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  • The Wood Diva February 5, 2024

    Author: Beach Combing | in : Contemporary
    The Wood Diva

    ***I’ve been absent for a couple of months because I was locked out of the account! Just to let you know that Chris and I continue to do our podcasts and there has been an episode on medieval x-files and now bird spirits. This is a fragment of an article on Fairy Census 2 I’ve […]

    Do You Feel Lucky, Historian? January 1, 2023

    Author: Beach Combing | in : Contemporary, Modern
    Do You Feel Lucky, Historian?

    I had the great pleasure to start the year with a podcast episode on luck and lucky charms (with Chris Woodyard and her extraordinary free source book). We spoke about the psychology of luck, Italy as the dinosaur valley of fortuna, corpse magic (golly), the Great War and talismans, burying St Joseph to sell your […]

    Ghosts and ‘Our Own Dear Dead’ November 1, 2022

    Author: Beach Combing | in : Contemporary
    Ghosts and 'Our Own Dear Dead'

    I’ve always struggled to love ghosts. The only accounts that I find even half convincing have phantoms on a perpetual carousel of tedium: walking up that road, jumping off that bridge, creaking through that door… Then when ghosts are more daring – Chris in our podcast this month introduced me to an Icelandic housewife zombie […]

    Fairy Fashions: The Three Rules September 1, 2022

    Author: Beach Combing | in : Contemporary, Medieval, Modern
    Fairy Fashions: The Three Rules

    Supernatural fashions come and go. One generation ghosts are hopping around in shrouds, then they are carrying their heads under their arms, next we have clanking chains… Fairy fashions, though, as I argue on the latest episode of Boggart and Banshee, are surprisingly constant. I offer here my three fairy fashion rules. Rule 1: ‘Uniform […]

    Explaining Death Omens May 1, 2022

    Author: Beach Combing | in : Contemporary, Modern
    Explaining Death Omens

    I just can’t take pre-cognition and death omens seriously: a bat flying into the window, a rooster singing loud at midnight, even an encounter with a tall woman combing her hair. Yes, yes, all these are picturesque folklore confetti. But to say, as many of our ancestors did, that they represent the grim reaper throwing […]

    The Boggart: A Study in Shadows February 15, 2022

    Author: Beach Combing | in : Contemporary, Modern
    The Boggart: A Study in Shadows

    This morning, my new book comes out – The Boggart: Folklore, History, Placenames and Dialect. It is three hundred pages long and has just shy of a thousand items in the bibliography. There are lots of maps and images and, reader, if it dropped on your head from a three-storey building it would brain you. […]

    Dark Thoughts on the Wollaton Gnomes January 31, 2022

    Author: Beach Combing | in : Contemporary
    Dark Thoughts on the Wollaton Gnomes

    Introduction The Wollaton Gnomes was a classic anomalous encounter. 23 September 1979, a half dozen primary school children went for an evening walk in Wollaton Park in Nottingham. A number of these children then saw thirty small cars each with a gnome driver and passenger. The encounter lasted, according to the children, about fifteen minutes, […]

    Urban Legend? Razor Blades Behind Posters December 1, 2020

    Author: Beach Combing | in : Contemporary
    Urban Legend? Razor Blades Behind Posters

    I’ve never heard of these shenanigans before but my immediate reaction is ‘urban legend’. In urban legends, remember, ‘razor blades’ are put in everything from Halloween sweets or apples (US) to lipstick (Iran), to slides (stuck there with chewing gum) so why not behind posters? After all, ‘if someone was to tear [a poster] off […]

    Biggest European Cities: 1800-2018 May 8, 2018

    Author: Beach Combing | in : Contemporary, Modern
    Biggest European Cities: 1800-2018

    Messing around with numbers for the great European cities over the last two hundred years: I’m not interested so much in the biggest cities as the capitals of the most important countries. Can these be taken as barometers for the successes and failures of their countries? A few things stand out. First, growth is constant […]

    The Aura Machine! May 4, 2018

    Author: Beach Combing | in : Contemporary
    The Aura Machine!

    This bit of fun comes from Paul Tabori’s biography of British ghost hunter Harry Price. No date is given. Are we perhaps in the 1930s? A less sweeping claim was made by a gentleman who had invented a way of testing the human aura!… It seemed that the ‘aura’ machine was a violet-ray apparatus; it […]

    What Poltergeists Do and Poltergeist Noise May 2, 2018

    Author: Beach Combing | in : Contemporary, Modern
    What Poltergeists Do and Poltergeist Noise

    Introduction Been reading a lot about poltergeists recently, perhaps the most fascinating of all Fortean phenomena. I’ve collected a list of my favourite poltergeist actions; and then my favourite poltergeist sounds. I try and pass very quickly over the banal and well known. These come from tens of different cases. Poltergeist Acts Stones thrown; showers […]

    Index Biography #53: Prize a book April 30, 2018

    Author: Beach Combing | in : Contemporary
    Index Biography #53: Prize a book

    The Index Biography is a quiz 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 up previously here Sheridan le Fanu and Joseph Stalin (he of ripe […]

    Monsters with Eyes Like Saucers April 22, 2018

    Author: Beach Combing | in : Contemporary, Medieval, Modern
    Monsters with Eyes Like Saucers

       Introduction: Eyes like Saucers Eyes like saucers comes up again and again in accounts of the supernatural: ghosts sometimes have them, ditto demons and ‘black dogs’ almost always have them. But why? What do these descriptions mean? Where do they come from? Monsters Let’s start with some typical creepy saucer descriptions. A bogey at […]

    ABCs: When and What April 17, 2018

    Author: Beach Combing | in : Contemporary
    ABCs: When and What

    ABCs (alien big cats) is the useful acronym given to descriptions of exotic felines that allegedly live wild in the British and Irish countryside. Between April 2004 and July 2005 the British Big Cats society recorded some 2,123 sightings of ABCs from pumas to lynxes. What is going on here? Well, there are a couple […]

    The Mysterious Case of the Falkland Toothpaste Tube April 15, 2018

    Author: Beach Combing | in : Contemporary
    The Mysterious Case of the Falkland Toothpaste Tube

    Introduction The spring of 1982 was a time of some tension in the South Atlantic and would climax with Argentine troops landing on Falklands, and the subsequent battles between the British taskforce and the Argentinean army and navy. However, as so often when the gods in Olympus are still deciding which side to back, farce […]