Beachcombing's Bizarre History Blog

The cool kids at Yale

This story comes from a Spanish correspondent to a Victorian newspaper. This then, if as Beach suspects it is, an urban legend is a Spanish urban legend: note that it is a very old story, versions can be found in many different countries. From Arragon there is a curious story, which, if true, is rather […]

Cicero speaks against Catiline.

Cicero, looking strangely like a monk, dies.

Actually a sylph, but 1714

Beach stumbled on the following unlikely superstition. He has never come across anything like it before. The story apparently came out of Exeter in south-western England: 1839. On Monday, as a negro convicted of vagrancy was about being locked up, a servant came into the office, and stating that she came from an opulent tradesman […]

Charlotte Despard in 1933, veteran of the anti-suffragette movement, taking on new enemies.

It is Mermaid Monday and here is an Ulster mermaid from the early nineteenth century. Sir, l beg leave to inform you, for the benefit of the curious, that I am happy that have it in my power to set the public mind at rest, respecting the existence of this wonderful animal, having been so […]

If you are going to carry out massacres then it is important to be able to count how many soldiers (and all too often civilians) that you are killing. From scalping in the American west to the Einsatzgruppen tally sheets on the Eastern Front in the Second World War military organizations have come up with all […]

There is a minority tradition about obscene ghosts: ghosts that stalk the living for sexual favours; or that even invade their beds. It is very difficult to know how common these ghosts were because prior to about 1970 it would have been just too much to write about them: paradoxically the source-starved middle ages and […]

4 Aug 1941 (barely a month into Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union) this ‘funny story’ appeared in a London newspaper. Perhaps we should think of it as a bit of nostalgia from the times when knives not Nazi bombs were the most dangerous thing in the East End. During the scare caused by Jack […]

German inflation crisis.

It is 1891. You are living in a small Cornish village and your neighbours get jumpy every time they see a shadow (‘the ghost…’ etc) and talk darkly of Mother Jones being a witch. Well, in most British villages it was a question of sermons, railway timetables and opening parish schools. But in Ludgvan, close […]

British marines break out at sword.