Beachcombing's Bizarre History Blog

 Marina Ginesta was seventeen when, in 1936, the picture above was taken by Hans Gutmann on top of the Hotel Colón in Barcelona. The Spanish Civil War was now underway and Marina, from a French family settled in Spain, had joined up with the Unified Socialist Party of Catalonia. She did not habitually carry a gun, […]

The US destroys the Iraqi arming fleeing from Kuwait…

Here is a little bit of gossip from Cornwall 1880 and a dose of human misery. An extraordinary but well authenticated instance of belief in witchcraft comes from St. Blazey, Cornwall. A woman named Keam, who died the other day, was believed by her neighbours to be a witch, and great difficulty was experienced in […]

  What a world that could create these images and the Jane Austen novels…

For a student from the west the basic sign of historical literacy is whether or not you can put the following periods in their correct order: antiquity, ‘dark ages’, middle ages, renaissance and modernity. Beach has the privilege of teaching perhaps two hundred American students a year and probably ten percent would be capable of […]

This blog, several years ago, ran a series of posts on unicorns. Here is a late appendix based on reading Cosmas Indicopleustes’ Christian Topography, a work that dated to the mid sixth century of our era. Cosmas was a widely travelled Greek. He had been to Ethiopia and he may have been to Sri Lanka, […]

  Liberated French pray for dead American infantry soldier

The Heliodorus Pillar is one of those wrong place Euroasian antiques, which should make any self-respecting bizarrist choke up. It is a simple, still standing sandstone Hindu column, at Vidisha near Bhopal in India, known locally as the Khambh Baba. The column was placed there in about 110 BC so it is a good two thousand […]

The Dominions were a precise administrative category within the British Empire. They referred to the territories that had reached, according to omniscient London, the ability to govern themselves with minimum interference from the motherland. With many of the racist assumptions of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries it was believed that only white populations […]

  Ramses III fights the sea people (thanks to Wade): sacrificed focus for detail. Incredible.

There is not much to comment on here, just a very unusual passage in a classic Roma book, The Book of Boswell: Autobiography of a Gypsy (1970). The edition referred to here is the 1973 Penguin. Now to the fairies. Notice how they jump in rather matter of factly. Our author is remembering an idyllic […]

  Thanks to Tim for this classic, a Chinese Nazi trying to join the master-race.

The thieves’ candle is a longstanding tradition in Britain, America and, indeed, throughout the western world. Usually the candle was the hand of a dead man with one or more of the fingers made into candles. These candles were supposed to provide safety, invisiblity and be able to cast sleep spells on victims. For example, […]

Sleeping Tommies just arrived in France and going to the front. How many of these were still alive in 1918