Beachcombing's Bizarre History Blog

The search for the original sewer dwelling creature continues. The first reference to sewer snakes comes from a British newspaper in 1888. It is agreeable to recall that, not long ago, a huge boa-constrictor was discovered in a Vienna sewer, the serpent having evidently escaped from a menagerie, and either taken refuge there from cold, […]

Beach recently ran across this marvelous nonsense: Probably the most remarkable manner of extinguishing fire has occurred at Boswell, a mining town in Pa., America. Hundreds of men, women, boys, and girls saved the town from destruction by throwing snowballs. The town says (the veracious chronicler) has no fire department and water is scarce. The […]

When did the last American Indian state fall to predatory Europeans? Well, you could argue that there are still some independent hunter-gatherer ‘states’ in the Amazon that have preserved their independence by virtue of jungle foliage. There was resistance among the plain Indians in the US as late as the 1920s (another post, another day). […]

This comes from a story told in the The Prince Edward Island Magazine (June 1902), which uniquely, gives us the evidence for fairy flight speed. We are in the Canadian Maritimes, on the eastern coast of Canada. Prince Edward Island (PEI) is one of the Canada’s most attractive provinces. By the twentieth century there was […]

Let’s talk floating islands. A few years ago Beach had a very gentle battle with a courteous Nessie writer Roland Watson. As a sceptic with folklore interests Beach was intrigued by many parts of Ronald’s argument, but one piece of new evidence that stood out was the claim that there was a floating island on Loch […]

Beach wants to introduce today a folklore custom that survived unexpectedly for three hundred years in the dark, before emerging to be briefly photographed by stunned folklorists at the end of the twentieth century. The tradition in question relates to bread. It was believed in south-west England in the 1600s that if you carried bread […]

Beach is knackered and trapped in a public computer room after coming down to a large Italian city to see his middle daughter start school. While doing some correction work on ghosts and thinking about a recent bad experience in a hotel (idiot manager): his tired mind managed to knit the two together. Does, he […]

Two ideas interested late nineteenth-century crime fiction writers. First, the ridiculous notion that finger prints were unique and that they could be recorded to incriminate this or that thief or murderer; and, second, optography, the sensible-sounding proposition that a murder victim would record the last thing he or she saw on the eye’s retina. Take […]

Weak old humanity has long tried to wring drops of the future out in the present by: cutting open live calves, watching birds, reading palms, throwing bamboo rods and, well, hundreds of other methods. It is rarely that Beach comes across a form of divination that has most others beaten. His reference work is a […]

A WIBT moment from early nineteenth-century Portugal. Thousands of well dressed but harassed men and women are milling and pushing in Lisbon harbor before a score of great British and Portuguese ships. The tense silence is suddenly broken as a piercing scream begins from behind. The woman’s voice, from a royal carriage is continual. Maria […]

It would be futile to discuss which historical man or woman had the most interesting life: what, after all, is ‘interesting’? However, if we think of places visited and people met, then a good candidate is surely Francisco de Miranda (1750-1816), South American patriot, playboy, soldier, sexual athlete and general n’er-do-well. Consider, just as a […]

The year is 1908. You are walking through a jungle territory in southeastern Cameroon in central Africa when you hear the sickening smack of the machete on flesh. Expecting the worst you emerge, your rifle half lifted, but see only a local hunter with a kill. He has taken a chimp in a trap and […]

Beach has recently been reading around medieval and early modern prostitutes. Of course, contemporary sources are not particularly vivid in this respect. Between canon law and town legislation, we either get an hysterical appeal to the coldest parts of the Gospels, or pounds, pennies and halfpence. In fact, if you want to relive the medieval […]

Beach read and watched a lot of zombie fiction this last summer. There was the Living Dead, the nightmarish Crossed and Alan Moore’s incredible adaptation, not to mention 28 Days Later. Beach is not an out and out zombie fan. In fact, he finds zombies, per se, the least interesting of all our supernatural fauna. (If Beach was […]

Today is an important day in the calendar of the Beach family, Beach and kids get to open the massive piggy bank (Money Pig) in the downstairs bathroom. Beach has then to double any money found there – it has been a year… – then kids, minus Beach, go out to spend Money Pig’s money […]