Beachcombing's Bizarre History Blog

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 […]

When Farmer Smith’s barn becomes a luminous grinning monster…

Beach has often offered up stories that sound like that they may be urban legends from Victorian Britain. Many of these stories involve crime because crime was acceptable to the reading palate of Victorians: morality, punishment, sometimes redemption… There were unquestionably many sexual urban legends. Unfortunately most of these went unrecorded because of Victorian sensibilities. […]

The long road home, for some…

One of the memories of the Crusader victory at Jerusalem in 1099 is the blood of Jewish and Muslim inhabitants spilled when the city was overrun. Contemporary Christian accounts described blood up to the ankles, up to the knees and, finally, up to the bridles of horses at the Temple Mount where most of the […]

Late 18C antiquarians out and about…

The London underground before the complaints box came online.

Sorry

Beach has a busy day, so he offers this story up almost without comment. It would be fun to expand it though. Can anyone help with original sources, or at least ones nearer the fount: drbeachcombing At yahoo DOT com Thousands of peasants in the province Sessbu [in Japan] are engaged in a dragon hunt. […]

Urban type visits the countryside. Love the children inspecting his socks…

Readers of this blog will now have to excuse Beach for possibly the single most boring post in strangehistory history, but the following has been rankling inside for some time. 1880s or 1880’s? This might seem unimportant, but if you spend several hours a day reading books about the past it starts to matter. How should […]

Seabrook, Nathan Bedford Forrest and the Battle of Fort Pillow Bit late with this one (!), but looking forward to getting a copy…

Yesterday we offered the best nineteenth-century writing on Irish fairies. Today the best of the twentieth century: 1911: In this year W. Y. Evans-Wentz changed fairy writing for ever by publishing his brilliantly bizarre The Fairy Faith in Celtic Countries. Evans-Wentz offered a collection of fairylore for all the Celtic nations (Cornwall, Man, Scotland, Brittany, […]

Paolo Morisi, The Italian Folgore Parachute Division Morisi on one of Italy’s few achievements of WW2.