Beachcombing's Bizarre History Blog

Charlie Brown just doesn’t look like Charlie Brown should…

Regular readers will know that Beach has a pronounced weakness for the collision of the supernatural and the legal system: be this in Africa, Ireland or Britain. Here is a lovely case from Scotland in 1889. Five miners were charged yesterday, Falkirk Sheriff Court, with poaching on the lands of Mr William Forbes of Culendar, […]

  Penn Libraries call number: Inc B-720 Loved this…

‘The first day or so we all pointed to our countries. The third or fourth day we were pointing to our continents. By the fifth day, we were aware of only one Earth.’ Sultan bin Salman Al-Saud These sentiments do Sultan bin Salman credit, but the earth at night is rather less democratic than the […]

McCenroe can’t take it…

A busy day, so a good and, let’s say, credible story from Llanfillin in Wales. This tale also involve a favourite Beachcombian theme, which cannot be revealed to the end without ruining the story.  An English man goes to live in Wales and is warned that the house he wished to rent is haunted. The […]

Man in a fish…  

In 1859 a unique witchcraft source appeared in the British newspapers. Durham police had raided the house of one Mrs Leadpiper and had seized a number of letters from her supplicants. To our great good fortune the Durham Chronicle published several: and the article was then picked up by other papers from Cornwall to Luton. […]

John R. Schindler, Fall of the Double Eagle I’m a big Schindler fan, looking forward to reading this…

This is an Italian memory of a British traveller, it is also a rather good ghost story. The non consequality of many of the events is effective. I had the pleasure many years ago of staying for some days at San Donato, in Chianti. It is about thirty miles from Florence. The way of life […]

Oldstone-Moore, Of Beards and Men This is a favourite subject of mine: let’s hope the book lives up…

***Dedicated to David*** In a recent reflection about the way we remember the past, this blogger made the case that after about two hundred years we cease to ‘own’ history. ‘For Beach Waterloo seems, somehow, ‘present’. Anything before that date seems, meanwhile, completely out of reach, as if the historical imagination falls down into a […]

Smile for the cameras…

Here is an American story (of who knows what veracity) that got sucked across the Atlantic and into the British newspapers: WDP, 22 Nov 1872, 3. Few positions in life can be imagined more disagreeable than that of being imprisoned in a haunted cell in police station. The New Orleans Times tells a most unpleasant […]

Fox hunt problems with new arrival…