Beachcombing's Bizarre History Blog

Scott Wood, London Urban Legends Urban legend junkies are perhaps the most attractive of all folklorists. Their brethren get obsessed with the minutiae of traditional culture: polkadots on dresses, superstitions about dandruff, dance rhythms… Alternatively, men and women of advanced years (who should know better) plunge into subjects that defy understanding, that are actually about not […]

The Fairy Hole on Cape Breton in Nova Scotia is a huge cave on a mountain side, some twenty yards across. There are several videos on youtube that give some sense of what it is like inside and immediately outside. Beach was interested by this site because Fairy Hole is a common placename in England, particularly […]

What do you do if you really dislike someone? Hurt them, tax them, kill them obviously… But if you really hate them you salt their land… Confused? Let’s head back to mid eighteenth century Portugal. The Tavora executions were some of the bloodiest from the eighteenth-century west: even fifty years later the family would have […]

Right through history castaways have been thrown up on foreign shores after a shipwreck, a storm or an argument on board (in many navies marooning was a form of punishment). For those of us interested in Wrong Place and Wrong Time phenomena these castaways are crucial. But how many were actually left behind. For example, how many […]

Beach has neglected for some time the honourable pursuit of dumb duelling: duels where either the weapon or the motive or preferably both were absurd. Here is one from 1853 from France. It is reported in a contemporary English newspaper so it may even, say it quietly, be true. Enter the whip duel A singular duel […]

Beach recently enjoyed Robert Hutchinson’s The Spanish Armada, particularly this short passage about an Elizabethan inventor, John Trew: Periods of national crisis often throw up the more eccentric among us. John Trew wrote to the queen in December offering his services for ‘her preservation and salvation… Though an old man, I desire to be employed […]

Simon Bolivar was a Venezuelan troublemaker who would lead the Spanish Americas to freedom. Ferdinand VII was the cretinous Spanish monarch who would allow this to happen. What Beach had not known until recently was that Bolivar and Ferdinand actually met as boys in 1800 in extraordinary circumstances. Bolivar (right) was seventeen; Ferdinand (left) was sixteen. […]

In the famous nineteenth-century Belgian novel The Legend of Thyl Ulenspiegel and Lamme Goedzak there is a reference to an unexpected form of execution. ‘Since you do not like any of these,’ said the Stevenyne, ‘you shall be taken on to the king’s ships, and there condemned to be torn asunder by four galleys.’ The […]

A busy day today as Beach is going to go and do five or six useless tasks. Here, then, is a fillip post, put tentatively in the urban legends file: surviving death by molten iron (or ‘molten metal’). This can’t be true can it? Can it? Drbeachcombing AT yahoo DOT com But few men have […]

Erotic Book Plates, (ed) Drs Phyllis and Eberhard Kronhausen (New York 1970) A rather eccentric and intriguing book from what we will one day look back upon as the mid-twentieth-century sex revolution. Two radical Freudians, who would write half a dozen works on western sex habits, including an old favourite of this blog Walter, were able […]

Sixtus V (the last of his name) was a grumpy counter-reformation pope who got mixed up with Philip II’s planned invasion of England: the invincible Armada. However, Sixtus, who hated Philip and saw the Spanish Empire as the greatest obstacle to the extension of his own power, made some strange conditions for lending money to […]

This is a haunting passage from the first volume of Cochrane’s Autobiography of a Seaman. The episode in question took place in 1794 while Cochrane was sailing on the Thetis. [63] The squadron sailed from Plymouth; and when about midway across the Atlantic an incident occurred worth relating… One night finding the temperature of the […]

Beach previously tried to bring honour to the name of Johann Weyer who combined a skeptical attitude to witchcraft with and a believing attitude to the supernatural. His books, which are not unfortunately easily accessible in English, are full of gems. Here is a good one which combines a nasty solitary fairy and a witchcraft […]

Sir Thomas Elyot (c. 1490-1546) was a Tudor polymath who wrote on politics, classical learning and Christian living: his day job, meanwhile, was as a diplomat to Henry VIII. In Elyot’s most interesting book (at least to the modern reader) The Castell of Helth the author sets out tips for good living and cures based […]

***Congrats to Melissa for getting this one*** The Index Biography is a new form of biography 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 […]