Beachcombing's Bizarre History Blog

c. 1903

The black cat has been visited before on this blog: particularly the question of luck and cats. In three special posts we want to visit the question of why black cats came to be so hated in many parts of Europe. Here is one of the most interesting early texts, which comes from Walter Map, […]

Dear Reader, thanks for all the emails and communications. The most exciting event of this month has been the discovery of a hidden room in the Beachcombing residence: apparently three partisans hid there in the war. We know where it is, we have worked out how big it is, but we still have not broken […]

The book I’m most looking forward to this month: A Garden of Marvels, marvels in early medieval China!

***James wins it, scroll down for answer*** The Index Biography is a new form of biography 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 […]

What Napoleon wore on his last day of freedom

In Hamlet a priest says of the dead Ophelia as she is being brought to her burial (5,1): She should in ground unsanctified have lodged Till the last trumpet: for charitable prayers, Shards, flints and pebbles should be thrown on her: But what is this about ‘shards, flints and pebbles’? The Auden Shakespeare has no […]

Mother and children shelter from gunfire

***Dedicated to Chris with question marks*** There is a modern idea that fairies are the spirit of vegetation, the spirits of the land. Human beings, meanwhile, are their polluting, urbanizing neighbours. The two represent, respectively, the forces of life and entropy and are on a permanent collision course. Traditional views of European fairies were rather […]

Love it, but am sorry!

Odell is a small village, now in the English county of Bedfordshire. Here is a nice nineteenth-century case of ghost hysteria. For two or three weeks the neighbourhood Odell has been put into an extraordinary degree of excitement by the description of a supernatural visitation, at the village alehouse. To such a pitch had this […]

What Michael Jackson will look like twenty years on

In 1968 Donald McCormick published  Murder by Witchcraft (Arrow Books), it was one of about forty books that he wrote (under his own name or that of ‘Richard Deacon’) and it was, like many, perhaps all of the others, shot through with falsehoods and lies. Beach has examined Donald’s porkies on Jack the Ripper and on Madoc […]

Nazis with the Nation of Islam. I’m interested in the background, but more in their faces. Bruce T, EC and John M wrote in. I put down black panthers, but this is nation of Islam. Apparently there was the possibility of an alliance between two segregationist movements. At the centre is the George Lincoln Rockwell […]

Just to put the following events in perspective. The last witch certainly executed in England – there are some subsequent doubtful cases – dates to 1682: the last witch executed in Scotland dates to 1727. In 1735 witchcraft ceased to be a supernatural crime in England. Yet, 12 July 1737, The Monthly Chronologer reports the […]