Beachcombing's Bizarre History Blog

Thanks to Chris from Haunted Ohio Books for pointing out a dimension of the poison duel that Beach had recklessly passed by: poison duel by animal. First, the tarantula duel from 1887 courtesy of Chris Grand Forks [North Dakota] Daily Herald 20 September 1887: p. 3 A Toledo (O) special dispatch says: Particulars of a […]

This blog has long taken pleasure in noting late cases of witchcraft from Britain and Ireland. From time to time Beach announces, in arrogance, that this case or other was absolutely the latest: just last month it was an assault on a witch from 1924 from Devon. However, the following remarkable case seems to make […]

Manifest destiny: US hunters have wiped out the most important inhabitants of the west, the buffalo

From about 400 to about 1200 there are pitifully few western witness accounts: almost all experiences are filtered through poetry, hagiography, or legal documents. We don’t really see scenes or meet characters: there are names and there are gilded set pieces (a wedding, a miracle, a battle). This makes the exceptions so much more exciting… […]

One of the most famous images from the Civil Rights movement. As always with these shots, it is the grinning buffoons who make it. Memories of a bully crowds post.  

To add to the Poison Duels series here is another fictional story. This time from the Sunderland Daily Echo 17 July 1895, but taken originally from Tit Bit 21 July 1894. Beach loved it and found it more satisfying than the other poison duel set in Germany. Other Poison Duel fictions? Drbeachcombing AT yahoo DOT com There were […]

The owl and the magpie in a luscious medieval miniature. What about the other birds? what is the parable here?      

The 1975 Church Committee looked at rogue or extreme CIA activities and took a particular interest in the decision in the late 1950s and early 1960s to kill foreign heads of state, who were deemed unfriendly to US interests. Chief of these was, of course, Fidel Castro, a man who had both succeeded in making […]

  Persia’s Socratean moment as Persian mystic Mansur al-Hallaj is killed in Baghdad 922

Folie a deux was once used by psychologists to describe shared madness. Not just one person, but two or three or many more experience the same unreasonable convictions. Strange History wants to offer a short series of cases of shared madness within households, i.e. people living together, typically families. It should be noted that for […]

  Love this image of flirting in a Georgian garden, but what extraordinarily hard faces…. The two know the game.

Noah’s Ark has had a bit of a rough time over the last hundred and fifty years. Indeed, from the first attacks on what might be called ‘literal Christianity’ the aetheist rottweillers have gone after the Ark with a passion that is frightening. Why? Quite simply because the authors of the Pentaeuch (God or/and mere […]

Cocaine toothache drops, for tiny tots who can’t get to sleep…  

There follows a story that appeared during research into poison duels. As with many duel stories it is thrilling: ref Hartlepool Mail, 18 Dec 1888, 4. Herr Karl von Krulhanser— the Professor, he was called— was an eccentric man of science. With the exception of a few students, to whom he gave private lessons, he […]

On the 6 August 1945 American planes dropped their first atomic bomb on Hiroshima. The Japanese would surrender within a month, arguably hundreds of thousands of US lives and very possibly hundreds of thousands of Japanese lives were saved by Little Boy and his elder brother Fat Man. The Japanese surrender came about because of […]