Beachcombing's Bizarre History Blog

For the unacquainted Herne the Hunter is a southern English bogie, who haunted a tree in the park at Windsor Castle on the Bucks/Berks border. Almost all writing about Herne is overlaid with speculative points and useless comparisons. This post offers, therefore, an absolute basic version of the legend focusing hard on our early sources, […]

Seven twentieth century myths follow. Any other contributions or angry rebuttals, drbeachcombing AT yahoo DOT com Great War: A Disaster Waiting to Happen, 1914 The Great War was going to happen sooner or later because two countries, Germany and France, wanted it. However, the consensus that the Great War would have inevitably led to the ‘breaking […]

In the 1970s folklorists lightened up and realised that folklore was not just about elves, witches and weather prognostications. Modern beliefs involving swallowed melon seeds and superstitions about cars from suburbia were also fair game. With this new revelation, several excited young men and women went out and began collecting tales and started writing about […]

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 […]

Norwood was a rural area to the south of London that was sucked into the metropolis in the mid, late nineteenth century. If you want to go and imagine where the nightingale once sang and where Surrey farmers shot rabbits, head off for the mean streets around Crystal Palace, sit down and weep. ‘This is the […]

The claim that Lord Kitchener had survived death seems to have been well established by December 1916. By 1917 the story rumbled through the spring and summer building up a head of steam until it quite unexpectedly entered the real world. In early September 1917 Lloyds opened an insurance policy, really a bet, that Kitchener […]

In the rusty old filing cabinet that provides fodder for this blog there is somewhere a file on men being buried upright. However, Beach has failed to find said file for the last three years, so despairing he hands the problem over to his readers. Famous or not so famous people from history who decided […]

***Thanks to Roberto for this tale*** This is a nasty little story from nineteenth-century Kansas. We are in Leavenworth in that state and enter Mrs. Green, note a suspiciously generic name. Mrs. Green is a midwife, a profession that has had many ups and downs at the hands of doctors, feminists, journalists (nota bene), witch-hunters […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

Beach goes to the motherland today with daughters and without dog or wife. Mixed feelings. Here is a familiar sounding story. Eugene Delacroix has persuaded the richest man in Europe, Baron James de Rothschild to pose as a beggar for a painting. Rothschild, a gentleman, agrees. Delacroix hung a tunic on his shoulders, placed a […]

Outstanding story about coming face to face with the devil in Paris. This first appeared in October 1888. The folklore motif that rounds the tale off is: G303.16.3.1. Happy reading… The chief persons named are a Russian Prince, Pomerantseff, and a French Abbé, Girod, who ridiculed the whole theory of apparitions. The conversation at a dinner […]

British folklorists badly screwed up their own discipline in the late nineteenth century. When they should have been collecting the rich crops from the home counties and the north and midlands they, instead, indulged in premature comparative work, looking overseas for answers to stupidly ambitious questions. The comparison with some of Britain’s smaller European neighbours […]