Beachcombing's Bizarre History Blog

Books where everybody dies. Sorry, but loved this.

Here is a short mermaid report from the middle of the eighteenth century. It appeared in a British newspaper 11 Sep 1749, but the mermaid catch was said to have actually taken place in Denmark 3 Sep of that year. We hear from Nykoping in Jutland, that the Fisherman there had catched a Mermaid, which […]

In spring 1127, in Peterborough, Cambridgeshire strange things happened. At night locals heard repeated horn blasts and some, who were foolish enough to be out in the dark, saw ghastly sights: men appeared on black horses and on black goats riding through the woods following black hounds. It goes without saying that this was not […]

A duel was described in a British compendium in 1784: the Weekly Entertainer since you ask. The full text is below for connoisseurs, but what was remarkable about it was that eight men died and 2 were injured. Briefly the story went as follows. A group of friends in a tavern in Galway had an argument. At […]

Spells… it has been a while. Location: nineteenth-century Ireland Aim: to bring back a lover who is looking elsewhere Ingredients: a fairy woman, a grave, a linen sheet, a moonless sky, seven candles and a wheat sheaf Method: (i) find a fairy woman to assist you: fairy women were the nineteenth-century Irish witches who, using […]

Arch Duke Ferdinand and Family: aie….

Cyclical language…

Austrian artillery in the Alps: against the Italians?

This is  a mysterious illness that led to most of the members of a family in Suffolk (England) losing their limbs in 1762. Was there an Ebola outbreak in mid eighteenth-century England? Presumably not. But what is happening here? The case was presented to the Royal Society in 1862 by a Dr. Woolaston. This is […]

Taxi cab in New York in the 1980s late one night. These women are now in their fifties…

Here is a bit of a cheeky post as the photo is ‘borrowed’ from an Italian site (Matteo Rubboli): but as the text is overwhelmingly in Italian there is the fear that an international audience might not find it easily. This is particularly a shame as the text is just a mild commentary and the pictures are so […]

Hitler’s Brain. Sorry Enjoyed this: loved the eyes.

This one actually appeared in a note to a previous mermaid post from 2011. Beach has since hunted down a slightly earlier account in English (Anon 1812). Note that we are in deepest Brittany, in a land where mermaids were still an important part of folklore in the early 1900s. On the 31st July, an […]

The rarest form of Victorian urban legend is the sexual one: it is not the Victorians did not tell racy stories, it is that generally speaking no one dared to publish them. Here is one that somehow slipped through the net. Beach’s favourite detail are the stripes. In a suburb of Dundee a golden discovery […]

The Mongol armies of the thirteenth century were among the most multi-ethnic in history. Koreans, Africans, Europeans and Persians fought together under the ‘prince of heaven’: a thuggish horse thief from the Steppes. Beach was recently particularly struck by one example of this that could stand for many less dramatic instances. When in 1258 Hulegu […]