Beachcombing's Bizarre History Blog

Stone, Slav Outposts Wends etc. Looking forward…

***James got this… scroll down for the answer*** 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 […]

When Beach was at university he lived about six floors up just under the roof of a marvelous Georgian building. Every day a bird used to visit his room and fly around inside impressing all Beach’s friends and casual visitors who thought that he’d turned into a Celtic saint. The real reason for the bird’s […]

Muravchik, Making David into Goliath One of the tragedies of the postwar period…

1984. He’s not Nixon but…

What is the first recorded use of cannabis? There follows what is unquestionably the first European reference, though it relates to a Steppe people. Herodotus (4,73) is here describing the Scythians, the barbarians beyond the Black Sea, a region note that Herodotus may have visited: certainly he had lots of surprisingly accurate information about Scythian […]

Padraig Og O Ruairc, Truce: Murder, Myth and the Last Days of the Irish War of Independence The catastrophic winding down of the struggle in Ireland

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. […]