Beachcombing's Bizarre History Blog

Ghost photograph fakes always have a certain interest, not least because they are usually so clumsily done. However, these, which appeared in the Tatler, 9 Oct 1907, were a cut above. There follow screen captures of the five photographs. The editor has written in ‘The making of ghosts has ever been a favourite pastime of […]

Beach would like to introduce to the sheer unadorned horror of the Irish turkey. Let’s start slow and, then, gradually crank up the volume. Willie Reilly of Gelsha was going home… It was fairly late: when he came to where Johnnie Connor lives now, there was a bend in the road and there was at that […]

Several years ago Chris from Haunted Ohio Books came across, in Paranormal Great Lakes, an Illustrated Encyclopedia, Charles Cassady, Jr., Schiffer, 2009,  p 64, a marvelous sounding monster called the Rolling Muff. As Beach has a now four-year interest in what Bob Rickard has called Unidentified Rolling Objects (UROs) he thought he would share this with […]

First the problems with dates. This appears in a 1913 newspaper and had been borrowed from the Observer, which had taken it from a newspaper from ‘A Hundred Years Ago’, named Drakard’s Paper. 1813, c. 1813? For the record this does not sound like a report from 1813, but why spoil a good story Wednesday, […]

This is one of the very best ghost stories: partly because of how its written; partly because of how difficult it is to explain away. The author is Shane Leslie, an Irish member of the British establishment in the 1920s and 1930s, a cousin of Churchill and a witty and delightfully gossipy talker. He had […]

There is a minority tradition about obscene ghosts: ghosts that stalk the living for sexual favours; or that even invade their beds. It is very difficult to know how common these ghosts were because prior to about 1970 it would have been just too much to write about them: paradoxically the source-starved middle ages and […]

It is 1891. You are living in a small Cornish village and your neighbours get jumpy every time they see a shadow (‘the ghost…’ etc) and talk darkly of Mother Jones being a witch. Well, in most British villages it was a question of sermons, railway timetables and opening parish schools. But in Ludgvan, close […]

We have seen on this site, several times, urban legends about body parts being used in industrial production: fat for glass or telegraph wires; body parts for soap, something, of course, found too in the First World War. The following story is a not so elaborate practical joke but the attitudes behind it suggest that […]

An interesting ghost scare from 1930. Somercotes is a village in Derbyshire. The first report is from 9 Jul 1930. The Somercotes ghost, which caused a big scare four years ago, has apparently not been laid. This early report has proved untraceable, though in the midst of the following crisis a local confesses to having […]

In some ways this is a normal nineteenth century ghost story: we are in 1836. A man dresses up as a ghost; he scares some people; a group of toughs go out and look for him; it ends in tears: the story is entitled, be warned, ‘flogging a ghost’. However, this one has some special […]

Here is a nice ghost riot story from deepest darkest Cornwall, at Ludgvan near Penzance. This is a rather rare, though not entirely unprecedented thing, a rural ghost riot. Note also that this is a memory: interestingly the great Ludgvan ghost riot of c. 1820 or c. 1830 didn’t make it into the press. My first acknowledgment […]

This is weird little story from Barnoldswick on the border between Lancashire and the North Riding. The year is 1928. Barnoldswick is affected by a ghost scare which has broken out like a fever among the schoolchildren of the town. The use of ‘fever’ is interesting thinking of that wonderful book by Robert E. Bartholomew […]

Beach was awfully fond of his snowball tag, and was disappointed when he simply ran out of good snowball stories. Imagine his joy then to run into some ghostly snowballs in Skinner’s Myths and Legends of Our Own Land. The year is apparently 1849 Forty-seven years ago, in the township of St.  Mary’s, Illinois, two […]

Beach has only once been to Bedfordshire, a tiny English county near London. He got stuck in its chief town, Luton, took a room in a sordid pub (the bookshelf had a rack full of well-thumbed pornographic magazines – if only Tripadvisor had been around…) and missed his bus.* In any case, enough of Luton. […]

This is a very confusing story: perhaps one reason for taking it seriously. We are in Orkney in March 1907. There were certainly believed-in ghosts in Orkney but in 1907 there was also still strong belief in trows: the local fairy population. Ghostly happenings have disturbed the town of Kirkwall, the capital of the county […]