Beachcombing's Bizarre History Blog

***Congrats to Melissa for getting this one*** The Index Biography is a new form of biography pioneered by this blog and introduced in a previous post. The creator must find a biography of a famous individual from history, they must turn to the index and write down eight peripheral facts about the individual’s life. We offered […]

Sometime after the Battle of the Wilderness…

There are two versions of the history of Pook’s Hill: the official version; and the official-official version. First, the official version. Kipling wrote in the Edwardian period a book for his children about English history: Puck of Pook’s Hill, published in 1906. A fairy, Puck, introduces Kipling’s two children to the marvelous wonders of the […]

Love the ‘Dangerous’ and the little girl…

The unquiet dead. One put his head on a railway line and was decapitated by an obliging train. One was stabbed between twenty and thirty times by her ex boyfriend. The third was drowned in a canoeing accident late one night. These three incidents are the closest that Beach has come to violent death. Happily […]

Bit weak, but it appealed…

Beach recently ran across this sordid but fascinating episode in Otis, Prostitution in Medieval Society (71). Those of a sensitive disposition might just want to go and do the washing up now. Those who are determined to read on prepare yourselves… Significant, too, is the Venetian court register that records, in the trial of a […]

‘Good morning! Good morning’ the general said

Some enjoyable treasure ghosts from the deep south… Though  this tract is now largely cleared and settled, these  traditions and ghost stories are still told and  believed by the negroes, Creoles, and ignorant  whites, Poinquinette, an old Creole fisherman and  a repository of interesting lore, has related some  of his personal encounters with the Magazine […]

Lydia Pyne, Seven Skeletons  Looking forward to this one, too….

The search for the original sewer dwelling creature continues. The first reference to sewer snakes comes from a British newspaper in 1888. It is agreeable to recall that, not long ago, a huge boa-constrictor was discovered in a Vienna sewer, the serpent having evidently escaped from a menagerie, and either taken refuge there from cold, […]

Ted Sandling: London in Fragments Father Thames gives up his treasures…

Beach recently ran across this marvelous nonsense: Probably the most remarkable manner of extinguishing fire has occurred at Boswell, a mining town in Pa., America. Hundreds of men, women, boys, and girls saved the town from destruction by throwing snowballs. The town says (the veracious chronicler) has no fire department and water is scarce. The […]

The end of the crusader states: pity those in the walls….

When did the last American Indian state fall to predatory Europeans? Well, you could argue that there are still some independent hunter-gatherer ‘states’ in the Amazon that have preserved their independence by virtue of jungle foliage. There was resistance among the plain Indians in the US as late as the 1920s (another post, another day). […]