Beachcombing's Bizarre History Blog

6 Durham Light Infantry in North Africa

***Leif gets it, scroll down for the answer*** 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 […]

Paul Rahe, The Spartan Regime The craziest society before North Korea…

Another immortal, this time from the Grantham Journal 20 Sep 1873. Note that vagueness about Afro-Americans’ ages was often pronounced in the late nineteenth century. Several of the ‘oldest American’ stories are about ex-slaves in the south. According to the Louisville Journal, a wonderful old negro is at present living at the farm of Dr. […]

Whalen, Messing and Mladinich, Undisclosed Files of the Police The cover won me on this one…

  The idea that words or images spontaneously appear on natural objects has long fascinated gullible human beings, and perhaps particularly the Muslim faithful: the letters ‘Allah’ on the filaments of a cut eggplant etc. Quite why there should be more interest in the generation of natural words in Islam it is difficult to say. […]

Read all about it…

Beach continues to enjoy pickpocket stories. This one was told of James White (skinny White) a pickpocket, who died in 1895 and who was ‘the cleverest pickpocket in Europe’. His obituary is willfully quiet about some of his exploits. It for example, tells us nothing of the ‘curious tales’ about his fun at Monte Carlo. […]

US Marines with captures trophies: Battle Cape Gloucester

In 2008 that hoary old newspaper of the British right, The Daily Telegraph, all cobwebs and fox hunting, included a fascinating piece on a car-crashing ghost. Here follows a very brief edited version: Paranormal researchers are investigating the sightings of a girl in Victorian dress on a road in the West Midlands, which locals say […]

German artillery team caught, late Oct 1918, by British artillery.

The lovemaking of other ages is often obscured from us. A natural reticence, which the twenty-first century has largely given up on, draws a veil around medieval or Tudor sex. Our few exceptions include some rare pornographic accounts and a handful of legal descriptions where sex was getting someone in trouble and needed to be […]

Brit in Tripoli Jan 1943: six months later he’ll be in Italy.

There have been a few cases of crocodiles being found in the Thames. In 1897 and 1933 crocodiles were retrieved from the river: alive in the first case (two feet), and dead in the second (five feet). Note that there are also several modern claims that crocodiles have been seen on the river. However, what […]

Soviet troops in Poland 1945