Beachcombing's Bizarre History Blog

Greystone was a converted manor house in Wiltshire (UK) that Gareth Knight (pictured), perhaps the most celebrated post-war British ritualist, used for his magic. From 1977 to 1983 a series of rituals were carried out by Gareth to connect the upper with the lower world: the aim was to bring earth and the underworld back […]

Apologies….

There are good historical records of armies fighting animals, armies fighting frost bite (the Wehrmacht from 1941 onwards) and one doubtful case of an army accidentally fighting itself. But Beach has recently been reading about a remarkable instance of an army that fought a river, and lost. The year is 1221, the army in question […]

A Foot in the River: Felipe Fernandez-Armesto Intrigued by this one: always had good experiences of FFA, a fine combination of productive megalomania and wit

You all know the story. Young couple go out on their first date and decide to drive out to the twilight lake with a Kentucky Fried Chicken. They arrive and in the dark start chewing on the delicious white meat only for the girl to say that hers tastes strange. She takes a number of […]

Life and Death in the Andes: On the Trail of Bandits, Heroes, and Revolutionaries: Kim MacQuarrie Always good to go south: the bandits got me…

‘He/she is an expert, he or she should know’: is one of the leitmotifs of the modern world, not least its particularly annoying variant ‘I’m an expert, I should know.’ In the good old days we were all knights, peasants, mothers or priests and so these claims rarely came up: save on, respectively, the battlefield, […]

Wilhelm Gustloff setting off, 1945: all will die. [should be ‘most will die’] 22 Dec 2015: Lanark writes in, The amazing thing about the Wilhelm Gustloff was that they didn’t all die… despite the ship being sunk in minus 18 degree temperatures in January in the Baltic. Over 1200 survivors were pulled from the water by three rescue ships […]

Seneb’s tomb in the Giza Necropolis offers the first realistic portrait in history of someone suffering from dwarfism. Seneb is sculpted seated to the left of his wife and where his feet would normally be shown coming down to the ground there are two of his three children; an unconventional touch. Size is often misleading […]

William Kemmler, first man legally executed in the chair

The Malleus Maleficarum (1485) is the classic witch hunter’s book. It is the first ‘convincing’ attempt to place witches in a diabolical formula with magically affected victims at one end, the devil in the middle and large and roaring fires at the other. The author, though, Heinrich Kramer, very naturally sucked up a lot of […]

Man working on Columbia Tower construction

When did English-speakers start using the word Poltergeist? The conventional answer to this question is in 1848 when Catharine Crowe wrote, in her The Night Side of Nature, the following passage while describing spirits of the dead. [B]ut there is nothing sportive or mischievous, nor, except where an injunction is disobeyed, or a request refused, […]

Dear Reader, thanks as always for all the emails and communications. Everything great at chez Beachcombing. In fact, only five or six ulcers on the tongue are distracting from the pleasure of life. This month was supposed to be dedicated to Bella in the Wych Elm, but new data is still dripping in: witchcraft spy, […]