Beachcombing's Bizarre History Blog

A duel was described in a British compendium in 1784: the Weekly Entertainer since you ask. The full text is below for connoisseurs, but what was remarkable about it was that eight men died and 2 were injured. Briefly the story went as follows. A group of friends in a tavern in Galway had an argument. At […]

Spells… it has been a while. Location: nineteenth-century Ireland Aim: to bring back a lover who is looking elsewhere Ingredients: a fairy woman, a grave, a linen sheet, a moonless sky, seven candles and a wheat sheaf Method: (i) find a fairy woman to assist you: fairy women were the nineteenth-century Irish witches who, using […]

This is  a mysterious illness that led to most of the members of a family in Suffolk (England) losing their limbs in 1762. Was there an Ebola outbreak in mid eighteenth-century England? Presumably not. But what is happening here? The case was presented to the Royal Society in 1862 by a Dr. Woolaston. This is […]

Here is a bit of a cheeky post as the photo is ‘borrowed’ from an Italian site (Matteo Rubboli): but as the text is overwhelmingly in Italian there is the fear that an international audience might not find it easily. This is particularly a shame as the text is just a mild commentary and the pictures are so […]

This one actually appeared in a note to a previous mermaid post from 2011. Beach has since hunted down a slightly earlier account in English (Anon 1812). Note that we are in deepest Brittany, in a land where mermaids were still an important part of folklore in the early 1900s. On the 31st July, an […]

The rarest form of Victorian urban legend is the sexual one: it is not the Victorians did not tell racy stories, it is that generally speaking no one dared to publish them. Here is one that somehow slipped through the net. Beach’s favourite detail are the stripes. In a suburb of Dundee a golden discovery […]

Bureaucracy hell at the moment in Italy so here is a simple but marvelous stocking filler from 1870. Reminds Beach of one of his favourite ever posts, on a hare in a Manx courtroom. Perhaps not quite as good but almost… We are in northern Scotland near Inverness. The other evening, while two servant girls […]

Nothing about fairies is easy but Beach is getting more and more confused about one aspect of fairy life and that is their trees. In the Gaelic-speaking world (or what was the Gaelic-speaking world, RIP) thorns were commonly associated with fairies. These are the trees that workers are sometimes terrified about cutting down. In Wales […]

Apologies for the absence of Mermaid Monday over Christmas. Here we are back with an account from Captain Stedman: seen previously in this blog tangling with a fairy. Stedman has been talking about tapirs. He, then, gives some interesting opinions from his peers about mermaids (II, 182-3). A Mr. Selefelder, of the Society service, at […]

Beach recently reach ran across this will in an early nineteenth-century publication, Kirby’s Wonderful Museum, vol IV, p. 259. Enjoy. I do hereby direct my executors to lay out five guineas in purchase of a picture of the viper biting the benevolent hand of the person who saved him from perishing in the snow, if […]

Here is an extraordinary description of George Catlin (obit 1872), American painter and ethnologist (before his time) among the Mandans, with the matching image above. The game is basically this: how many arrows can you shoot into the air before your first arrow hits the ground. What Beach finds extraordinary are the number of arrows […]

It is well known that there was a great deal of walking or pedestrian enthusiasm in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century England. Usually, these races were a question of going from, say, London to York in x number of hours or of beating y over the same distance. However, Beach recently ran across the single weirdest race […]

Beach has recently been having nightmares about narrow corridors. This story is a form of reverse therapy. It also taps into other stories told in this place of men and women who get into trees and can’t get out afterwards. It is well known that during the French Revolution, the wood Kusel, near Deux Ponts […]

Children, we are told, have supernatural encounters more easily than adults. On several levels this would make sense. But forgetting, for a moment, about whether this is true or false, where does the idea come from? There is a very strong notion among spiritualists and theosophists in the later 19C that kids had greater potential […]

*** Stephen D. gets it!*** Scroll down for 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 […]