Beachcombing's Bizarre History Blog

Shocking stuff…

The Index Biography is a new form of biography 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 […]

Incredible image as the German army advances towards the Allied lines…

James McClenon is a sociologist who has written on the paranormal and parapsychology. His books are to be recommended in the highest terms, not just for their arguments, put perhaps most of all for their reasonable yet never irritating openness to the unexplained; something which does not offend even a hoary old materialist like Beach. […]

Angry?

Here is a cute witchcraft story from the wrong side of the Atlantic, where Salem is supposed to have put paid to any witch hunt shenanigans. What Beach loves about this account is that we are clearly dealing with very sincere people who are making it up as they go along on the basis of […]

In 1885 a neophyte priest William Herbert Seddon arrived at the parish of Painswick in Warwickshire. Seddon had a strong classical background, he appears for instance in that monument of Victorian learning, The Concordance to the Septuagint, as an important contributor. And he was interested to find, on his arrival, that until the early nineteenth […]

The day after….

Nutritionists disagree on almost everything. However, if you go and visit several score one of the few points of consensus (along with ‘eat vegetables’) is that sugar is bad for us: in fact, there is far more agreement about sugar than about fat. Humanity’s dalliance with sugar dates back to the first time that a brave […]

Christopher Othen, Katanga 1960-1963 Always been curious about Katanga, two many bad 1980 novels…

Beach recently had the immense pleasure or reading John Widdowson’s If You Be Don’t Be Good, a collection (and analysis) of bogeys used by Newfoundland parents in the interwar and immediate postwar. JW’s purpose was to examine how parents controlled their children in Atlantic Canada, particularly through folklore. But he also picked up many fascinating, […]

Another book that passed me by… The lost religions of the near east. Gerard Russell, Heirs to Forgotten Kingdoms  

Lost technology….

Happy Christmas to all readers. This was Strange History’s photo of the year. A teen (Jewish?) girl photographed by British or Dominion (Canadian?) troops at the liberation of Bergen Belsen’s hospital, 15 April 1945. Frighteningly thin, she has just survived the worst war in human experience, on one of the most dangerous acres of European soil. […]

The three brothers….