Beachcombing's Bizarre History Blog

***Thanks to Stephen D for bringing this book to my attention*** Most anthropologists choose an exotic destination and then head off to live with the Kwang or the Baiga for a couple of years, subsequently using the material they gather there for their doctorates. In the 1980s Tanya Marie Luhrmann, instead, headed from Cambridge in […]

10 March 1890 one of the worst mining accidents in British history* took place in Morfa in South Wales. 87 miners were killed. A gas explosion had been set off, probably by an unfastened lamp. Interestingly the local community had had forebodings before the explosion. This article came out almost two months later in the […]

Chrisian Lange, Paradise and Hell in Islamic Traditions Another one I’ve been looking forward to: parallels between Christian and Islamic hells are fascinating…

From the 1920s to the 1940s Britain had perhaps the best spy agencies in the world: this was particularly true of its foreign spy agency, SIS or MI6. Ian Fleming, Graham Greene and even John Le Carré’s fiction carry the distilled essence (albeit sometimes shifted to later times) of British triumph against Nazi Germany, Imperial […]

Grundstein, Naked in the Woods Ah, Hippies. Can’t wait for this one…

Princeton students after a snowball fight: thanks to Wade for this many months ago. 22 Nov 2015: Anon X writes in with this tab that shows that snowball fights did take place. He also points out though that there are many on the net who claim that this was taken after a boxing match. Any […]

Another in our description of the cult of hate for medieval cats. The following text is anonymous and appeared in a fourteenth-century hand in MS Cotton Julius D, xi, fol. 84 r. It is short and it entitled Errores Valdensium, the Errors of the Waldensians. The Waldensians, for the uninitiated were a Christian sect that […]

Princess Anne (looking beautiful) talking to an ancient Haile Selassie.

Now here’s an easy question on mythology. Tomorrow at noon you will be taken off to the infernal regions by an underworld spirit. You have twenty four hours to prep from the seventy or eighty volumes of mythology on your shelves. What one lesson do you bring away from your reading before you are taken below? It’s […]

Bayeux tapestry is often surprisingly ‘raw’: here a woman is hit by a priest? Typhon to the rescue, 22 nov 2015, After seeing the picture I would have made an uneducated guess, that maybe the woman is a heathen priestess and thus gets slapped by a priest. The structure she is standing in symbolizing some sort […]

The best candidate for the haunting though has to be Emilia Wesley (aka Emily). What does this attribution rely upon? Well, let’s start with some minor suggestive points. First, she was fourteen at the time of the haunting, a classic poltergeist age. Second, in one of the letters Emily claimed that she gave the polt the […]

Polish soldiers at the front in 1920 as the Red Army approaches

There is a long history of trying to explain poltergeist events with reference to fakery of household members; or extreme angst within the family circle. The first is absolutely credible, given the vagaries of human nature, but difficult to deploy as an explanation when the experiences were so bizarre and so, well, ‘total’ as in the […]

Girl (late 1950s?) runs to freedom: police from the two Germanies face off. Amazing picture: why isn’t it better known?

The IEA, one of Britain’s most serious think tanks, has recently published a list, a very stimulating list, of the thirteen great economic mistakes in British economic policy in the last century. All this got Beach thinking about the great mistakes in public policy generally since 1900. Here is a very limited list of points […]