Beachcombing's Bizarre History Blog

Beach has recently been looking at cases of men and women who accidentally, or deliberately, or accidentally-deliberatishly slept with demons. The following comes from a seventeenth-century account and it is interesting to see an idea that defined the Middle Ages surviving so powerfully into the early modern period: Beach wonders when the latest record would […]

Raid on an illegal whisky still in prohibition…

William Geroux, The Mathews Men: Seven Brothers and the War Against Hitler’s Uboats Always up for Battle of the Atlantic books…

Robert Damon Schneck, The Bye Bye Man and Other Strange-but-True-Tales (New York 2014) RDS has built a reputation, in the last decade, for ‘strange stories’ well told with a strong bias towards the supernatural. This ‘new’ collection – actually originally published by Anomalist Press in 2005 as The President’s Vampire – has the typical RDS […]

Horowitz, Kosher USA (Columbia University Press) Food history is always good and some of the manipulations described in the blurb got my curiosity going.

Aristotle writes in his Politics (7, 2) that ‘among the Iberians, a warring people, they fix obeliskoi in the earth around a man’s grave corresponding to the number that they have killed’. This is a much quoted sentence and one that has caused some confusion over the years because of the translation and mistranslation of obeliskoi. […]

Not sure what is going on here, but my guess is a peasant is finishing off a knight, possible with the knight’s sword. 23 May 2016, lots of emails pointing out what should have been obvious. This is David on Goliath. D’oh. E.g. Tarcangel: Your May 20, 2016 drawing of a “peasant killing a knight” […]

Beach likes to think that he presents an interesting series of monsters to the international anomalist, folklore horror and ghost community. But he has one regret. In largely limiting himself to British and Irish newspapers the range of fauna is often fairly modest, certainly when compared to the marvelous stuff that appears in some American […]

The other big three, Wilson, Clemenceau, Lloyd George: would you put the future of Europe in their hands?

  There follows a particularly vivid description of an African execution/sacrifice of a witch. The witness, Paul B. Du Chaillu (obit 1903) was describing his travels in West Africa in the 1850s: Du Chaillu has gone down in history as the first westerner to see gorillas (though there is Hanno…) Here he instead he learns […]

Unexciting title but this thirteenth century MS has something

Beach came across this reference to postal messengers being delayed the inference being that this was because of a fear of Derbyshire bogeys: we are near the ivy-covered village of Longnor in the deep Peaks (UK 1874). For the guidance of our friends and neighbours we learn that our post-messenger will for the future be […]

Shiver….

English is a Germanic language and its closest living relation should be one of the Continental Germanic tongues, German, Dutch and the like. However, try speaking English to a German who knows no English, or try understanding German (with just English) and you will find that they are very distant relations. An Italian listening to Spanish: or […]

Daily Mirror just as war is declared, a bit late of course…