Beachcombing's Bizarre History Blog

This bit of fun comes from Paul Tabori’s biography of British ghost hunter Harry Price. No date is given. Are we perhaps in the 1930s? A less sweeping claim was made by a gentleman who had invented a way of testing the human aura!… It seemed that the ‘aura’ machine was a violet-ray apparatus; it […]

This is an early example of operational psychology in battle. We are in 480 BC and a massive Persian fleet is heading south along the Greek coast to meet the allied Greek navy. However, within the Persian flotilla, are the ships of the Ionian cities of Asia Minor, Greek-speaking communities who, just ten years before, […]

Wright goes around the Statue of Liberty.

Introduction Been reading a lot about poltergeists recently, perhaps the most fascinating of all Fortean phenomena. I’ve collected a list of my favourite poltergeist actions; and then my favourite poltergeist sounds. I try and pass very quickly over the banal and well known. These come from tens of different cases. Poltergeist Acts Stones thrown; showers […]

Dear Reader, a crappy month with a *serious* wordworm problem in the house and a health disaster in the wider family. As a result the next month might be particularly tricky towards the end. Please be patient if there is interruption in service. The most popular posts this month were Why Did the Chicken Cross […]

The Index Biography is a quiz pioneered by this blog and introduced in a previous post. The creator must find a biography of a famous individual from history, they must turn to the index and write down eight peripheral facts about the individual’s life. We offered up previously here Sheridan le Fanu and Joseph Stalin (he of ripe […]

Beach has recently being looking at the mythology of the Whitechapel killings. He has tried but failed to resist the evidence of spiritualists. Here is an extensive report on the hunt from the table rappers, early October 1888. An extraordinary statement bearing upon the Whitechapel tragedies was made to the Cardiff police yesterday by a […]

It is rarely that this blogger is flabbergasted about something on fairies: but today he was fair blown away by this sentence concerning the fey on the Isle of Man, published in the early spring of 1902 in a Liverpool newspaper. Fairies are not encouraged at any other time of the year, only on New […]

Not history perhaps but one of the most fascinating European metrics: fascinating patterns.

This blog has frequently pioneered ‘wrong time’ objects: things that appear decades or generations before we might reasonably expect them to. Here is an instance (not our first, wrong time car readers might remember) of a motor car about one hundred and fifty years before the car was invented. We are in London in 1742 […]

Greek slingshot with letters ‘catch’ (dexai)!

Swimming looks here like a bar-code… Presumably a problem with printing? Leif writes, 29 Mar 2018: The image is an illustration from Everard Digby’s De Arte Natandi (The Art of Swimming) published in 1587, considered the first English treatise on the practice. The work includes forty woodcuts, which are really brilliant. The attached image gives […]

Stressful days – just discovered our house is riddled with woodworm – are ameliorated by making lists. This is one I’ve been playing around with all afternoon: the demography of Victorian fancy dress parties. You know the drill. Invitation arrives with instructions to turn up on the Sunday afternoon in a costume and identity of […]

Egyptian spelling: sorry…

Humans adapt new technologies quickly to almost every imaginable use. This was true with flight. The first manned hot air balloon flew in 1782. The first military use of hot air balloons came at the Battle of Fleurus in 1794: France became the first nation to ever use air power in war. However, what about […]