Beachcombing's Bizarre History Blog

The wild man was a staple of nineteenth-century circuses and penny shows. This personality was typically black, mostly undressed and the possessor of a cannibal’s grin. He (and it was invariably a male who took on the role) would stomp back and forth in his cage every so often lunging at some unwary child, allowing […]

Imagine that there is a wild man out in the local woods. However, this guy is not your normal naked wimp, dirty with matted hair, who fell on hard times blah blah blah. He wears a lion mask, steals carpets and sports a nifty yellow black mini skirt: and this is 1874. Beach would put […]

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 […]

The historical practical joke tag has now reached almost a dozen posts and Beach thought that he would celebrate with a brief survey of a particularly unusual form of practical joke: jokes that ended in the joker or jokee dying. Beach limited himself to British newspapers from 1 Jan 1880 to Dec 31 1899 and […]

In the last thirty years historians have found a new way to pattern their vast bibliographies. Rather than just include twenty pages in alphabetical order – too easy for the scholarly mind – many have decided, instead, to split the bibliography in two. The first bibliography will be primary sources and the second bibliography will […]

Qua campis cervos agitabat sacra juventus/ Incumbit fessus nunc baculo senior./ Nos miseri, cur te fugitivum, mundus, amamus? (‘Here the holy young man who chased deer in the fields, now, stands a broken old man with a stick/ O what wretches! Why, world we love, do you flee from us?’) Alcuin O Mea Cella Beach’s […]

Beach recently shared the splendours of naked fertility rituals in Missouri from Colonial times to the Great Depression. The author of that article (Vance Randolph, Nakedness in Ozark Folk Belief, The Journal of American Folklore 66, 333-339) also describes what may be spill over into local Christianity. In 1905 a preacher, Jim Sharp from Missouri, […]

Germany went to war in August 1914 to bloody Russia, put Britain back in its place and break France’s back. Looking at their war record, after a century, what is striking is just how close Germany came to achieving at least a relative victory. Yet Germany’s leadership was not up to the job: this is clearer […]

Imagine these three scenes all from Ozark country in Missouri: A man and a woman walk into a flax field naked chanting, while throwing seeds, ‘Up to my ass, an’ higher too!’ The man throws the seed against the woman’s buttocks. ‘Then they just laid down on the ground and had a good time.’ Date: […]

***warning, Beach worked on a goat farm for six long months…*** Let’s first of all get one thing out of the way. Goatman: Flesh or Folklore was brought out by CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform. In other words, it is a privately published work. In 1990 this would have been a strong negative signal and old […]

For a student from the west the basic sign of historical literacy is whether or not you can put the following periods in their correct order: antiquity, ‘dark ages’, middle ages, renaissance and modernity. Beach has the privilege of teaching perhaps two hundred American students a year and probably ten percent would be capable of […]

This story was allegedly taken from the Detroit Free Press by an English newspaper, 27 Oct 1894. That it appeared in the DFP there is no reason to doubt, English newpapers are almost frightening reliable about these things: that such a duel took place between an English and a French man in Tombstone… Well, this […]

Thanks to Chris from Haunted Ohio Books for pointing out a dimension of the poison duel that Beach had recklessly passed by: poison duel by animal. First, the tarantula duel from 1887 courtesy of Chris Grand Forks [North Dakota] Daily Herald 20 September 1887: p. 3 A Toledo (O) special dispatch says: Particulars of a […]

The 1975 Church Committee looked at rogue or extreme CIA activities and took a particular interest in the decision in the late 1950s and early 1960s to kill foreign heads of state, who were deemed unfriendly to US interests. Chief of these was, of course, Fidel Castro, a man who had both succeeded in making […]

Noah’s Ark has had a bit of a rough time over the last hundred and fifty years. Indeed, from the first attacks on what might be called ‘literal Christianity’ the aetheist rottweillers have gone after the Ark with a passion that is frightening. Why? Quite simply because the authors of the Pentaeuch (God or/and mere […]