Beachcombing's Bizarre History Blog

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 […]

Charlotte Despard in 1933, veteran of the anti-suffragette movement, taking on new enemies.

It is Mermaid Monday and here is an Ulster mermaid from the early nineteenth century. Sir, l beg leave to inform you, for the benefit of the curious, that I am happy that have it in my power to set the public mind at rest, respecting the existence of this wonderful animal, having been so […]

If you are going to carry out massacres then it is important to be able to count how many soldiers (and all too often civilians) that you are killing. From scalping in the American west to the Einsatzgruppen tally sheets on the Eastern Front in the Second World War military organizations have come up with all […]

There is a minority tradition about obscene ghosts: ghosts that stalk the living for sexual favours; or that even invade their beds. It is very difficult to know how common these ghosts were because prior to about 1970 it would have been just too much to write about them: paradoxically the source-starved middle ages and […]

4 Aug 1941 (barely a month into Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union) this ‘funny story’ appeared in a London newspaper. Perhaps we should think of it as a bit of nostalgia from the times when knives not Nazi bombs were the most dangerous thing in the East End. During the scare caused by Jack […]

German inflation crisis.

It is 1891. You are living in a small Cornish village and your neighbours get jumpy every time they see a shadow (‘the ghost…’ etc) and talk darkly of Mother Jones being a witch. Well, in most British villages it was a question of sermons, railway timetables and opening parish schools. But in Ludgvan, close […]

British marines break out at sword.

1956

A discovery of the summer. Love this.

Mermaid Monday continues with this gem from western Ireland Galway. The earliest record found so far dates to 22 Sep 1819, Saunder’s Newsletter, 2-3 with the title ‘Mermaid’. However, the originally allegedly (non vidi) appeared in the Galway Advertiser 19 Sep. Naturalists have hitherto doubted of the existence of mermaids and mermen; we have it […]

We have seen on this site, several times, urban legends about body parts being used in industrial production: fat for glass or telegraph wires; body parts for soap, something, of course, found too in the First World War. The following story is a not so elaborate practical joke but the attitudes behind it suggest that […]

There has long been a minority opinion that Jack the Ripper was a woman: the so-called ‘Jill the Ripper theory’. It is often said that the theory begins with William Douglas Steward, Jack The Ripper: A New Theory in 1939. Steward established to his own satisfaction, that Jill was a deranged midwife. But Steward was […]