British and Irish Women in Black Spirits October 31, 2021
Author: Beach Combing | in : ModernIn today’s Boggart and Banshee podcast Chris Woodyard and I talk about the Woman in Black, a largely forgotten and utterly terrifying supernatural figure of American provenance. WiB, as devotees fondly call her, started to be seen in the 1860s in the United States. She would, in the next decades, be spotted in all corners […]
Transvestite Vicar Ghost in Interwar England May 4, 2016
Author: Beach Combing | in : ContemporaryThis story haunted Beach more than any other he has covered in the last couple of weeks. There are several Beachcombian themes that come together and then rip a man’s life apart: ghosts, English deference (and its disappearance), the eccentricities of those in religious office, and the loneliness of each and everyone of us in our […]
The First New Orleans Mardi Gras: Bears and Transvestites February 24, 2014
Author: Beach Combing | in : ModernThe relevant Wikipedia page dates the first recorded Mardi Gras to 1835. However, there was certainly a small Mardi Gras held a long century before. Indeed, possibly our earliest Mardi Gras description from the city was written out in 1730. In that year a Company of the Indies official Marc-Antoine Caillot, who had been in […]
Transvestite Protestors: Why, When and Where? June 23, 2013
Author: Beach Combing | in : Modern***Dedicated to Chris*** Modern and early modern social movements are not normally Beach’s thing. He’ll let the likes of Eric Hobsbawm salivate over those. But just yesterday an email brought a peculiar Irish American phenomenon to his attention: the Molly Maguires, previously known to this author only from Conan Doyle’s Valley of Fear. The Mollys […]
Transvestite President? May 19, 2012
Author: Beach Combing | in : Contemporary, ModernBeachcombing isn’t big on cross-dressing but this fabulous pastiche of poor old Jefferson Davies’ capture caught his attention. Some accounts – Union accounts it should be noted – claim that Jefferson tried to escape wearing his wife’s clothing. This comes from the New York Times. To Maj. Hudson was given the duty of surrounding the […]
Transvestite Knights in the Thirteenth Century March 7, 2011
Author: Beach Combing | in : MedievalUlrich von Liechtenstein (obit 1278) was a standard thirteenth-century knight. He had castles (three of them). He fought – above all, in Eastern Germany. And he also dressed up as a woman and rode from Maestre (Venice) up to Vienna. Yes, yes, Beachcombing stopped too when he first read this many years ago. But now […]