Beachcombing's Bizarre History Blog

…with several other Roman relics at Walcott near Bath 19) A pair of nun’s stockings 20) Lace made of human hair 21) Centipedes in spirits 22) Brain stones [what?] 23)…

…hope of understanding how we sorry human ants distort our personal histories. First a premise: ten years ago, living far away from Little Snoring and Tuscany, Beachcombing set himself a…

…during this long journey was subject to the Mongols. They came across many cities which had been destroyed and huge mounds of human bones.’ They were given, however, a warm,…

…sees the sunlit uplands off on the horizon and believes, perhaps stupidly, that humanity is gradually evolving and moving towards a happier, freer future. However, he would be the first…

…It should be Stories My Teacher Neglected to Tell Me… There is no question that the Americans that Farquhar has herded together are unusual human fauna. However, and this is…

…the external evaporation into the earth. Inevitable and, for Beachcombing, bizarre comparisons with the working of the human body follow. ‘We must suppose the action of the wind in the…

…sacrificed as the bread and wine transubstantiated… (Bede and some dodgy archaeology from Yeavering). The edges of the world, it is fair to say, do things differently. Ditto Desert Islam…

…fads. Several have appealed to him, but certainly the one that clamoured most urgently for his attention was the belief that human breast milk was a healthy addition to the…

…to its human acolytes. I’ve long had this prejudice. I remember, at Sunday School, reacting badly to God scribbling on the wall in the Book of Daniel. The Wooster poltergeist…

…was not given human food. They seem to have given her money. Ann, in fact, fits rather neatly into the category of what might be usefully called the ‘fairy witch’:…

…The worm, produced spontaneously from out of the mud of the marshland, puts forward his claim to gnaw on humanity’s enamel: a plague of more than Biblical proportions is born….

…a supposed ‘ex-human being’ all in white, whose perambulations were confined to certain lanes and other isolated places in the vicinity of Shorts-fields. The taste of the perturbed spirit was…

…the pieces of human flotsam washed away by this attack was Guðríður Símonardóttir. Andrew Evans in his Iceland (p. 215) tells us that she was twenty nine when kidnapped with…

                Mars has a long history of befuddling human minds. Think of Giovanni Schiaparelli mapping out the ‘canals’ of that planet. Poor Perceval…

…lived there had become Europeanized in external appearance and were so much like other human beings that I even looked upon them as Germans… As I thought that they were…