Beachcombing's Bizarre History Blog

Malinowski, one of the founding fathers of modern anthropology about a lost hat

This was, I believe, one of the fake letters that P.T.Barnum sent out when he took possession of the Fejee Mermaid in 1842: though I’ve found no other online version. The scallywag here claimed to be a doctor from Montgomery, Alabama, resident in the Indies. I have this day seen, handled, and very closely examined […]

Dear Reader, They are risen! Three of the six Beachcombing tortoises are out now in the garden. Now to business… The most popular posts this month were Bloody Babs Says Goodbye to Tommy If I were your Husband I would drink it When Churchill Came within Twenty Yards of Hitler Gay Fairies What Happened to […]

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 […]

Charles Montgomery Skinner was an early American folklore writer famous for such works as Myths and Legends of Our Own Lands. Skinner though had a promising background, one that gets him into that select catalogue of ‘rogue researchers’. Charles has just been describing a series of poltergeists, including some phantom snowball throwers. Without presuming to […]

This is a scene that I recently ran across in the parish records and that I can’t get out of my head. It is Sunday morning 14 Oct 1855, and we are at the impressive Church of St Mary the Virgin, Blackburn in Lancashire, England. At the baptismal font waits the local vicar John Arthur […]

North Korean Poster: love the art, but genuine? EC writes in, 29 Mar 2018: Sadly not authentic NK propaganda. It’s from deviantart, the artist is “haryarti“. He’s got one for the UK too   

Earthy medieval art: love the hands going up – spare me…

Paolo and Francesca look forward to hell: notice the book dropping.

The Cripple’s Death It says something terrible about Britain’s nineteenth-century legal system. In 1812 a twelve year old was brought to the scaffold for having broken a window. He was barely able to walk, needing crutches: in fact, he was a ‘cripple’: he had been put on a man’s shoulder’s to break the window and […]

1918 Fairy on the New York stage.

This is a weird entry that I haven’t been able to find my way into. The year is 1891 and this is clearly a mechanism of some kind: but how did they do it? drbeachcombing AT gmail DOT com Or was it a light show, like Pepper’s Ghost. The latest addition to the side shows […]

Wilhelm and Alfred This post is written not with a sneer still less with pleasure, but with real sympathy for two men who saw their courage relegate them to a thousand footnotes. Welcome from left stage Wilhelm Korpik and Alfred Liskow. A light ripple of applause fills the auditorium. German Attack Wilhelm and Alfred had […]

Classic 19C ghost confusion at night. Fascinated by the raciness of the nightgowned woman.

Introducing HMS Hood This blog dealt yesterday (it feels longer ago) with Helen Duncan, medium extraordinaire, claiming, in Portsmouth in 1941, that HMS Barham had sunk before the British government had announced that ship’s demise. In that post I acknowledged that there was another case where Helen Duncan had learnt that a ship had sunk […]