Beachcombing's Bizarre History Blog

***Matthew gets it…*** 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 […]

Shortly before his emphatic and embarassing defeat. People carried on shoulders rarely end well…

Those Bolshevik bastards… Actually the four Romanov girls were shaved because of the measles (?)

Adorable. Could this be mass produced for the greater good?

‘integrates your money but segregates you’

This is one of those only in Ireland stories, which the British press loved in the nineteenth century. The tale originally came up in the Cork Examiner, but this text was taken from Bu He, 3 April 1869. An amusing instance of post mortem bequest and its consequences transpired at the Kanturk Petty Sessions on […]

This tale appeared in a good Protestant paper in the six counties. It has a puritan twist and a capitalist ethic. The following story is told of Mr. Sheaf, a grocer in Portsmouth, New Hampshire: it appears that a man had purchased some wool of him. which had been weighed and paid for and Mr. […]

‘I told you these were shadows of the things that have been,’ said the Ghost. ‘That they are what they are, do not blame me!’

1889 polygamist Mormons righteous in prison.

In 1920 the Journal of the Society for Psychical Research published a letter from Celia Alleyne. I like this letter because having been through tens of such cases from the twentieth century now this is (a) written by a person of above average intelligence and (b) average in terms of relations with the ‘fairies’ (or […]

Miranda shortly before his death: the most colourful death and now montony in a small room. Can anyone go lower on sad prison images?

Why we love mini skirts…

Here is a remarkable fairy account from Newfoundland. We are in Canada and the report appeared in the Evening Telegraph 26 Dec 1900. This, then, is a creepy Christmas story. A resident of this city, who is subject to extraordinary hallucinations, was the other night, as he seriously states himself, ‘again carried off by fairies’. […]

Beach has recently been dealing with the horrors of losing manuscripts in times before personal computers and photocopiers. But why exempt the contemporary world? Why ignore the potential of broken hard discs and failed backups and lost pen drives to ruin lives? Example. Several years ago Beach found himself associated with a family whose matriarch […]