Beachcombing's Bizarre History Blog

Here is an unusual story from Great Chart, Kent, UK. It is 1858. On Saturday evening week a person in the employ of Mr. E. Greenhill, at Bucksford-farm, Great Chart, was startled by the sudden apparition of what appeared to him to be an extraordinary kind of animal, resembling a large baboon, in one of […]

It is surprising (or perhaps depressingly predictable) that many ghosts turn out to be men dressed up in sheets. Very often these ghosts are roistered by the local population, who seem to enjoy the hunt: memory of ghost riots… Here are two reminders of why you never want to be that person: when the Scooby […]

Bret Baier, Three Days in January The end of the US’s greatest postwar President.

Location: The witch bottle spell seems to have been used against witchcraft throughout much of early modern and modern Europe. Aim: To free a human victim from a witch’s spell by attacking the witch. Ingredients: A bottle, fire, and then various other objects including urine, nails, pins, salt and thatch. Method Ridgewell, Essex (Anon 1859) […]

Douglas Preston, Lost City of the Monkey God A fan favourite from January 2017

Many moons ago Beach ran an article on telephony, the use of telephones as a kind of primitive music radio. Essentially telephone owners would subscribe to a ‘channel’ and would then phone into said channel to listen to shows: those of us old enough to remember the speaking clock or telephone weather forecasts were listening to […]

How long did fairy beliefs survive in different parts of Ireland? And how well did these beliefs survive? In some senses the question should be easy to answer. After all, Ireland has the most detailed folklore records in the world. But unfortunately Irish folklorists were, after independence, more interested in folklore tales and tale types […]

This is a cute story from the States, picked up by an Irish newspaper in 1873. Whether this story is true or false we do not know; but it is said here that recently in the parish of St. Martin, Iberia, or somewhere down that way, an old widow lady, whose children had all married […]

Six Tory MPs: 1992 (?) fronted by Teresa Gorman, one of the UK’s more eccentric MPs in the later 20C.

The Yasgurs at the end of Woodstock: what have they done to our land…

19C Naval Bombardment of Bomardsung

This poker story comes from an extremely rare poker book that has, unfortunately, never been scanned and put online, John Lillard’s Poker Tales. It is perhaps the best collection of poker anecdotes the world has seen and dates to 1896: A certain very well known New Jersey politician – an old man, whose fame extends […]

The Palace of the Soviets, begun in 1937 and never finished thanks to the war: it now has a cathedral on top of it which says it all…

Beach lived for three glorious years in Spain and there is something very Hispanic about the following Spanish duel. Honour, pain and everyone taking themselves a little too seriously. Two officers have decided to fight. The duellists are fencing experts of unusually high standard, and the bitterness between the two men was so great that […]

Catherine Lacey and Forsyth Harmon, Art of the Affair An ‘illustrated history’: could be very good or rather bad…