Beachcombing's Bizarre History Blog

Pulled out of the funeral shroud…

Even by the standards of oriental despots Mohammad Khan Qajar was a pretty nasty piece of work. He had himself survived as a young man because the then ruler of Persia had decided only to castrate MKQ instead of having him killed, a decision he would soon regret. MKQ was not apparently a sadist. But […]

The Hodag is one of the most interesting mythical creatures from the great American wilderness. It is associated above all with Wisconsin and particularly with a hoax that dates to 1893 when newspapers reported the capture of a Hodag, apparently a small horned lizard. Full points to those who organized this brilliant photograph above, surely […]

Supposedly Pearl Harbor, staged? 29 June 2015: Nathaniel with the solution, not faked but not Pearl…

Troops meet in no man’s land…

This is a first in the immortal meal series, a repast that is probably, we must hope, mythical, but one that launches a genre that we are still trying to forget two and a half millennia later. First some background. Herodotus, the father of history, gives us only one account of the birth and childhood […]

  Bombers on the production line, with their yellow shells…

Resolution of yesterday’s mystery! When the D., M. & A. Railroad, which will have cars running here next week, began the grading and cutting at what is known as the Cascade, they brought a gang of Italians under the management of an Irish man Pat Durfee by name, who is almost a prodigy of strength. Durfee […]

This is the best wild man story yet, it reads like a very bad film, but, like many bad films, the story is compulsive. It came from the Cincinnati Enquirer. Many most mysterious and startling events have occurred in this county in the last last three years, and, by a most terrible and sensational discovery […]

Looks like she is carrying a chicken nugget…

Beach hates fortune tellers and he loathes séances and he really can’t be doing with mediums (if spirits exist just leave them in peace). But he was struck by this account from the great Mannerheim, Finland’s hero Marshal, who saved the country in three wars against Soviet Communism; even though he lost two of them. This particular […]

Beach recently enjoyed himself with three posts about the Athenian runner Pheidippides and while he was dipping into half forgotten but much loved sources he became curious about the treatment of the Pheidippides legend in the ‘art’ of the last couple of centuries, art understood in the loosest and most general sense. He, therefore, spent an […]

Britain’s glorious nineteenth century included many unsavoury episodes. But one of the more winsome aspects was the promotion by Britain’s London and southern provincial elite of the notion of cruelty to birds and to animals, the idea that animals and birds could feel pain and that the brute creation should be protected from its even […]

Beach spent a few minutes going through Heuvelmans’ wonderful On the Tracks of Unknown Animals but could find not hint of this ‘thing’. The following description appeared in 1899 in some nature notes in a British newspaper! The natives of Natal [South Africa] have implicit faith in the existence of the lamp snake, which they […]

Bestiality (humans having sex with animals) has been a long-standing minority pursuit, which very occasionally has been ritualised, memories of a king having sex with a horse in Ireland and hints of a tribal leader marrying a seal. In most societies though bestiality has been punished and punished harshly. None of this is new, but what […]