Beachcombing's Bizarre History Blog

In this month’s podcast we are looking at the last of the American witches. We also talked a good deal though about their British cousins and particularly witch killings. Here is an especially nasty nineteenth-century witch attack where an individual took it upon himself to do away with a neighbour because she had overlooked his […]

The latest episode of the boggart and banshee podcast is on the Fewston Coven; see also the Pwca book of Edward Fairfax’s witch diary, the readalong for the podcast.  In 1621 a coven of six witches in Fewston (in the old West Riding of Yorkshire) decided to persecute a local family, the Fairfaxes. In one […]

Boggart and Banshee’s new podcast is here on the Wesley Poltergeist. Readers of many years may recall that I visited this case in a long thread of posts back in 2015. Well, now Chris and I have returned to rake through the poltergeist ashes. I was struck again by how while this might not be […]

Introducing the Magic Mersey Between 9 March 1857 and 22 June of the same year the Liverpool Mercury ran a series of thirteen articles on ‘fortune-tellers and their dupes’. I’ve just published these articles (about 30,000 words) in a pamphlet entitled: The Wizards, Astrologers, Fairy Seers and Witches of Victorian Liverpool.*  Taken together they are […]

The Coker Hill haunting is unusual, first, in that we know that the locals believed it was a case of ‘overlooking’ or witchcraft (rather than a ghost); and, second, in that we know two of the spells employed against this malicious use of witchcraft. Spell One Matters were beginning to look serious and it is […]

Bureaucracy hell at the moment in Italy so here is a simple but marvelous stocking filler from 1870. Reminds Beach of one of his favourite ever posts, on a hare in a Manx courtroom. Perhaps not quite as good but almost… We are in northern Scotland near Inverness. The other evening, while two servant girls […]

One of the joys of reading about early modern witch trials is the description (particularly in British cases) of the crazy and creepy familiars kept by old women for their various delectations and debaucheries. Beach recently publicized a spirit mole and he now wishes to introduce Jamara, described in three different passages relating to some […]

There is a long tradition of witches having familiars, animals who act as a source of power, or perhaps the medium between the witch and the devil. Britain has rather few references to sabbats and witch orgies compared to continental witch trials: but it arguably has more familiars than French, German and Polish witch investigations. Here […]

Witch bottles were ceramic or glass or (sometimes) iron bottles into which a cursed man or woman put parts of their own body and sharp objects. Parts of their own body might be hair, nails and, classically, urine. Sharp things might be nails, pins and thorns. The logic behind all this was that the curser […]

A story from the depths of East Anglia (1843), one of the more isolated parts of the English countryside in the 19 Century. A rather amusing and novel occurrence was related to us the other day. A young man, the son of Mr. Elsden, a respectable tradesman of Soham, was walking from that place to […]

Beach previously tried to bring honour to the name of Johann Weyer who combined a skeptical attitude to witchcraft with and a believing attitude to the supernatural. His books, which are not unfortunately easily accessible in English, are full of gems. Here is a good one which combines a nasty solitary fairy and a witchcraft […]

A few months ago Beach offered the evidence for early images of broomstick riding witches. There are three important manuscript sabbats that come down to us from the period 1450-1500 and that offer the best early visual evidence for the belief that witches attended sabbats by broom. The first of these images dates to about 1450. […]

1869, the Empire is at its height, teeming millions walk through Britain’s mighty metropolises and out in the Devon countryside the locals are consulting witches. A witchcraft case reported from South Devon. Two or three young women living at Dittisham fell ill. Their mothers, thinking they had been illwished – that is, looked upon with […]

Many moons ago, Beach began the long search to find the last witch killing in history. He quickly narrowed down to Western witch killing, because of course, there are many killings in Africa and Asia to this day. Every so often he thinks he has come close, but then another inconvenient and later murder falls […]

Witches fly in many different cultures: the British anthropologist Needham argued that it was a way of expressing their power, their ability to bring maleficum to all who get in their way or on their nerves. But in the European tradition witches have been associated, above all, with broomsticks: though note that witches were also […]