Beachcombing's Bizarre History Blog

Beach has recently been messing about with Ngram, as his leisurely ancestors used to mess around on southern English rivers. Ngram for the uninitiated is a Google tool that allows the user to measure the frequency of certain words in Google Books. It is not as sophisticated as Google Analytics, which measures search terms. But […]

The literature on self help dates back to the book of Proverbs and Cicero, but in its modern multi-billion dollar form it has a particularly American imprint: Dale Carnegie, Anthony Robbins, Brian Tracy and Napoleon Hill among the most interesting. Most self help coaches stress the science of self help: life changes are given as […]

Big Ben the great bell that rings out from Westminster is a central part of British identity: not least because its chimes have, for many years, sounded on national radio and television programs. It would hardly be surprising then that there are superstitions about Big Ben, but what is surprising is that these seem not […]

These words came from an article in All the Year Round 1869 trying to explain ghosts as problems of sensation. It is unusually well written, and goes into some areas of perception that modern studies don’t deal with: we tend to be obsessed by sight. Next to sight, hearing is the sense most frequently imposed […]

***Solved after quite a wait by Peter G: scroll down for the answer*** 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 […]

Stephen Gundle is one of the best British writers on Italy. He has dealt with Italy film industry, the Italian ideal of beauty and the relationship between Botteghe Oscure (the nasty old Italian Communist Party) and Moscow. However, his most mainstream book is Death and the Dolce Vita: the Dark Side of Rome in the […]

Bored, got nothing to do? Here’s a thought. Why not blind a friend for a lark? There are a couple score newspaper stories from 1850-1950 of workmen, companions and complete strangers giving victims pipes that have been doctored with gunpowder. Typically the smoker puts a match to the shag of tobacco, takes a deep breath and […]

Beach is eternally worried about mystics, people who have or believe that they have paranormal powers. Where do they come from? What do they mean? Most studies of ‘mystics’ put them in a historical tradition. The Cunning Man in the English or, for that matter, New England countryside in the 1700s draws on Christianity, Anglo-Saxon […]

Edith Turner (deceased 2016) was a well-known British anthropologist. She is honoured here as a rogue researcher* for an experience in 1985 among the Ndembu in Central Africa. She was particularly interested in spirit healing and was allowed, at the very end of November of that year, to attend a healing ceremony where Meru, an […]

Bloody Sunday was an atrocity (simply no other word) that took place in Derry, Northern Ireland, 30 Jan 1972. On that day British paratroopers opened fire on groups of protestors and killed, over several minutes, fourteen men. Who was to blame, the individual British soldiers, their officers, the politicians who had tried to put down […]

***David B gets it, scroll down for answer**** 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 […]

Readers of this blog will now have to excuse Beach for possibly the single most boring post in strangehistory history, but the following has been rankling inside for some time. 1880s or 1880’s? This might seem unimportant, but if you spend several hours a day reading books about the past it starts to matter. How should […]

Yesterday we offered the best nineteenth-century writing on Irish fairies. Today the best of the twentieth century: 1911: In this year W. Y. Evans-Wentz changed fairy writing for ever by publishing his brilliantly bizarre The Fairy Faith in Celtic Countries. Evans-Wentz offered a collection of fairylore for all the Celtic nations (Cornwall, Man, Scotland, Brittany, […]

Beach once before ran a post on missing Sherlock Holmes stories in the Invisible Libraries series: books that do not exist save in the imagination. However, he missed a trick. There are not just missing Sherlock Holmes stories there are also missing Sherlock Holmes publications. On several occasions in the canon Sherlock refers, en passant, […]

Royal parents have a unique problem. They have to bring up their children like anyone else (or, ok, pay others to do so), but they also have to convince their children that they are God’s anointed. Infants painfully learn that the world does not revolve around them: yet, in the case of royal children, particularly heirs […]