Beachcombing's Bizarre History Blog

The third Beachcombing epiphany gift follows: past gifts were War in Dollyland (2010) and Scary Fairies: Proto Edition (2011). In the search for information about the Fairy Investigation Society we were put onto New Frontiers by Stephen T (for which again many thanks!). New Frontiers was a short lived British paranormal magazine published in January […]

Fairies and silent films… Who would have guessed that our great great grandparents troubled to make shorts about the winged folk? But they did and some are really quite beautiful. The first one that we stumbled upon was Princess Nicotine (aka The Smoke Fairy), a classic of its kind. A smoker falls asleep and then […]

Poor old reverend William Dodd! Hanged in 1777 at Tyburn he was the last Englishman to be sentence to death for forgery. His trip to the gallows was greased by money. He was never able to make enough and yet he was always able to spend too much. In February 1777 he forged a bond […]

There is something fascinating about people just vanishing, perhaps particularly in those rare instances when people are actually watching them. Beach has recently been chasing after records for the following interesting case. We’ve taken enough words from The Examiner to give some kind of outline here. James Burne Worson was a shoemaker by trade living […]

Who is the ruler of Christmas? Santa Claus, of course. But the red bearded one has climbed over a lot of dead bodies to get to where he is today. And every so often when you travel around western countries you find traces of Christmases past. In Spain, for example, and, indeed, through much of […]

Let’s face it. If you want a good wine the last thing you will do is head off to the supermarket and buy an English brand. The idea is almost comic. French, Italian, yes. Australian, Californian, Hungarian, perhaps. But English grapes freezing their pips off on a vine in the Midlands, where not enough sun […]

Nancy Price was an English actress who was famous in her day and yet is now all but forgotten: thespians suffer that fate. NP interests Beach because, in the 1950s, she was a member of the Fairy Investigation Society. You would have thought that anyone who would care to get involved in such an unfashionable […]

Beach is not a huge fan of modern medicine. But when you see what our ancestors had to go through health-wise, every so often he feels a certain warmth towards the white coated ones. Take this horrific account concerning Isambard Kingdom Brunel’s brush with death after a conjuring trick accident (!). Mr. Brunel, the celebrated […]

The Inventio Fortunata (the Happy Discovery) is a text that we’ve already looked at twice on this blog. A first post described its extraordinary survival in a burnt copy of a copy of a copy in the wrong language. A second post alleged that the IF detailed an English trip to Arctic Canada in 1360. […]

An English ghost story from the mid late twelfth century which we owe to the very great kindness of the Count. The story begins with a Chaucer-like sexual adventure. This romp (and fall) seems to have no connection to the haunting other than to have helped the man of evil conduct into his coffin.  What […]

Back to families and remembering. This time though in the Northern Isles with the last of that cursed breed the Vikings… Occasionally there are examples of writing in stone, which under special conditions, survive beautifully through the centuries. This is true of the several sheltered runic inscriptions found in the Maeshowe megalithic tomb on Orkney, […]

BB (Denys Watkins-Pitchford, obit 1990) was a superlative writer and illustrator, who spent most of his time celebrating gnomes, the English countryside and fowling: his pseudonym comes from the BB shot used to bring down wild geese. For present purposes, we are interested in BB and gnomes for the man wrote two excellent gnome books […]

Lord Grey’s famous quotation that ‘the lamps are going out all over Europe’ came eventually to encapsulate the horror of 1914. Grey, then Britain foreign secretary and an exquisitely cultured and civilised individual, spoke the words on 3 August 1914 just before the great powers collectively committed suicide. He recorded the statement in his autobiography […]

The following bell story cannot lay claim to being bizarre history in the normal sense of the phrase. But it is enjoyable. It comes from the memoirs of James Lee-Milne (obit 1997) and describes Mrs Hartwell’s most dangerous day. [Mrs] Hartwell was an aged widow who gallantly brought up an orphaned brood of undisciplined grandchildren. […]

Another of these almost forgotten fairy stories recorded in the early fourteenth century. Fairy clues include the mound (fairies live in hills or is this a grave?), the benevolent fairy and the human attempt to steal a prize from fairyland. Rather you than me. Here is another thing, no less wonderful and quite widely known, […]