Beachcombing's Bizarre History Blog

Surrenders are never very easy moments but the meeting between William Tecumseh Sherman and Joseph E. Johnston at Bennett Place on 17 and 18 April 1865 as the American Civil War was winding down proved a generally civilized affair. Sherman, the Union commander, was a Democrat and had a natural sympathy for the south: despite […]

Paris, anteaters…

How the chaps in purple bought it…

Sometimes the blogger finds a newstory that he cannot let go. After a week of wrestling with his conscience Beach has decided that he simply has to give this particular incidence of love between the peoples of Europe wider coverage. We are in 1931. Prague. Thursday. Two schoolboys were killed in the course of a […]

Beach has recently been looking at cases of men and women who accidentally, or deliberately, or accidentally-deliberatishly slept with demons. The following comes from a seventeenth-century account and it is interesting to see an idea that defined the Middle Ages surviving so powerfully into the early modern period: Beach wonders when the latest record would […]

Raid on an illegal whisky still in prohibition…

William Geroux, The Mathews Men: Seven Brothers and the War Against Hitler’s Uboats Always up for Battle of the Atlantic books…

Robert Damon Schneck, The Bye Bye Man and Other Strange-but-True-Tales (New York 2014) RDS has built a reputation, in the last decade, for ‘strange stories’ well told with a strong bias towards the supernatural. This ‘new’ collection – actually originally published by Anomalist Press in 2005 as The President’s Vampire – has the typical RDS […]

Horowitz, Kosher USA (Columbia University Press) Food history is always good and some of the manipulations described in the blurb got my curiosity going.

Aristotle writes in his Politics (7, 2) that ‘among the Iberians, a warring people, they fix obeliskoi in the earth around a man’s grave corresponding to the number that they have killed’. This is a much quoted sentence and one that has caused some confusion over the years because of the translation and mistranslation of obeliskoi. […]

Not sure what is going on here, but my guess is a peasant is finishing off a knight, possible with the knight’s sword. 23 May 2016, lots of emails pointing out what should have been obvious. This is David on Goliath. D’oh. E.g. Tarcangel: Your May 20, 2016 drawing of a “peasant killing a knight” […]

Beach likes to think that he presents an interesting series of monsters to the international anomalist, folklore horror and ghost community. But he has one regret. In largely limiting himself to British and Irish newspapers the range of fauna is often fairly modest, certainly when compared to the marvelous stuff that appears in some American […]

The other big three, Wilson, Clemenceau, Lloyd George: would you put the future of Europe in their hands?

  There follows a particularly vivid description of an African execution/sacrifice of a witch. The witness, Paul B. Du Chaillu (obit 1903) was describing his travels in West Africa in the 1850s: Du Chaillu has gone down in history as the first westerner to see gorillas (though there is Hanno…) Here he instead he learns […]

Unexciting title but this thirteenth century MS has something