Beachcombing's Bizarre History Blog

A Cruikshank pic: love the guy’s expression.

Love this. Late 19C British view of the two Irelands, Protestant and Catholic.

Beach was awfully fond of his snowball tag, and was disappointed when he simply ran out of good snowball stories. Imagine his joy then to run into some ghostly snowballs in Skinner’s Myths and Legends of Our Own Land. The year is apparently 1849 Forty-seven years ago, in the township of St.  Mary’s, Illinois, two […]

This fine ‘lost valley’ story comes from Texas, but the tale of the shepherd who accidentally walks through into a hidden dell or stumbles up, while chasing a lamb, onto an unknown plateau is probably as old as our Neolithic ancestors. This particular version was collected by J. Frank Dobie at the end of the nineteenth century. West […]

Beach has only once been to Bedfordshire, a tiny English county near London. He got stuck in its chief town, Luton, took a room in a sordid pub (the bookshelf had a rack full of well-thumbed pornographic magazines – if only Tripadvisor had been around…) and missed his bus.* In any case, enough of Luton. […]

Serial Killer in Chief

Today is the anniversary of Britain’s vote, suicidal or brave as you see fit, to leave the European Union. Beach thought he would remember that day with a quotation that has more resonance with him than anything else he has read on the campaign because it describes a strange lived historical experience: the sense of […]

This is a great story which appears with the heading, ‘Scotch Ghost Story’. We are in Glasgow. Beach has no doubt though that it is a Victorian urban legend. Let’s face it, the tale is so satisfying that if it ever actually happened it would have been abstracted and told to everyone who would listen. […]

19C illlustration of the tree message

Old school

Location: Ireland (Wilde 1888, 199), late nineteenth century Aim: To cure the mumps Ingredients: a piece of rope, an alarm clock, nine black stones, a torch, a holy well. Method: (i) go out with your torch before dawn and find nine black stones (ii) once the sun is up tie the rope into a noose […]

Sculpture class

A girl, a radio…

Beach read this story, tried to forget it but couldn’t. There are two questions. First, did it really happen? 19C British newspapers are usually quite reliable, but 19C French newspapers are not. If this had been clipped from a French newspaper it could have been a complete invention, it would be interesting to see whether […]

Beach has long been curious about the begging life and was fascinated to run across this article from 1889 about how difficult it was to make money in London by holding out your hand. A clearly middle class man took a bet with his friends, after dinner, and presumably after taking port, that he could […]