Beachcombing's Bizarre History Blog

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 […]

Prepare to be humiliated. Your name is Guillaume, the years is 1816, and you have convinced yourself that it is possible to fly with wings attached to your puny arms. Yes, this is the age of balloons, but surely man can climb into the sky practically unassisted? Now you are in a great tradition, a […]

Sorry…

A very short post today as Beach has to deal with some pesky leprechauns. Annie McIntire, a venerable county Derry woman, has a sublime faith in the fairies. When being examined at a meeting of the Limavady Pension Committee as to her age, she fixed the time of her birth as Hallowe’en in 1839 giving […]

This was allegedly born in Kracow.

Irish warriors prepare to fight the English. Note the blessing… Late sixteenth century.

In awe of this picture. James H. 29 Sep 2017, has found the same orientation. Love this. Leif, 1 Nov 2017: At the sight of this photo, Dr. Beachcombing was overcome with awe. We were overcome with suspicion. 100 years ago, film exposures were far to slow to capture a propellor in rotation, so when […]

An interesting ghost scare from 1930. Somercotes is a village in Derbyshire. The first report is from 9 Jul 1930. The Somercotes ghost, which caused a big scare four years ago, has apparently not been laid. This early report has proved untraceable, though in the midst of the following crisis a local confesses to having […]

Turkey: made 7500 years ago. Kate writes in, 29 Sep 2017: If that little toy cart was really made 7,500 years ago, wouldn’t it predate the invention of the wheel by about 2,000 years? That doesn’t seem right. Kate has a point…

It is the single most important mermaid sighting of them all, because it is the Babylonian creation myth (or part of the same). Our source is Berossus, a Chaldean historian, writing in the Greek tradition of history: a Herodotus wannabe, in the third century B.C. In one of the surviving fragments of his book (which […]

When the insufferable Lytton Strachey was asked, in WW1, what he would do if he saw a German trying to violate his sister, he responded ‘I would try and get between them.’ Strachey gave this answer in a legal setting. He wanted to be certified as a pacifist and Beach was curious about the question, […]

Most Shakespeare scholars believe that Shakespeare’s first plays were written in about 1590, a couple of years before the sonnets: Shakespeare would have been 26. But there must have been earlier attempts, now lost apprenticeships in prose and poetry, where Shakespeare learnt his art. It is just possible that we get a distant echo of […]

Here is a remarkable feat of arms recorded as a poem on an inscription, put up in AD 118 on the banks of the Danube by a Roman soldier, Soranus. Given that this is a public statement of the feat, we can assume that it actually happened. This is I, once the best known of […]