Beachcombing's Bizarre History Blog

Physical manifestations are, after noises, the most common features of poltergeist hauntings. In this sense Jeffrey did not disappoint, but given the sheer richness of the sounds that the family heard: and the three creepy sightings of Jeffrey, the albino mongoose from hell, the casual reader might have expected that the family would have been […]

Unusually for a poltergeist case – or is this actually a wider phenomenon? Drbeachcombing At yahoo DOT com – Jeffrey was not just heard and felt. He was also seen. There were three occasions. I) On the first Susanna Wesley (mother not Suky) saw a ‘headless badger’ (!) under her daughter’s bed after a fit […]

The main feature of the Wesley haunting were the noises that the family heard. For the most part these were banal ghost knocks but there were lots of other more exotic sounds. The following could almost stand as a prose poem: the gobbling of a turkey, (142); dancing in a closed room (142); ‘tingling’ of […]

An important preliminary to the haunting is to sketch out the period of Jeffrey’s activity. Most reference works (and this blog) refer rather carelessly to December 1716-January 1717. But a careful reading of the Wesley files shows that actually the haunting was rather more drawn out than that. First, in a very important passage we […]

Samuel Wesley was an Anglican churchman who had been given in the late seventeenth century, through royal favour, a living at Epworth in Lincolnshire. He was married to Susanna with whom he had nineteen children: including perhaps the two most important figures in early Methodism, Charles and John Wesley. At the time of the haunting […]

‘The Wesley ghost’ is one of the best attested instances of a poltergeist haunting prior to the twentieth century. There were apparently twelve people living in the Parsonage House (pictured), Epworth (Lincolnshire) at the time of the disturbances, disturbances that centred on the period December 1716 to January 1717: three servants, the Wesley parents and […]

This account dates to southern England and 1873, but to judge from some dating clues in the texts the old man who wrote this extract was probably a boy in the early part of the nineteenth century when he heard the story: perhaps in the 1810s or 1820s? It sounds, meanwhile, as if James Carter, […]

Supernatural beings occasionally, like the rest of us, jump. In some cases, e.g. Spring Heeled Jack and the Devil, this seems to be a key characteristic. In other cases it is there in many descriptions: e.g. American wild men. Then, with other bogeys it is only an occasional activity: e.g. fairies and ghosts. However, Beach […]

From 1889-1892 the Society for Psychic Research asked a series of 17,000 Britons (of all classes and both sexes), whether they had ever had a ‘hallucination’, that is hearing or seeing someone who was not actually there and yet while ‘awake, and not suffering from delirium or insanity or any other morbid condition obviously conducive […]

There follows the single most interesting ghost story Beach has ever read. Perhaps part of its fascination is that it is not clear that it is a ghost story: though something bizarre is certainly going on. In any case, all began when in 1860, in the tenth volume (new series) of Notes and Queries  K.B […]

Beach hates fortune tellers and he loathes séances and he really can’t be doing with mediums (if spirits exist just leave them in peace). But he was struck by this account from the great Mannerheim, Finland’s hero Marshal, who saved the country in three wars against Soviet Communism; even though he lost two of them. This particular […]

The bosom serpent is the useful term to refer to the folklore notion that animals (particularly reptiles) find a way into the human body and cause illness there. Stories of this kind seem to be practically universal and to date back to the earliest times: we are dealing with a proto-myth or even part of the […]

Strange History has noted before the belief in daemons, individual spirit guides, a Mediterranean tradition that matures into the guardian angel with the assistance of Christianity. The most striking example is certainly that of Socrates who had regular conversations with his daemon. Then there is Joan of Arc and St Michael (or whoever)… Beach today […]

Joan of Arc has appeared once before on this blog in that fascinating moment where she apparently picked out the Dauphin with psychic antennae. Today, two years on, Beach is turning instead to another part of Joan’s paranormal life, her voices. Joan heard, from her early adolescence onwards, voices. These voices gave her instruction and […]

There are some rare accounts from the middle ages (though not from antiquity?) of trees that are alive. The following comes from the great eighth-century Chinese geographer Du You. Du You is talking here of the Dashi, the Chinese word for the Arabs, that have just started to come onto the horizon with the Islamic […]