Beachcombing's Bizarre History Blog

This blog has reported many historical ghost stories over the year. Now it is time for a bit of reflection. Let’s pretend that your neighbour John Smith on Treacle Row in London, has reported that he has seen a ghost in a flowing gown running up and down the stairs. Now think carefully about this […]

I have no idea…

Why do we just latch onto some people and enjoy detesting them? Beach is not talking here about neurologists taking years off your life or architects stealing tens of thousands from loved one, the bastards, but those more random insidious despisings that arise with people who are barely known and who have not done anything […]

New technologies bring fears with them, of course, and often for very good reasons. Electricity was no exception. You could understand the presence of electrificed objects causing fear, but more refined is the fear of electic light. This particulary story come from 1890. A family in Ottery (Devon, UK) had been terrorised by the new […]

Against the snail hordes…

Invisible an old and dear friend of this blog has sent the following story in from an American newspaper, Evening Ledger, 20 Oct 1914. The problem is the story was not published with the photograph in question: why publish a story if you have to describe rather than print the snap? The one above is […]

French girl inspects a German soldier

Perhaps you need a British sense of humour, but this scene had Beach smiling more than potential death scenes normally do. It is D-Day and General Donovan (pictured) and Colonel David Bruce the narrator have to undertake a special mission in the French interior just off the D-Day beaches (they have been landed at Utah), […]

Franz Ferdinand just before his death  

Exciting article by Finbar McCormick from 2009, one that somehow passed Beach by, ‘Struell Wells’, The Journal of the Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland (2009), 45-62. FM begins with a careful description of a nineteenth-century Irish water shrine, the Struell Wells (Downpatrick). This shrine is credited through St Patrick with the power of curing. Crowds would […]

Hard drinking and, of course, vomit

Another for the forgotten kingdom files, this time a particularly short lived example from Italy: the rulers of the Republic of Montefiorino managed about six weeks in 1944 before history and German flame-throwers intervened. First, some background. In the summer of 1943 Mussolini’s fascist government crumbled and Italy found itself occupied by angry Allies in […]

An old fear, gypsies steal a French child

Beach has previously looked at ‘the gong of the world’, the desert boy Apion, who while still brushing sand from his hair, decided to insult the Jews of Alexandria and, indeed, the Jews of the entire Mediterranean. We do not have Apion’s anti-semitic work, the classical equivalent of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion: […]

Going through the Arc de Triumphe: Charles Godfroy 1919