Beachcombing's Bizarre History Blog

Beach recently ran across this marvelous nonsense: Probably the most remarkable manner of extinguishing fire has occurred at Boswell, a mining town in Pa., America. Hundreds of men, women, boys, and girls saved the town from destruction by throwing snowballs. The town says (the veracious chronicler) has no fire department and water is scarce. The […]

The end of the crusader states: pity those in the walls….

When did the last American Indian state fall to predatory Europeans? Well, you could argue that there are still some independent hunter-gatherer ‘states’ in the Amazon that have preserved their independence by virtue of jungle foliage. There was resistance among the plain Indians in the US as late as the 1920s (another post, another day). […]

Or just a chance bad photograph which has been ‘reinterpreted’? James B, 29 Sep 2016: Beach the problem with photographs likes this, the problem with all photographs is that a moment of life is immortalized and we then interpret the moment. I suspect the guy was just caught in a maturing smile. A post of […]

It is late. You walk over to the reed bed and lie down and stare contentedly at the ceiling. The storm is brewing up outside, but the house is sturdy: no rain will wet your family. Outside are good neighbours and strong walls: no invaders will come. The kids are gently snoring off in the […]

Shah Abbas: love the colour…

This comes from a story told in the The Prince Edward Island Magazine (June 1902), which uniquely, gives us the evidence for fairy flight speed. We are in the Canadian Maritimes, on the eastern coast of Canada. Prince Edward Island (PEI) is one of the Canada’s most attractive provinces. By the twentieth century there was […]

Mississippi, master and slave

Let’s talk floating islands. A few years ago Beach had a very gentle battle with a courteous Nessie writer Roland Watson. As a sceptic with folklore interests Beach was intrigued by many parts of Ronald’s argument, but one piece of new evidence that stood out was the claim that there was a floating island on Loch […]

US servicemen going overseas…

Beach wants to introduce today a folklore custom that survived unexpectedly for three hundred years in the dark, before emerging to be briefly photographed by stunned folklorists at the end of the twentieth century. The tradition in question relates to bread. It was believed in south-west England in the 1600s that if you carried bread […]

Daniel Todman, Britain’s War Promising, first of two volumes…

Beach is knackered and trapped in a public computer room after coming down to a large Italian city to see his middle daughter start school. While doing some correction work on ghosts and thinking about a recent bad experience in a hotel (idiot manager): his tired mind managed to knit the two together. Does, he […]

Tevi Troy, Shall We Wake the President Great title, reserving judgement on the book, hope to get a copy soon.

It is perhaps the best quotation about the Second World War. ‘The British gave time, the Americans gave money, the Soviets gave blood’. In other terms the defeat of the Axis was made possible by the UK hanging on in the summer of 1940; by the Americans ability to outproduce the enemy; and by twenty […]