Beachcombing's Bizarre History Blog

The journalist himself arrived once the haunting had officially come to an end. However, he found one individual, ‘a well-to-do, respectable, intelligent man’, who had been in the building on Sunday 13 June when as many as three hundred neighbours had gathered to hear the noises. When I got in the sound seemed to be […]

The haunting began after the resident mother had a fit 4 June 1880. Noises started up immediately around the house. This went on for several nights – the knocking performances commencing shortly after midnight, in the orthodox fashion. The woman became somewhat alarmed these singular visitations, she could not sleep, the children were frightened, and […]

Beach has recently become interested in a nineteenth-century ghost case from Somerset in southern England that has it all: there are witches, there are sprites, there are magpies, there are spells and counter spells, there is a spirit that rolls around the room, and there is a magic lantern.  There are unfortunately few sources: only […]

***Tineke gets it, 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 life. We offered up previously […]

This little report was printed in the Daily Telegraph in November 1886. The article in question gives a series of classic mermaid sightings, but starts with one that the journalist had personally heard of and that had purely local interest. The problem is: where are we? A boatman lately told me that about two years […]

This is a very enjoyable ghost story: it is classed as an urban legend because this blogger has come across it before but cannot remember where. Can anyone help: drbeachcombing AT gmail DOT com The text comes from The Life and Times of Henry Lord Brougham (the good Lord’s autobiography, published in 1871: flor. 1778-1868). […]

An 1897 ghost story, with a small ghost riot, exceptional for this extraordinary illustration from the Illustrated Police News. Regrettably the story was not more widely reported. Can anyone give more? drbeachcombing AT gmail DOT com PLUMSTEAD, near Woolwich, has for the past week been the scene of a ghostly visitation, in which the ‘spirit’ […]

This mermaid account is perhaps most interesting for the insight it gives into the mermaid trade in the east. We are in Delhi (Anon 1870). I was quite astonished to hear from some of my friends that a real mermaid exposed in the chouk of this city, could be seen on paying a single piece. […]

This is one of those WIBT (wish I’d been there) moments, described by Lloyd George some two decades after the event. First some background. 4 August 1914 Britain had given an ultimatum to Germany stating that Germany would have to remove its troops from Belgium forthwith. If Germany continued to violate Belgian neutratlity then Britain […]

In 1871 a man in a cattle market in Ipswich (England) watched a dealer remove, from his pocket, various objects and was shocked to see a small skeletal foot there. On being asked what the object was: the cattle dealer responded that it was a ‘fairy foot’ and that it was a ‘sovereign protection against […]

‘World war’ is a magnificent phrase. It alliterates, it promises a vast scale, and it doesn’t get lost in tiresome Latinate polysyllables. But where does the expression come from? The Longer Oxford Dictionary gives its earliest reference in English to 1848 and the People’s Journal.* Actually the phrase seems to have been used earlier in […]

Location: nineteenth-century Ireland Aim: to find out who you are destined to love Ingredients: a snail, two plates, a May night Method: (i) find a snail while walking at night in May (perhaps May 24, the night between the worlds?) (ii) put this snail between two plates before going to sleep (iii) sleep (iv) in […]

This is a mermaid account from mid late 1910 and from County Clare in Ireland. The last reported appearance of a mermaid is so recent as the end of April, 1910. Several people, including Martin Griffin, my informant, saw what they are firmly convinced was a mer-woman in a cove a little to the north […]

You may not believe it, at first glance, but this painting is among the most terrifying ever hung in a gallery in Ireland. It shows a supernatural force threatening a series of Irish men and women. Confused? We’ll return to the fear in a minute. The artist was a young man of twenty two from […]

At the trial for Duke of Norfolk, at the very end of Henry’s reign, Bess Holland, Norfolk’s mistress gave the following testimony about Henry VIII’s obesity. She claimed that the Duke had told her: That the king was much grown of his body and that he could not go up and down stairs and was […]