Beachcombing's Bizarre History Blog

This month’s Boggart and Banshee podcast is on ghosts and shrouds (Shrouded in Mystery: The Origins of the Iconic Sheeted Ghost). As often with Chris’s choices I didn’t at first get the point: I can only get so excited about textiles… But my attention picked up as I realised (ever the slow learner) that the […]

The latest episode of Boggart and Banshee is on horse spirits and Chris and I disagree on, well, just about everything… There is also a fun accompanying book with seventeen different tales of horse spirits (UK, US). However, you can listen to the podcast for that. I’ve, instead, been caught up with one very simple […]

I’ve always struggled to love ghosts. The only accounts that I find even half convincing have phantoms on a perpetual carousel of tedium: walking up that road, jumping off that bridge, creaking through that door… Then when ghosts are more daring – Chris in our podcast this month introduced me to an Icelandic housewife zombie […]

In today’s Boggart and Banshee podcast Chris Woodyard and I talk about the Woman in Black, a largely forgotten and utterly terrifying supernatural figure of American provenance. WiB, as devotees fondly call her, started to be seen in the 1860s in the United States. She would, in the next decades, be spotted in all corners […]

1873, 2 women see a weird humanoid on the road between 2 Bedfordshire villages. Was it a ghost, a fairy, death or an itinerant tramp?

   Introduction: Eyes like Saucers Eyes like saucers comes up again and again in accounts of the supernatural: ghosts sometimes have them, ditto demons and ‘black dogs’ almost always have them. But why? What do these descriptions mean? Where do they come from? Monsters Let’s start with some typical creepy saucer descriptions. A bogey at […]

Charles Montgomery Skinner was an early American folklore writer famous for such works as Myths and Legends of Our Own Lands. Skinner though had a promising background, one that gets him into that select catalogue of ‘rogue researchers’. Charles has just been describing a series of poltergeists, including some phantom snowball throwers. Without presuming to […]

Introducing Nancy This little passage is a troubling one for all kinds of reasons. In the mid-late nineteenth century, an itinerant preacher recounted an experience from his time in Staffordshire (a Midlands English county that ranged, in this period, from the beautifully wild to the grimily industrial). He had evidently begged a bed in the […]

Introduction In that wonderful book by Andrew Lang, Dreams and Ghosts (1897) there is a description of a phantom finding its way into a British courtroom in 1829 (pp. 143-144). Lang did not have access to the British Newspaper Archive – what fun he would have had there! – so his reference is brief and unsatisfactory. Here is […]

The journalist himself arrived once the haunting had officially come to an end. However, he found one individual, ‘a well-to-do, respectable, intelligent man’, who had been in the building on Sunday 13 June when as many as three hundred neighbours had gathered to hear the noises. When I got in the sound seemed to be […]

The haunting began after the resident mother had a fit 4 June 1880. Noises started up immediately around the house. This went on for several nights – the knocking performances commencing shortly after midnight, in the orthodox fashion. The woman became somewhat alarmed these singular visitations, she could not sleep, the children were frightened, and […]

Beach has recently become interested in a nineteenth-century ghost case from Somerset in southern England that has it all: there are witches, there are sprites, there are magpies, there are spells and counter spells, there is a spirit that rolls around the room, and there is a magic lantern.  There are unfortunately few sources: only […]

This is a very enjoyable ghost story: it is classed as an urban legend because this blogger has come across it before but cannot remember where. Can anyone help: drbeachcombing AT gmail DOT com The text comes from The Life and Times of Henry Lord Brougham (the good Lord’s autobiography, published in 1871: flor. 1778-1868). […]

An 1897 ghost story, with a small ghost riot, exceptional for this extraordinary illustration from the Illustrated Police News. Regrettably the story was not more widely reported. Can anyone give more? drbeachcombing AT gmail DOT com PLUMSTEAD, near Woolwich, has for the past week been the scene of a ghostly visitation, in which the ‘spirit’ […]

A busy day today, but ran cross this ‘charming’ sea tale about a ghost wreck: we’ll get to the monkeys shortly. There is a book to be filled with supernatural stories at sea: perhaps it already exists. This deserves, in any case, to be jammed respectfully into a footnote somewhere. The British sailing ship Glooscap, […]