Beachcombing's Bizarre History Blog

Seneb’s tomb in the Giza Necropolis offers the first realistic portrait in history of someone suffering from dwarfism. Seneb is sculpted seated to the left of his wife and where his feet would normally be shown coming down to the ground there are two of his three children; an unconventional touch. Size is often misleading […]

William Kemmler, first man legally executed in the chair

The Malleus Maleficarum (1485) is the classic witch hunter’s book. It is the first ‘convincing’ attempt to place witches in a diabolical formula with magically affected victims at one end, the devil in the middle and large and roaring fires at the other. The author, though, Heinrich Kramer, very naturally sucked up a lot of […]

Man working on Columbia Tower construction

When did English-speakers start using the word Poltergeist? The conventional answer to this question is in 1848 when Catharine Crowe wrote, in her The Night Side of Nature, the following passage while describing spirits of the dead. [B]ut there is nothing sportive or mischievous, nor, except where an injunction is disobeyed, or a request refused, […]

Dear Reader, thanks as always for all the emails and communications. Everything great at chez Beachcombing. In fact, only five or six ulcers on the tongue are distracting from the pleasure of life. This month was supposed to be dedicated to Bella in the Wych Elm, but new data is still dripping in: witchcraft spy, […]

Young Putin, unmistakable…

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 offered up previously here Sheridan le Fanu and Joseph […]

Strangehistory recently featured the longest European war of the twentieth century, that between Greece and Albania (1940-1987). While looking at this Beach was intrigued, nay amazed by the true duration of the Second World War. In fact, this morning his room has taken on a strange orange sheen. For example, how long was Britain at […]

Anderson and Piuk, Trapped Behind Enemy Lines Rescuers in WW1, a new subject for me: can’t wait to get my hands on a copy.

Tony Judt wrote twelve fine history books* before his untimely death in 2010, one of them ‘the unmatched and perhaps unmatchable’ (Snyder) Postwar (2005). When he died, after a courageous fight with an impossible illness, eulogiums rained down. But there was a minority opinion that Judt was something less than a new Gibbon. Dylan Riley wrote […]

The hopeless fight in Rhodesia… Enter Mugable left stage. Wessels, A Handful of Hard Men  

A bit of Star Wars nostalgia

Beach really, really, really doesn’t like ceremonial magic, creepy pentagrams and casual acquaintances with books by the ‘Beast’ Crowley on their shelves. But he recently steeled himself to read The Magus (1801) by Francis Barrett, mainly to see what the alchemists and magi had to say about fairylore. There is a lot of material as it […]

The queen in front of her truck (note ‘L’)