Beachcombing's Bizarre History Blog

This story was allegedly taken from the Detroit Free Press by an English newspaper, 27 Oct 1894. That it appeared in the DFP there is no reason to doubt, English newpapers are almost frightening reliable about these things: that such a duel took place between an English and a French man in Tombstone… Well, this […]

  Summary justice on the battlefield, the hanging tree.    

There is no more controversial minute in Italian history. The sixty seconds took place around four o’ clock in the afternoon 28 April 1945 at Villa Belmonte (picture shows a man tracing bullet holes there). In those seconds a wrecked man, old before his time, and his much younger lover were shot dead. The man was, of […]

Fire in the Brain: Clinical Tales of Hallucination dates back to 1992, yet it is by far the best introduction to visions and perception and misperceptions known to this blogger. The author Ronald K. Siegel offers seventeen case studies, where he had investigated people who saw things that were apparently not there. We have, for […]

The founding fathers as bikini models  

This story comes from a German grammar book with Teutonic compositions dating to 1903 An apothecary once insulted an officer. The officer therefore challenged him to a duel. The duel was to be with pistols. When the opponents had arrived, the apothecary said: ‘I am not used to fighting with pistols, but I have another […]

  Aztec warriors from the Codex Mendoza  

Anne Boleyn was, of course, the second wife of Henry VIII, who ended her short life with French steel interposing between her chin and her shoulders, 19 May 1536. Her execution came after a travesty of a trial in which she was found guilty of high treason against the king (a man of unusual psychology): she […]

Late medieval French book of hours  

Civil Wars are generally – the American Civil War is a fascinating exception – confusing with there almost inevitably being more than two factions. However, it is arguable whether, with apologies to Syria and Bosnia, the world has ever experienced civil wars quite as confusing as those reported in Florence, Italy in the fourteenth century. […]

The earliest image of vomit?

Irish children are brought up with the attractive lie that St Patrick drove all snakes from the country when he arrived in Ireland in the fifth century. Certainly there are no indigenous snakes in Ireland, but over the years small snake populations have been established; not least in the Irish boom when snakes became prestige […]

The Nazi faithful salute the fuhrer at Nuremberg.

Anyone who has ever read a book on Joan of Arc will know that the English-hater was supposed to have had some kind of relations with fairies. But what exactly were those relations? The trial at which Joan battled for her life in 1431 included a long list of charges against the Maid. Some of these charges […]

The last helicopter leaves Saigon: the US ‘occupation’ is over; the hell of war is over, a new hell awaits the inhabitants…