Beachcombing's Bizarre History Blog

When was the last occasion on which a western government burnt one of its citizens alive judicially? Well, there are several examples from elsewhere in the world, including a North Korean who was supposedly executed by flame thrower in 2014 and various ISIS murders. However, in a western country on the instructions of a judge? […]

Feiring, For the Love of Wine Georgia, of course. Always wanted to try Georgian wine…

There has been much theorizing about what really happened at the séance. Let’s review the possibilities. The first possibility is that the séance never took place; that it was a simple legal strategy to give information to the police without having to actually implicate anyone or explain where that information came from. The second possibility […]

Remarkable shot as a unit crosses road

In the previous post Beach introduced the Moro Seance. Here instead let’s go into more detail about the actors around the table. There were, by most accounts, twelve people including girlfriends, in the house that day but three names stand out: Romano Prodi, Mario Baldassarri and Alberto Clò. The three names were all economics professors […]

Stunt men being blown away….

On 16 March 1978 the Rome commando of the Red Brigade carried out a deadly and efficient attack on a leading Christian Democrat politician Aldo Moro. They murdered five bodyguards on the spot and carried Moro into a two month captivity that would end with this death in the boot of a car. The Moro […]

OK, OK there were no personal computers in 1884. But the following ‘Oracle’ sounds as if it was mapping out, imaginatively, the territory that computers would make for themselves. We are in the UK: our source the Leighton Buzzard Obs, 1 Jan 1884. Dr. Lloyd, the medical officer of St. Giles’s Workhouse, attended before Sir […]

Fighting for Monty Python

‘The case in Illinois was lab-associated….’

This is a very exciting ghost story, because it seems to be an early version of the most famous (and at least to this blogger) the most satisfying modern urban legend: the vanishing hitchhiker: hitchiker picked up who it later transpires was a ghost. Admittedly the story is turned on its head: the driver and […]

Dig deep…

Ergot is a fungus that grows on some crops, particularly rye, and is most common in northern temporal climes. When ingested by humans or animals it can cause hallucinations, temporary neurological disorders and circulation difficulties including burning limbs and, in serious cases, gangrene: there are records of peasants who lost all four limbs to ergot poisoning […]

Barry Renfrew, Wings of Empire Perhaps the single book I’m most looking forward to…

Beach has long tradition of posts of unusual nineteenth-century accounts of the survival of witchcraft in Britain and Ireland. Here is one from Bridgewater, Somerset (the south-west), which appeared in Notes and Queries in 1853. A cottager, who does not live five minutes’ walk from my house, found his pig seized with a strange and […]