Beachcombing's Bizarre History Blog

British troops surrender in Crete to German paratroopers. (May have been New Zealanders).

A simple question today. Are witch’s broomsticks dangerous? Well, anything that takes human beings out of the natural element, namely the earth and places them with the birds could go wrong and depending on how high witches were flying, horribly wrong. The greatest in flight danger that witches faced was accidentally saying a Christian name […]

Anti-lynching demonstration

Did Churchill allow Coventry to be bombed to save the Enigma secret?

Picture of the month? I can’t believe I’ve never seen this before. Marlene Dietrich kisses a serviceman coming home, 1945.

For many years this blog has run a weird wars tag, some of the most bizarre story from humanities adventures on the battlefield. Beach has recently got a sniff of one story that has greatly excited him, but he can’t track down the details. He throws open the problem to readers hoping that someone will […]

E.R. Bills, Black Holocaust: The Paris Horror and a Legacy of Texas Terror (Eakin Press Aug 2015). ‘From 1891 to 1922, Texans burned an average of one person of color at the stake a year for three decades. These burnings typically featured carnival atmospheres with thousands in attendance, including men, women and children who later […]

‘I’ve… seen things… you people wouldn’t believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion; I watched c-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate… All those… moments… will be lost, in time, like… tears… in… rain.’ Famous lines from Bladerunner. But what if instead of an exotic replicant at his death, we […]

  A. G. Lewis DFC, July 1940 in the middle of the Battle of Britain. Dominion pilot (South Africa) who came, fought and survived the war.  

Beach is not sure why he finds this meal so appealing, but it is probably something to do with the disregard for frontier law and the ability of Texans to improvise entertainment out of a goose, a shack and some eggs. Sherman is and was the capital of Grayson County in Texas. In 1858 a […]

1976, a US flag becomes an unlikely weapon in a demonstration.  

This is a short story published some 90 years after the event it supposedly described: Chester is a city on the northern Welsh borders. This story is frequently retold in miscellany of the bizarre, local histories and Francis Wheen includes it in his marvelous The Chatto Book of Cats, 1993. There are three interesting points: […]

The Kaiser meets the most presumptuous Briton of his generation: love Churchill’s boyish face.

In a recent post Beach looked at the extraordinary survival of the Waldensians, a courageous proto-Protestant sect, which  managed to weather the full rage of the Church in the Alps between France and Italy. The history of the Waldensians is a long catalogue of courage and atrocity: the courage of the Waldensians and the violence of the […]

Summer is over, sigh: first class tomorrow. I’ve put the very best 10,000 words below for posts from this month. Happy September! Beach American Wild Men: Bruce T. on banging stones, and Luke on a Texas wild man… Anticipating the Telephone: Sam has come across a supposed ancient telephone… Baby Loving Snakes: David M brings up […]