Beachcombing's Bizarre History Blog

Early plane legends, guessing that this never happened.

Early 1990s boat from Albania for Italy: the beginning of the migrant crisis.

Brussels

This is weird little story from Barnoldswick on the border between Lancashire and the North Riding. The year is 1928. Barnoldswick is affected by a ghost scare which has broken out like a fever among the schoolchildren of the town. The use of ‘fever’ is interesting thinking of that wonderful book by Robert E. Bartholomew […]

Curious about ring legends? This blogger recently went through the international folklore indexes in search of rings so you don’t have to: you can waste a lot of time there… Yes, he found the boring old chestnuts: ring found in fish; ring cut from corpse etc. etc. But there are also some marvelously bizarre and […]

Jim Ottaviani and Maris Wicks, Primates This blog has a tradition of, from time to time, flagging up excellent children’s books on history and the supernatural. Primates, a 140-page comic, falls very much into the first of these two categories. It takes the lives of three biological anthropologists, only two of whom are still alive: […]

Another flying legend.

This is a lovely story from Paisley (Scotland), ‘about the truth of which there is no doubt’. The other morning there were, as usual, standing the Cross several journeymen dyers, one of whom had the reputation of being clever in his way in providing the needful when thirst is requiring to be quenched. They looked […]

Got this from twitter but can’t find source or user: sorry! 31 Jul 2017: Larry writes  I don’t think they’ll ever learn: “St. Petersburg woman injured after bullet left inside oven explodes,” Tampa Bay Times, 2017 July 13. 

Late 19C, Marines.

Fairy legends are common in the Celtic fringes and the north of Britain. They are to be found in northern England and south central England: they also occasionally crop up in the English Midlands. However, they were as rare as gold dust in south-eastern England and East Anglia by the time that folklore records were […]

Student = Sharon Tate

19C taken from Walter Scott.

In the famous image of Henry VIII’s family from 1545 there is a mysterious figure walking on the left in the background. The woman apparently has no hair (note the back and front of her head and compare with the princesses in the picture) and she seems rather lost, perhaps even confused. Different theories for […]

Christian woman stolen off.