Beachcombing's Bizarre History Blog

The survival of Britain from May to October 1940 is one of the most stirring stories of the Second World War. Britain as Lukacs noted could never have won the war alone but in the first summer of the war Britain could have lost it. From 1936 to early May 1940 the UK had made […]

He was four. Such innocence?

***Dedicated to Chris W*** Beach in his tiny hours of research ran across two accounts that feel like Victorian urban legends: a favourite theme of this blog. Note the lack of concrete references. These look as if they were included in a joke column and then recycled as news with some salacious details thrown in… A Sheffield […]

Nicholas, Hidden Britain Real tunnels or folklore ones too?

Welsh ghost stories always have something extra: maybe it is the water, maybe Methodism, maybe coal dust… They are, in any case, always worth reading. This one starts with a nun that is admittedly not very promising but bear with her. Llangynwydd, which is in the Llynvi Valley, has a ghost scare on just now. […]

Lawrence, Kursk Very expensive but by all accounts wonderful book…

Ludchurch (aka Lud’s Church, Lud Church) is not a church. It is a haunted ravine in the English midlands, Staffordshire, that has been frequently associated with the supernatural. The photo above will hopefully give some idea of what it is like. It has also been associated with an underground race of hominids in caves that […]

Keep the kids smiling…

One of the eternal human problems is how to transmit facts – history, fame, infamy, love… – from one generation to another. We have tried to do it on calf skin, on papyrus, on the tongues of the tribal singers and on stone. But never forget we have also tried to do it on glass. […]

Horror…

Beach has recently been looking for the stranger monsters of British mythology and with some pride he comes today to the Baum-Rappit, a monster from Rochdale in Lancashire. What was the Baum-Rappit? Well as the name suggests it seems to have been a diabolical rabbit. Wright in his incredibly useful dialect dictionary comes up with […]

British humour, sorry

There follows that rarest of things. A credible conspiracy theory. Our two heroes are Dragutin Dimitrijević (aka Apis, obit 1917) Chief of Serb Military Intelligence and Viktor Artamonov (obit 1942), a Russian military liaison officer in Serbia. Apis is remembered by history as the organizer of Archduke Ferdinand’s assassination and the organizer of the Black […]

Kobe bombed and photographed…

Beach this last weekend enjoyed re-reading one of the greatest books ever written on the supernatural, Andrew Lang’s Cock Lane and Common-Sense (1894). Lang, an extremely learned Victorian Scot, has a simple position. There are, he believed, a core of paranormal experiences that repeat themselves in every culture at every time: invisible knocking, levitation, throwing […]