre History Blog

***Thanks to Mike Dash and Penne for sending reports in*** This site has pioneered an oral transmission tag and particularly claims that human beings can transmit information over tens, even hundreds of generations without any recourse to writing: these range from hints of memories from the early Neolithic at Newgrange to impossibly old memories of […]

The six counties, probably Belfast, two IRA women privates stop and search a man

The most important thing about nineteenth-century witchcraft reports in British, Irish and American newspapers is that they reveal a series of beliefs that were actually practiced, but that were often too intimate and ‘stupid’ to share with a folklorist. The result is that these neglected newspaper reports are the closest that we come to the […]

Every so often Beach gets a post from a reader that practically writes itself and the extent of this blogger’s work is the cut and paste button. Here is one such example that goes in the well established oral transmission tag.  The correspondent and author was Indranil. Can any reader help out Indranil and his […]

Dear Reader, Crappy January with a long and stubborn flu, made worse by the fact that it was necessary to work through it. But it seems now almost to be over… Thanks, as always, to the multiple linkers: Amanda, Chris, Chris S, Joan, Ricardo, Wade and others. I’ve put the very best contributions below to […]

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

I have no idea….

Beach is a sucker for these ghost stories from the Victorian, the Edwardian and immediate post Edwardian period. This particular series of horrors relates to the Ewings who lived as tenants at St Vincent’s Cottage, Lynton, 1937, ‘where a large number of bones have been found’. Here is Mrs Ewing: From the very start of our […]

Beach recently shared the splendours of naked fertility rituals in Missouri from Colonial times to the Great Depression. The author of that article (Vance Randolph, Nakedness in Ozark Folk Belief, The Journal of American Folklore 66, 333-339) also describes what may be spill over into local Christianity. In 1905 a preacher, Jim Sharp from Missouri, […]

The Hindenburg comes crashing to earth, 1937… 36 died

Helen Keller meets Charlie Chaplin

An entry in the burning libraries catalogue… In 1536 Anne Boleyn was executed for sexual betrayal and for plotting the murder of the king, her husband Henry VIII. Beach has examined these extraordinary claims in another post, sufficient to say for now that there was almost certainly no substance to them, but that Henry VIII […]

Hans Schumann runs for freedom in Berlin, 15 Aug 1961

Beach had, as a historically-inclined teenager, a recurrent dream, where he was on an island in a lake and a Viking boat full of blond psychos was coming toward him (and there was nowhere to go and nowhere to hide). The extract below has something of the same terrible inevitability. Certainly, having read this a […]

God, help any German prisoners…