Beachcombing's Bizarre History Blog

It’s not just Vietcong in the jungles of ‘Nam. Photo dated 1967.

Beach has previously given examples of bosom serpents, the idea that animals, particularly snakes can live within the human body. But consider the following freaky description. What is this thing? The quotation comes from the Athenian Oracle (II, 380) where reader’s questions were answered. Whence proceeds the Shutterkin? Physicians have imputed this Shutterkin (which resembles […]

A British newspaper story from 1870, enjoyed the flying mortar board: go Anglicans, go!

Lebensborn is a Nazi word to place side by side with such Teutonic charmers as Einsatzgruppen, Lebensraum and Endlösung. The Lebensborn or Life’s Fount was a scheme to breed a hundred million blond supermen and their hand maidens. It had various reflexes: sex between consenting Aryans was encouraged, against conventional Christian morality; Aryan women siring children […]

Richard Weikart, Hitler’s Religion: apparently Hitler was a pantheist. It would make sense…

This passage comes from one of Beach’s recent favourites (for which he must thank Mike G), the Athenian Mercury. The AM was a late seventeenth-century journal that has been described as the first advice column in history. Readers would write in questions and the editors, a cabal of level-headed Londoners, would then do their best to […]

Tim Rayborn, Beethoven’s Skull: weird stories form classical music….

A short note today from a curious book entitled Salamandrologia published in 1683 in Nuremberg, about, of course, Salamanders, p. 116, the mythical fire dwelling lizard: it is a surprisingly long work and worth browsing through. Here is one fragment. It would be good to trace the original down in Italian, German or Latin. It […]

This is an extraordinary story about child murder in a London church. In fact, the real story here – thinking of this site’s interest in urban legend and rumour – is the power of a freak event involving bodies to whip a working class area into a frenzy, but we’ll get to that…. In August […]

Crikey, well this has been another dramatic month… Beach has been in intense contract negotiations and will now leave his old institute and go and work in another one: he was given an offer he could not refuse and 72 hours to decide, the next three days were a sort of gnawing hell. Many times […]

This German war correspondent hidden behind a Russian tank in 1942 when there were still good things to report.

***Melissa got this, scroll down for the result*** The Index Biography is a new form of biography 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 […]

British and Dominion bombers back from a raid over Germany, 2 March 1944

Imagine going to a banquet and not being sure if you are to eat or be eaten. Welcome to the world of Andrés de Avendaño y Loyola, a seventeenth-century Franciscan who walked into the territory of the Itza (a forgotten kingdom previously celebrated on this blog) in 1696. Avendaño was brave. Many other missionaries had […]

Asinine typewriter at New York Trade Fair 1940: note text…