Beachcombing's Bizarre History Blog

Beach has recently been reading around medieval and early modern prostitutes. Of course, contemporary sources are not particularly vivid in this respect. Between canon law and town legislation, we either get an hysterical appeal to the coldest parts of the Gospels, or pounds, pennies and halfpence. In fact, if you want to relive the medieval […]

Magnificent Roman jug

There are two interesting references in Helter Skelter (Vincent Bugliosi with Curt Gentry), the description of the Charles Manson murders, to a bottomless pit in the Californian desert. First, a little background for anyone coming to this new. Charles Manson was a charismatic and unpleasant individual (a promising combination) who gathered a group of impressionable […]

Love the beard…

A nice story about intuition and intelligence work. Aldrich Ames was a CIA operative and a schmuck. Starting in 1985 through 1993, when he was finally arrested, Ames gave Russian intelligence information in exchange for bags of cash. In short, a number of assets were executed and imprisoned in the Soviet Union so Ames could […]

Beach read and watched a lot of zombie fiction this last summer. There was the Living Dead, the nightmarish Crossed and Alan Moore’s incredible adaptation, not to mention 28 Days Later. Beach is not an out and out zombie fan. In fact, he finds zombies, per se, the least interesting of all our supernatural fauna. (If Beach was […]

From a Canadian paper

Beach has recently run across an incredible folklore and forteana resource: the transcripts of the 1930s Irish Schools survey where local traditions were written down by budding students and their teachers: thanks to Stephen D for sending it in. There is a lot to get excited about but first off here are three bosom serpent […]

Dear Reader, and so term is beginning. First class this morning. Butterflies and relief, for the first time in a decade, that the summer is over. Still 48,000 academic words written and some fun had. There follow the c. 10000 most interesting words sent in to StrangeHistory. Thanks to all contributors… Have a great September! […]

***Leif got it, spool down for the answer…*** The Index Biography is a new form of biography pioneered by this blog and introduced in a previous post. The creator must find a biography of a famous individual from history, they must turn to the index and write down eight peripheral facts about the individual’s life. We […]

Academics and serious historians get very worked up about publication dates. It is important to know, for example, whether, a publication on the Arab world was published before or after 11 Sept 2001; it is important to know whether bold new research (a) came before or after bold new research (b). Most of us can […]

Today is an important day in the calendar of the Beach family, Beach and kids get to open the massive piggy bank (Money Pig) in the downstairs bathroom. Beach has then to double any money found there – it has been a year… – then kids, minus Beach, go out to spend Money Pig’s money […]

Here’s a creepy little report of an unidentified creature from the Canadian North East. Labrador is the mainland territory just past Newfoundland. This was the territory that c. 1000 Vikings visited to get wood for the Greenland settlement. The man writing is a medical doctor, Wilfrid Thomason Grenfell. His autobiography has several entertaining or intriguing […]

Mike Dash, The Graveyard of the Batavia Beach took about two years to pluck up the courage to read this book. The problem was not the quality of the writing, which is excellent, but the painful subject matter. The story in brief. Over three hundred Dutch men, women and children sailing on the Batavia got […]

Harald the Fair-Headed (aka Harald Fairhead: obit c. 932) is apparently in that very select group of monarchs who became ghosts after his death. About Harald we know practically nothing, btw, other than that he fathered Eric Bloodaxe and that he won enough battles to make him the first king of Norway. Pity the poor […]