Beachcombing's Bizarre History Blog

Beach has recently been interesting himself with sightings of the Wandering Jew in modern times. A friend of this blog Filip Graliński has been himself looking and has found a remarkable Polish record relating to sightings of the Wandering Jew from just before the First World War. Beach, stung by his failure to find anything […]

And then the fairies blew all the candles out…

Coloured photo, queen and king out and about in blitzed out London.

Nineteenth-century newspapers are full of ghost reports. One thing that is rarely taken into account in modern ghost books, is just how many of these were larks. Remember that ghosts led to ghost riots and general excitement. Bored in an evening? Throw a white sheet over your head. Here is a typical one: At Felling, […]

Late 18C judge in various poses: do you feel rope tightening around your neck?

This is a fine urban legend like-story. The newspaper editor wrote ‘good if true’. A wealthy Englishman had the misfortune to be robbed of his portemonnaie the other day, containing a large sum, with a ticket for a box at the theatre, which he had purchased in the morning, and a carte-de-visite. He went to […]

Allegedly Soviet Crew late 1950s: northern Finland in the war???

Thomas Crofton Croker was an early mid, nineteenth century Irish writer, most famous today for his Fairy Legends and Traditions of the South of Ireland, which appeared in three volumes between 1825 and 1828. Croker was not, in the modern sense, a folklorist. Some of the stories he wrote out he had heard as a […]

Baron Munchausen’s coat of arms. This has real potential…

A WIBT moment from eighteenth-century France: the collision of the hoary old with the bright-eyed, metallic and ghastly new. It involves a cathedral, a hammer and the crystal fragments of a Roman perfume bottle, the Sainte Ampoule, one of the longest continuously used objects in world history. This tiny flacon had been made in the late Roman […]

Douglas Boyd, Agente: Female Secret Agents in World Wars, Cold Wars and Civil Wars Another spy book. Am worried that the range might be too great, but look forward to getting.

This story appears in Cyrus Redding’s Fifty Years in the third volume (1858). Redding is describing a Mr. Beckford, an immensely rich Englishman in the late eighteenth, early nineteenth century with whom he was personally acquainted. The following story is not from Beckford but from a friend of Beckford which means, of course, we are […]

Sander L. Gilman and James M. Thomas, Are Racists Crazy? Race and racialism have become one of the great postwar markers. Greatly look forward to reading this.

The most interesting thing that Beach has read so far in 2017 has been Dominic Cumming’s extraordinary piece for the Spectator on fighting a modern political campaign. The campaign he had in mind was the Brexit referendum in June 2016. Cummings gives 20,000 words to the fight over Europe in the UK, but to the […]

In his search for Victorian urban legends, Beach has recently been chasing the word ‘rumour’ through the Victorian press. He did not find much in the way of urban legends but he did find lots of inexplicable international gossip. Of course, in the age of the internet the rumour that the Prince of Wales had drowned […]