Beachcombing's Bizarre History Blog

There is a long history of trying to explain poltergeist events with reference to fakery of household members; or extreme angst within the family circle. The first is absolutely credible, given the vagaries of human nature, but difficult to deploy as an explanation when the experiences were so bizarre and so, well, ‘total’ as in the […]

Girl (late 1950s?) runs to freedom: police from the two Germanies face off. Amazing picture: why isn’t it better known?

The IEA, one of Britain’s most serious think tanks, has recently published a list, a very stimulating list, of the thirteen great economic mistakes in British economic policy in the last century. All this got Beach thinking about the great mistakes in public policy generally since 1900. Here is a very limited list of points […]

Physical manifestations are, after noises, the most common features of poltergeist hauntings. In this sense Jeffrey did not disappoint, but given the sheer richness of the sounds that the family heard: and the three creepy sightings of Jeffrey, the albino mongoose from hell, the casual reader might have expected that the family would have been […]

An intimate portrayal of an empty man… Another one I’m looking forward to. Stratigakos, Hitler at Home

Unusually for a poltergeist case – or is this actually a wider phenomenon? Drbeachcombing At yahoo DOT com – Jeffrey was not just heard and felt. He was also seen. There were three occasions. I) On the first Susanna Wesley (mother not Suky) saw a ‘headless badger’ (!) under her daughter’s bed after a fit […]

Looks fascinating… Hope there is lots of art work. The Medieval Islamic Hospital, Ahmed Ragab

My blurb claims that this is a holocaust survivor attacking a Swedish neo-nazi: in any case, great photo…

So a hundred infantry have to get across a field to their objective and safety, only they know that the field has been planted with mines. How do you clear the field? The simplest (and most horrible) thing to do would be to send your troops forward down a plotted route with gaps of ten […]

Nine ‘allied’ soldiers in a Chinese city: they would soon be fighting each other….

Hayek: A Collaborative Biography: Part III Fraud, Fascism, and Free Market Religion (ed) Robert Leeson What in God’s name…!?! This is a website which prides itself on investigating the seedy and bizarre in history. So why bother with reviewing volume three in a series of six on Friedrich von Hayek, an Austrian economist who died […]

An image trying to portray the British (and Dominion?) dead after WW1. The files of zombie soldiers stretches up to the north-east of England, the front rank is walking through London.

Looking at medieval cat hating Beach came across this reference, from Etienne of Bourbon (again ran into the story in that wonderful book of Barillari, Protostoria della Strega, the translation though is not hers). We are no longer with the cat in a sabat. But this has to be one of the best demon descriptions of […]

Iranian child soldiers go up to the front in the Iraq-Iranian war.

Here is one for a busy day. Not sure if this is anecdote or factual event, but it is written in an amusing fashion, in that dry understated way that some British writers had in the later nineteenth century. Beach would put it down provisionally as an urban legend: he imagines the room exploding with laughter […]