Beachcombing's Bizarre History Blog

Beach has over the years collected, particularly with the help of readers, a number of stories of blood spilling and witches. The idea is that by spilling blood, typically taken with a bramble, you can cure the witch’s overlooking. There are though some variations on this theme, including to judge by this report from 15 […]

British soldier with French girls

In the 1980s Beach read an article on Ronald Reagan that described the then President (born in 1911) talking to veterans of Gettysburg as a child. It was a spark on kindling for the historic imagination. Here is a striking nineteenth-century equivalent that has given Beach much pleasure today. It was recorded in 1851 in […]

The death of a unicorn at the hands of a bear (?)

John Widdowson is one of our finest British folklorists and some of his most interesting work has been on how to scare the living bejesus out of ten year olds. Indeed, his first book had the winsome name If You Don’t Be Good and describes how parents, in the 1960s and 1970s, in Newfoundland (Canada), […]

Sorry again…

Civil war veteran on the steps of a jet engine…

Greystone was a converted manor house in Wiltshire (UK) that Gareth Knight (pictured), perhaps the most celebrated post-war British ritualist, used for his magic. From 1977 to 1983 a series of rituals were carried out by Gareth to connect the upper with the lower world: the aim was to bring earth and the underworld back […]

Apologies….

There are good historical records of armies fighting animals, armies fighting frost bite (the Wehrmacht from 1941 onwards) and one doubtful case of an army accidentally fighting itself. But Beach has recently been reading about a remarkable instance of an army that fought a river, and lost. The year is 1221, the army in question […]

A Foot in the River: Felipe Fernandez-Armesto Intrigued by this one: always had good experiences of FFA, a fine combination of productive megalomania and wit

You all know the story. Young couple go out on their first date and decide to drive out to the twilight lake with a Kentucky Fried Chicken. They arrive and in the dark start chewing on the delicious white meat only for the girl to say that hers tastes strange. She takes a number of […]

Life and Death in the Andes: On the Trail of Bandits, Heroes, and Revolutionaries: Kim MacQuarrie Always good to go south: the bandits got me…

‘He/she is an expert, he or she should know’: is one of the leitmotifs of the modern world, not least its particularly annoying variant ‘I’m an expert, I should know.’ In the good old days we were all knights, peasants, mothers or priests and so these claims rarely came up: save on, respectively, the battlefield, […]

Wilhelm Gustloff setting off, 1945: all will die. [should be ‘most will die’] 22 Dec 2015: Lanark writes in, The amazing thing about the Wilhelm Gustloff was that they didn’t all die… despite the ship being sunk in minus 18 degree temperatures in January in the Baltic. Over 1200 survivors were pulled from the water by three rescue ships […]