Beachcombing's Bizarre History Blog

Before we get to the lost book, wait  and reflect on its author, the younger Anaximander of Miletus. ‘Our’ Anixmander must not be confused with Anixmander the Elder, arguably the first recorded philosopher who, in the sixth century BC, put down the some lines about the origin of the universe that have, against all the odds, […]

Haven’t found the origin for this image: seems to be repeated a lot in the 19Cent 30 April 2016, Chris from Haunted Ohio Books: The image of raising the dead is by George Cruikshank and is an illustration from Guy Fawkes, William Harrison Ainsworth, 1840. It represents Doctor Dee and Edward Kelley, exhuming the body of Elizabeth […]

Holden is a stretch of countryside just to the north of Burnley, a small town in a small county (Lancashire) in the UK. It would be good to give a map at this point but Beach has decided against this  because the nineteenth-century ordinance survey has this territory on an edge between map sheets. That […]

Perhaps not prehistoric history, but still magnificent  

The slave trade to America was banned in 1807, but slaves were still brought to America illegally in the decades that followed. The last known slave ship that brought slaves across the Atlantic was the Clotilde in 1859. What is extraordinary about the Clotilde’s journey is that the young slaves who were sold in Alabama, […]

No date…

A medieval ivory horn is pictured with two mysterious wooden rods, which look like nunchaku, but were actually ‘silence sticks’, banged together before a sermon. The horn is kept at Assisi among the most precious relics of St Francis (obit 1226), because this horn, says tradition, was brought back by Francis from Egypt as a […]

Note Hemorrhoids, bottom left.  

A thalassocracy is a sea power, a realm built around the sea. The word is sometimes used to refer to maritime superpowers, like the British and French empires, but is more typically employed for chains of islands governed by a single king or council. Historical examples include Tondo; or some of the Viking polities from […]

The French build fake wooden guns in the Great War

There is the need for a collection of all Arthur Conan Doyle’s gadding around in his ‘psychic’ years. And when that time comes Strange History will have several stories to offer up: sometimes ACD turns up as an expert on the spot, at other times the press use ACD as an expert or talking head. […]

Schmuhl, Ireland’s Exiled Children, the American connections and the Easter Rising…

Modern painters have used blood and vomit as paints and penis, breasts and even eyes as brushes. However, the medieval Chinese sometimes gave the modern paper-tearers a run for their money. Wang Hsia (obit 805), for example, was known as ‘ink-flinger Wang’. He would, first, get drunk, second, hurl ink at his surfaces, third, smear […]

Love Maps, love Japan? Wigen, Cartographic Japan.

Here is a short paragraph from the late nineteenth century about Pendle in Lancashire. He who visits Pendle will yet find that charms are generally resorted to amongst the lower classes; that there are hares, which in their persuasion, never can be caught, and which survive only to baffle and confound the huntsman; that each […]