Beachcombing's Bizarre History Blog

Fighting for Monty Python

‘The case in Illinois was lab-associated….’

This is a very exciting ghost story, because it seems to be an early version of the most famous (and at least to this blogger) the most satisfying modern urban legend: the vanishing hitchhiker: hitchiker picked up who it later transpires was a ghost. Admittedly the story is turned on its head: the driver and […]

Dig deep…

Ergot is a fungus that grows on some crops, particularly rye, and is most common in northern temporal climes. When ingested by humans or animals it can cause hallucinations, temporary neurological disorders and circulation difficulties including burning limbs and, in serious cases, gangrene: there are records of peasants who lost all four limbs to ergot poisoning […]

Barry Renfrew, Wings of Empire Perhaps the single book I’m most looking forward to…

Beach has long tradition of posts of unusual nineteenth-century accounts of the survival of witchcraft in Britain and Ireland. Here is one from Bridgewater, Somerset (the south-west), which appeared in Notes and Queries in 1853. A cottager, who does not live five minutes’ walk from my house, found his pig seized with a strange and […]

Matthew, Invincible Beast The most deadly rugby scrum in history…

This appeared in the newspaper as ‘an extraordinary hallucination’: Beach had very tentatively put it in his list of Victorian urban legends until he verified the existence of Sheriff Balfour. It could alternatively be sure bloody chance; or a murder case (if you close your eyes and squint at it from an unusual angle): any views […]

Execution of a communist in Munich 1919. I’ve always had problems believing this picture… Everyone seems to be posing.  

Cargo cults are Melanesian religious movements centred on the ability of the colonial powers to bring the kind of trinkets that fill shopping malls and dollar stores to the some of the virgin corners of the earth. The first references to cargo cults, the Vailala Madness, which began in 1919, for example, saw Papuans preach […]

Poor photo but rare shot of fleeing non-Germans from the Sudetenland in 1938. Of course, in 1945….

There is a well attested belief that the bodies of executed criminals could heal certain illnesses. This led in past centuries to bits of executed felons being bought, sold and even eaten. Though the most gentle version was as simple as going to the gallows and begging the hangmen to let you run the dead […]

London, allegedly…

When many years ago Beach travelled in Sub-Saharan Africa he was warned by anxious parents, and relatives not to take photographs of the natives. They might believe that their soul had been taken. Where does this idea come from? And did anyone anywhere ever actually believe it? Well, a run through sources suggests that the […]