Beachcombing's Bizarre History Blog

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

Beach recently ran with a story that Napoleon was believed to have visited Britain incognito in 1803: Wales to be exact. Here is an annex to that post. The wonderful idea that Napoleon’s brother had holed up in a convent in Dorset at Marnhull no less! These were the glory years when the French were […]

First the problems with dates. This appears in a 1913 newspaper and had been borrowed from the Observer, which had taken it from a newspaper from ‘A Hundred Years Ago’, named Drakard’s Paper. 1813, c. 1813? For the record this does not sound like a report from 1813, but why spoil a good story Wednesday, […]

An important fairy institution are bad productions of A Midsummer Night’s Dream in which a little girl with brown butterfly wings runs on stage being announced as Moth, one of Titania’s maids. Yet bad moth costumes may all be based on a misunderstanding. The basics. Titania, it will be remembered, has four servants: Peaseblossom, Mustardseed, […]

This was published in The Orchestra in 1870. It is a curious account of singing fish in the US… It is very tempting to connect these phenomenon and others like them to the mermaid tradition: in the same way as that the rhino is presumably somewhere behind the unicorn. ‘One day as I was returning […]

Beach spends a lot of his time chasing fairies in eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth century books. Because he doesn’t have an exceptional library to hand and because travel is so damn annoying he finds the best thing to do is buy books on the basis of emails from friends and readers; or ‘snippets’ on Google […]

Some weeks ago Beach had some fun running through twentieth-century British monster stories. Here was one of his favourites. It has everything: a lion’s head, big tracks, a creepy cry and became part of a war-time propaganda campaign. We are at Ryde on the Isle of Wight off the coast of southern England: it is […]

Another in our series of early flight stories. This one comes from France and appeared in the Bradford Observer in 1858. We are informed that a shepherd, residing in a village in the neighbourhood of Langres, who, a few years ago, made some attempt at flying, has just tried a fresh experiment, not alone and […]

Bit of a melancholy mermaid story this week that has, sorry, little to do with mermaids and nothing to do with the sea. The following story has been published at Berlin under quasi-official sanction [those Prussians!]: ‘On the 15th, the wife of a painter in Old Schonhaus Street, brought into the world a most wonderful […]

Beach recently came across this remarkable hoax from Norwich UK from 1826. The public are respectfully informed that Signor Carlo Grain Villecrop [these sound like foreign names made up by an English writer], the celebrated Swiss Mountain-flyer, from Geneva, and Mont Blanc, is just arrived in this city, and will exhibit, with Tyrolese pole, fifty feet […]

Peter Alderson Smith is an English scholar who in 1987 wrote a really very good book on Irish fairies: W. B. Yeats and the Tribes of Danu. In the middle of the book there is one of these passages where you think: what?!? Beach to help inattentive readers has italicized the relevant clause. Note that […]

Here is a mermaid story from the Scottish islands 1857 (Anon 1857). The declaration of two fishermen on the Argyleshire coast appears in the Shipping Gazette. They say: ‘We the undersigned, do declare that on Thursday last, the 4th June 1857, when on our way to the fishing station, Lochindaal, in a boat, and when […]

***dedicated to Roberto*** This story is Perthshire in northern Scotland. It was recorded in 1906 after the even more striking account of the Sutherland fire ball. Late on Saturday night in autumn some seventy years ago, friends of the present writer were engaged in bringing in and stacking their corn. The day had been fine […]

This story comes from a Spanish correspondent to a Victorian newspaper. This then, if as Beach suspects it is, an urban legend is a Spanish urban legend: note that it is a very old story, versions can be found in many different countries. From Arragon there is a curious story, which, if true, is rather […]

Beach stumbled on the following unlikely superstition. He has never come across anything like it before. The story apparently came out of Exeter in south-western England: 1839. On Monday, as a negro convicted of vagrancy was about being locked up, a servant came into the office, and stating that she came from an opulent tradesman […]