Beachcombing's Bizarre History Blog

Daniel Beer, The House of the Dead Chilly Siberia before the Soviets.

Location: Magic spells for determining future husbands and wives are to be found throughout Britain. But spells usually involve church porches. This spell with a prayer book is only to be found in the English west country. Aim: To see your future spouse. Ingredients: table, fire, food, drink, prayer book, attractive partner. Method: West Country Spell […]

The magnificent buddhas of Bamiyan

Imagine that you are born in the industrial heartlands of England to a working class family in the mid nineteenth-century. Aged six you are already sent out to earn a crust: let’s say you have to drive a donkey for a cruel master. You never get an education worth the name and still by your […]

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Selling coats Danish style: Copenhagen 1936

Sewer stories… Several years ago a little German Jew, named Schwartz, believing that in the sewers of New York might be found many articles of value which had been lost, entered them, and for three days wandered through the labyrinth. He was very successful, picking up some 27,000 dols. worth of jewellery, spoons, forks, &c.; […]

British exhibition in the 1950s. A fairy shows children how electrical appliances will transform the home…

This was an advertising style for a while. It would be interesting to do a post… 23 Feb 2017: EC I don’t have proof but that picture just screams “modern fake”. I mean, the woman is nude under her apron – THAT wasn’t an advertising style back then! And both that address and that organisation […]

Here is an unusual story from Great Chart, Kent, UK. It is 1858. On Saturday evening week a person in the employ of Mr. E. Greenhill, at Bucksford-farm, Great Chart, was startled by the sudden apparition of what appeared to him to be an extraordinary kind of animal, resembling a large baboon, in one of […]

It is surprising (or perhaps depressingly predictable) that many ghosts turn out to be men dressed up in sheets. Very often these ghosts are roistered by the local population, who seem to enjoy the hunt: memory of ghost riots… Here are two reminders of why you never want to be that person: when the Scooby […]

Bret Baier, Three Days in January The end of the US’s greatest postwar President.

Location: The witch bottle spell seems to have been used against witchcraft throughout much of early modern and modern Europe. Aim: To free a human victim from a witch’s spell by attacking the witch. Ingredients: A bottle, fire, and then various other objects including urine, nails, pins, salt and thatch. Method Ridgewell, Essex (Anon 1859) […]

Douglas Preston, Lost City of the Monkey God A fan favourite from January 2017

Many moons ago Beach ran an article on telephony, the use of telephones as a kind of primitive music radio. Essentially telephone owners would subscribe to a ‘channel’ and would then phone into said channel to listen to shows: those of us old enough to remember the speaking clock or telephone weather forecasts were listening to […]