Beachcombing's Bizarre History Blog

In 1859 a unique witchcraft source appeared in the British newspapers. Durham police had raided the house of one Mrs Leadpiper and had seized a number of letters from her supplicants. To our great good fortune the Durham Chronicle published several: and the article was then picked up by other papers from Cornwall to Luton. […]

This is an Italian memory of a British traveller, it is also a rather good ghost story. The non consequality of many of the events is effective. I had the pleasure many years ago of staying for some days at San Donato, in Chianti. It is about thirty miles from Florence. The way of life […]

***Dedicated to David*** In a recent reflection about the way we remember the past, this blogger made the case that after about two hundred years we cease to ‘own’ history. ‘For Beach Waterloo seems, somehow, ‘present’. Anything before that date seems, meanwhile, completely out of reach, as if the historical imagination falls down into a […]

Here is an American story (of who knows what veracity) that got sucked across the Atlantic and into the British newspapers: WDP, 22 Nov 1872, 3. Few positions in life can be imagined more disagreeable than that of being imprisoned in a haunted cell in police station. The New Orleans Times tells a most unpleasant […]

There are few greater pleasures than bringing half- or three-quarter forgotten British bogeys back from the dead. Churn-Milk Peg was a psychotic old dear who would sit in glades of nut trees and smoke a pipe, waiting for children to come along to pick from her trees: ‘churn milk nuts’ were unripe nuts. In as […]

Bosom serpents refers to the belief that an animal, typically a reptile or amphibian has taken up residence in a human body. Two truisms to start with. First, there is no way that these animals could live in a human body. Second, if the patient believed in the BoS, the doctor had to deal with […]

***Dedicated to Chris W*** Beach in his tiny hours of research ran across two accounts that feel like Victorian urban legends: a favourite theme of this blog. Note the lack of concrete references. These look as if they were included in a joke column and then recycled as news with some salacious details thrown in… A Sheffield […]

Welsh ghost stories always have something extra: maybe it is the water, maybe Methodism, maybe coal dust… They are, in any case, always worth reading. This one starts with a nun that is admittedly not very promising but bear with her. Llangynwydd, which is in the Llynvi Valley, has a ghost scare on just now. […]

Ludchurch (aka Lud’s Church, Lud Church) is not a church. It is a haunted ravine in the English midlands, Staffordshire, that has been frequently associated with the supernatural. The photo above will hopefully give some idea of what it is like. It has also been associated with an underground race of hominids in caves that […]

One of the eternal human problems is how to transmit facts – history, fame, infamy, love… – from one generation to another. We have tried to do it on calf skin, on papyrus, on the tongues of the tribal singers and on stone. But never forget we have also tried to do it on glass. […]

Beach has recently been looking for the stranger monsters of British mythology and with some pride he comes today to the Baum-Rappit, a monster from Rochdale in Lancashire. What was the Baum-Rappit? Well as the name suggests it seems to have been a diabolical rabbit. Wright in his incredibly useful dialect dictionary comes up with […]

Love suicides are happily today a rare thing. But they were common enough from 1700 to, say, after the Second World War to enter folklore: many places in the English-speaking world have their ‘Lovers Leaps’. (Derbyshire, a small British Midland county has four!) Why were love suicides so popular? Perhaps we can separate the pull […]

Walter Scott refers, in one of his poems, to ‘the noontide hag’, a creature he explains in a note as ‘a tall, emaciated, gigantic female figure, is supposed, in particular, to haunt the district of Knoidart’ and ‘which, contrary to the general rule of ghostly creatures, appeared in the full blaze of noon.’ Quite how […]

Were there self made men in Victorian Britain? The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography as well as being the single most impressive collection of biographies yet put together is useful in measuring money as for most modern individuals, say from the eighteenth century onwards, the vox-writer has included wealth at death (something recorded in Britain […]

The following is a report from Reuters from Turkey from June 1937. Pretending to be a ghost, a beautiful young woman in Istanbul, who appeared naked at night in the house of a priest, and danced before him, has made big haul money and other valuables. When he first saw what he described as a […]