Beachcombing's Bizarre History Blog

The Giant Sloth? The giant ground sloth is one of the most charismatic of extinct creatures. Dwelling in South America Megatherium was, when it tore down trees, and walked over the pampa, the size of a small elephant and was finally hunted out of existence about 10,000 years ago: one of the victims of homo […]

Here is a bit of gossip that span through the European press in 1852, a good twenty years before Darwin wrote his Insectivorous Plants. According to some Italian journals, a new organised being has been discovered in the interior of Africa, which seems to form an immediate link between vegetable and animal life. This singular […]

Some weeks ago Beach had some fun running through twentieth-century British monster stories. Here was one of his favourites. It has everything: a lion’s head, big tracks, a creepy cry and became part of a war-time propaganda campaign. We are at Ryde on the Isle of Wight off the coast of southern England: it is […]

You wake up at 2.00 AM and you hear an eerie moaning outside in the garden. You get out of your bed and walk over to the window and lift the glass. The cold of an English winters rushes over you and there, in the dark, between the W.C. and the geraniums, you spot a moving […]

Here is an unusual story from Great Chart, Kent, UK. It is 1858. On Saturday evening week a person in the employ of Mr. E. Greenhill, at Bucksford-farm, Great Chart, was startled by the sudden apparition of what appeared to him to be an extraordinary kind of animal, resembling a large baboon, in one of […]

A short note today from a curious book entitled Salamandrologia published in 1683 in Nuremberg, about, of course, Salamanders, p. 116, the mythical fire dwelling lizard: it is a surprisingly long work and worth browsing through. Here is one fragment. It would be good to trace the original down in Italian, German or Latin. It […]

Here’s a creepy little report of an unidentified creature from the Canadian North East. Labrador is the mainland territory just past Newfoundland. This was the territory that c. 1000 Vikings visited to get wood for the Greenland settlement. The man writing is a medical doctor, Wilfrid Thomason Grenfell. His autobiography has several entertaining or intriguing […]

***Thanks to Ed, an old friend of this blog, for sending this in and making the sasquatch connection*** Do we have evidence from the Urals for a Sasquatch like figure in the tenth century? No one seems to have made this connection before but consider the passage charitably before we drag out the sledge hammer […]

Beach was innocently looking for stories about human bodies in trees. This one has no human body, but it seemed too good to waste. A correspondent of the Horticultural Times contributes the following account of the so-called snake tree, which is said to exert such a terrifying influence upon the natives of the Mexican Wilds. […]

There is a natural and very understandable human tendency to see a terrifying four-foot dog and describe it, honestly, to your neighbour as a terrifying six-foot dog. This is well known, of course, and may be behind the extraordinarily long lengths given to some snakes, a previous subject of this blog. However, there is another […]

British newspapers gave a couple of acres of space between 1800 and 2000 to ‘monster snakes’ discovered in this or that corner of the Green & Pleasant land. Typically a vicar in Devon had found an adder that measured two and a half feet long… However, leaving the shores of Britain behind there were better […]

The Hodag is one of the most interesting mythical creatures from the great American wilderness. It is associated above all with Wisconsin and particularly with a hoax that dates to 1893 when newspapers reported the capture of a Hodag, apparently a small horned lizard. Full points to those who organized this brilliant photograph above, surely […]

Beach spent a few minutes going through Heuvelmans’ wonderful On the Tracks of Unknown Animals but could find not hint of this ‘thing’. The following description appeared in 1899 in some nature notes in a British newspaper! The natives of Natal [South Africa] have implicit faith in the existence of the lamp snake, which they […]

When we think wild men most readers will think sasquatch and yeti: when people in the nineteenth century (and before) thought wild men they thought lunatics or hermits who had gone to live in the wood and who had lost touch with humanity. Perhaps in mythic terms there is not that much difference? However, this […]

Here is a weird little story that allegedly appears in St Nicholas’ Parochial Register, Durham for 1568. Mdm. that a certain Italian brought into the cittie of Durham, the 11th day of June, in the yeare above sayd, a very great strange and monstrous serpent, in length sixteen feet, in quantitie and dimentions greater than a […]