Beachcombing's Bizarre History Blog

  The Index Biography is a quiz 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 Stalin (he of […]

This is a great supernatural stories from 18C England. The earliest version known to this blogger dates to 1793. Note that this is a much later version that claims to be based on actual records. Beach doesn’t believe that for a second. Ha! It is almost identical and entire passages word-for-word the same. An Account of Mr. […]

‘Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,/ Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,/ Silence the pianos and with muffled drum/ Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.’ 2 Apr Fri, 1830, Britain’s oldest inhabitant died. Solemn notices appeared in the newspaper Death Extraordinary. On Friday se’nnight [a week Friday], at […]

Location: Ireland (Wilde 1888, 195), late nineteenth century Aim: ‘To Cause Love’ Ingredients: new plate, new butter, a bucolic retreat, and an ‘O woman loved by me’ Method: (i) buy a new plate, make sure that it has never been used (ii) Put golden butter on the plate. (iii) Find the one you love. (iv) […]

It is always such fun when folklore produces an impossible story that is actually credible. Here is one recorded from the Hebrides in J. F. Campbell’s Popular Tales of the West Highlands. Note that the Feen are the Fenians, Gaelic Robin Hoods. I was told in Benbecula how a man had found a book, containing the […]

Here is a curiosity: a plate that plays magical music to your sleeping ear. The passage comes from the writing of John Beaumont (obit 1731) a geologist and reluctant British mystic who sometimes saw ‘spirits’. In one of his works (Account, 188) Beaumont claims: I may here note, That some Persons have told my self, […]

Nina Burleigh, The Fatal Gift of Beauty In 2007 a young British student Meredith Kercher was murdered in her flat in Perugia, Italy: she had possibly been raped before her death. The crime was a horrible one, but the victim was all too often forgotten in the events that followed. The prosecutors in Perugia decided […]

Woolwich UK 1917

It is absolutely unsurprising that there is a strong liberal bias in university classrooms, particularly in the social sciences and to a slightly lesser extent in the humanities: and that this is true throughout the Anglo-Saxon and, indeed, the western world. It has been estimated, for example, that only one in forty sociologists in the […]

1920s? Floodmouse writes, 29 Jun 2017: I think your photo is from the early 1930s.  If you look at pictures from the 1920s, you will see the dresses have a lower waistline, which is sort of dropped below the hips.  The dresses in your photos have a higher waistline.  The high waistline and the length […]

A busy day in paradise today. Exams. However, Beach ran, a few months ago across this story and wondered whether this was just journalistic bluff, sheer coincidence (very possibly) or a little bit of Civil War history that had been lost. The Evening Bulletin of San Francisco, dated February 24, 1885, is said to have […]

In the last months Beach has put up a number of posts on possible nineteenth-century urban legends: as they are reported as facts though and as the nineteenth-century was a foreign country (‘they did things differently there’) it is difficult, perhaps impossible with any certainty to distinguish the legendary from the simply bizarre. This is […]