Beachcombing's Bizarre History Blog

Introduction The Wollaton Gnomes was a classic anomalous encounter. 23 September 1979, a half dozen primary school children went for an evening walk in Wollaton Park in Nottingham. A number of these children then saw thirty small cars each with a gnome driver and passenger. The encounter lasted, according to the children, about fifteen minutes, […]

The boggle factor is a crucial concept in anomaly studies: at what point do you just lose all patience with an account. For instance, John Smith tells you that he saw a ghost with its head tucked underneath its arm. OK, we smile politely. John Jones, meanwhile, tells you that he saw a ghost with […]

This bit of fun comes from Paul Tabori’s biography of British ghost hunter Harry Price. No date is given. Are we perhaps in the 1930s? A less sweeping claim was made by a gentleman who had invented a way of testing the human aura!… It seemed that the ‘aura’ machine was a violet-ray apparatus; it […]

ABCs (alien big cats) is the useful acronym given to descriptions of exotic felines that allegedly live wild in the British and Irish countryside. Between April 2004 and July 2005 the British Big Cats society recorded some 2,123 sightings of ABCs from pumas to lynxes. What is going on here? Well, there are a couple […]

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 […]

Had something stolen? A close friend has been murdered? Or has there been a kidnapping in the family? Help unfortunately is not at hand. The FBI are busy with the Patriot Act, the A Team are lost in the Los Angeles Underground and Le Chevalier C. Auguste Dupin is regrettably fictional. However, do not despair for […]

Beach is eternally worried about mystics, people who have or believe that they have paranormal powers. Where do they come from? What do they mean? Most studies of ‘mystics’ put them in a historical tradition. The Cunning Man in the English or, for that matter, New England countryside in the 1700s draws on Christianity, Anglo-Saxon […]

When we experience unusual phenomenon then, of course, our filters are almost as important as the phenomenon itself. Take a series of sheep killing cases that recently made quite an impression on Beach. The narrative breaks down into three sections: Mystery, Mystery Solved, Perception. Each of these in three parts: a, b and c. The […]

Here is a remarkable fairy account from Newfoundland. We are in Canada and the report appeared in the Evening Telegraph 26 Dec 1900. This, then, is a creepy Christmas story. A resident of this city, who is subject to extraordinary hallucinations, was the other night, as he seriously states himself, ‘again carried off by fairies’. […]

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 […]

  The idea that words or images spontaneously appear on natural objects has long fascinated gullible human beings, and perhaps particularly the Muslim faithful: the letters ‘Allah’ on the filaments of a cut eggplant etc. Quite why there should be more interest in the generation of natural words in Islam it is difficult to say. […]

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 […]

James McClenon is a sociologist who has written on the paranormal and parapsychology. His books are to be recommended in the highest terms, not just for their arguments, put perhaps most of all for their reasonable yet never irritating openness to the unexplained; something which does not offend even a hoary old materialist like Beach. […]

10 March 1890 one of the worst mining accidents in British history* took place in Morfa in South Wales. 87 miners were killed. A gas explosion had been set off, probably by an unfastened lamp. Interestingly the local community had had forebodings before the explosion. This article came out almost two months later in the […]

There is a long history of trying to explain poltergeist events with reference to fakery of household members; or extreme angst within the family circle. The first is absolutely credible, given the vagaries of human nature, but difficult to deploy as an explanation when the experiences were so bizarre and so, well, ‘total’ as in the […]