Beachcombing's Bizarre History Blog

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 […]

A fairy queen from New Jersey, 1903

HMS Daphne and rescued slaves, 1868: a long way from home.

1863, Confederate prisoners in their misery.

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 […]

11 Sept. Love some of these pictures. First the confusion, then the anger.

Beach came across this list of Japanese generals that was allegedly published in a Mexican newspaper in 1941. It was republished in A. Jimenez, Picardía Mexicana in 1965. The joke is that the names are all clever and very obscene double entendres in Mexican Spanish. Beach does not understand them all, but if anyone else […]

Colorised pic from 1940s New York.

A delicate occupied zone with an unfriendly population. Think US Marines patrolling in southern Afghanistan or Israeli troops walking through a Palestinian village. That is challenging enough. But could we make it a little more interesting for, say, an HBO series? Why not, for example, put the occupying troops under the control of a young […]

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 […]

The results of the Fairy Census are just out and are being hosted on the Fairyist, hence this link: scroll down. There are included 500 fairy sightings from around the world. If you have any experiences to add, then, by all means fill in the survey, as the second round of collection is now beginning […]

Beach is continuing to hunt down rumours, this time from the British press in the Second World War. Here are some global and some local, some silly and some worryingly credible. All were published with the implication being that they are not to be believed and yet were they so far off the mark? The […]