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 ripe […]

The King’s Evil (aka scrofula) was a form of tuberculosis that created horrific injuries on the skin’s surface, particular in the neck area. It could only be cured, many early modern French and British sufferers believed, by contact with royalty: a sufferer would go to the king or queen, be touched, and cured. The practice […]

Hamelburg Prison, American Marines Louis K writes in late June: After reading your caption for the picture, I was mistified. According to my knowledge there was no (major) US Marines presence in the ETO (European Theater of Operations). And looking on the internet more or less confirmed that: So I wonder where the caption came […]

Sheltering under a Sherman tank on the Gothic line.

A Cruikshank pic: love the guy’s expression.

Love this. Late 19C British view of the two Irelands, Protestant and Catholic.

Beach was awfully fond of his snowball tag, and was disappointed when he simply ran out of good snowball stories. Imagine his joy then to run into some ghostly snowballs in Skinner’s Myths and Legends of Our Own Land. The year is apparently 1849 Forty-seven years ago, in the township of St.  Mary’s, Illinois, two […]

This fine ‘lost valley’ story comes from Texas, but the tale of the shepherd who accidentally walks through into a hidden dell or stumbles up, while chasing a lamb, onto an unknown plateau is probably as old as our Neolithic ancestors. This particular version was collected by J. Frank Dobie at the end of the nineteenth century. West […]

Beach has only once been to Bedfordshire, a tiny English county near London. He got stuck in its chief town, Luton, took a room in a sordid pub (the bookshelf had a rack full of well-thumbed pornographic magazines – if only Tripadvisor had been around…) and missed his bus.* In any case, enough of Luton. […]

Serial Killer in Chief

Today is the anniversary of Britain’s vote, suicidal or brave as you see fit, to leave the European Union. Beach thought he would remember that day with a quotation that has more resonance with him than anything else he has read on the campaign because it describes a strange lived historical experience: the sense of […]

This is a great story which appears with the heading, ‘Scotch Ghost Story’. We are in Glasgow. Beach has no doubt though that it is a Victorian urban legend. Let’s face it, the tale is so satisfying that if it ever actually happened it would have been abstracted and told to everyone who would listen. […]

19C illlustration of the tree message

Old school