Beachcombing's Bizarre History Blog

Chris starts our new podcast episode (Mermaid 101) with this question (see title) and I answer ‘yes’. Mermaids (which have featured for over a decade on this site) are social supernatural beings who happen to live in the water rather than on land. They are essentially marine fairies. But there is an important difference in […]

***I’ve been absent for a couple of months because I was locked out of the account! Just to let you know that Chris and I continue to do our podcasts and there has been an episode on medieval x-files and now bird spirits. This is a fragment of an article on Fairy Census 2 I’ve […]

I had the great pleasure to start the year with a podcast episode on luck and lucky charms (with Chris Woodyard and her extraordinary free source book). We spoke about the psychology of luck, Italy as the dinosaur valley of fortuna, corpse magic (golly), the Great War and talismans, burying St Joseph to sell your […]

I’ve always struggled to love ghosts. The only accounts that I find even half convincing have phantoms on a perpetual carousel of tedium: walking up that road, jumping off that bridge, creaking through that door… Then when ghosts are more daring – Chris in our podcast this month introduced me to an Icelandic housewife zombie […]

Supernatural fashions come and go. One generation ghosts are hopping around in shrouds, then they are carrying their heads under their arms, next we have clanking chains… Fairy fashions, though, as I argue on the latest episode of Boggart and Banshee, are surprisingly constant. I offer here my three fairy fashion rules. Rule 1: ‘Uniform […]

I just can’t take pre-cognition and death omens seriously: a bat flying into the window, a rooster singing loud at midnight, even an encounter with a tall woman combing her hair. Yes, yes, all these are picturesque folklore confetti. But to say, as many of our ancestors did, that they represent the grim reaper throwing […]

This morning, my new book comes out – The Boggart: Folklore, History, Placenames and Dialect. It is three hundred pages long and has just shy of a thousand items in the bibliography. There are lots of maps and images and, reader, if it dropped on your head from a three-storey building it would brain you. […]

Introduction The Wollaton Gnomes was a classic anomalous encounter. 23 September 1979, a half dozen primary school children went for an evening walk in Wollaton Park in Nottingham. A number of these children then saw thirty small cars each with a gnome driver and passenger. The encounter lasted, according to the children, about fifteen minutes, […]

I’ve never heard of these shenanigans before but my immediate reaction is ‘urban legend’. In urban legends, remember, ‘razor blades’ are put in everything from Halloween sweets or apples (US) to lipstick (Iran), to slides (stuck there with chewing gum) so why not behind posters? After all, ‘if someone was to tear [a poster] off […]

Messing around with numbers for the great European cities over the last two hundred years: I’m not interested so much in the biggest cities as the capitals of the most important countries. Can these be taken as barometers for the successes and failures of their countries? A few things stand out. First, growth is constant […]

This bit of fun comes from Paul Tabori’s biography of British ghost hunter Harry Price. No date is given. Are we perhaps in the 1930s? A less sweeping claim was made by a gentleman who had invented a way of testing the human aura!… It seemed that the ‘aura’ machine was a violet-ray apparatus; it […]

Introduction Been reading a lot about poltergeists recently, perhaps the most fascinating of all Fortean phenomena. I’ve collected a list of my favourite poltergeist actions; and then my favourite poltergeist sounds. I try and pass very quickly over the banal and well known. These come from tens of different cases. Poltergeist Acts Stones thrown; showers […]

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 […]

   Introduction: Eyes like Saucers Eyes like saucers comes up again and again in accounts of the supernatural: ghosts sometimes have them, ditto demons and ‘black dogs’ almost always have them. But why? What do these descriptions mean? Where do they come from? Monsters Let’s start with some typical creepy saucer descriptions. A bogey at […]

ABCs (alien big cats) is the useful acronym given to descriptions of exotic felines that allegedly live wild in the British and Irish countryside. Between April 2004 and July 2005 the British Big Cats society recorded some 2,123 sightings of ABCs from pumas to lynxes. What is going on here? Well, there are a couple […]