Beachcombing's Bizarre History Blog

Peace signature in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles.

British soldiers after battle of Mareth Line 1943

Messing around with numbers for the great European cities over the last two hundred years: I’m not interested so much in the biggest cities as the capitals of the most important countries. Can these be taken as barometers for the successes and failures of their countries? A few things stand out. First, growth is constant […]

1963, dragon killed in puppet show in Paris.

Some crappy days in London now, sigh. Here in any case, while I’m away, is an American mermaid case that washed up in an Irish newspaper in 1873. The original sources was supposedly the Provincetown Advertiser. We are at Brewster in Massachusetts. A supposed mermaid was seen upon the beach at Brewster last Thursday by […]

German Space program: sorry…

This is an account of a legendary meal (perhaps too legendary?) that took place in the 1860s in Paris. The host and the subject of the meal was Cora Pearl a British courtesan based in the French capital. Her cuisine was legendary for the quality and quantity of the food that was served. Indeed a […]

Headless men, late medieval manuscript, note the chest eye and low beard.

This bit of fun comes from Paul Tabori’s biography of British ghost hunter Harry Price. No date is given. Are we perhaps in the 1930s? A less sweeping claim was made by a gentleman who had invented a way of testing the human aura!… It seemed that the ‘aura’ machine was a violet-ray apparatus; it […]

This is an early example of operational psychology in battle. We are in 480 BC and a massive Persian fleet is heading south along the Greek coast to meet the allied Greek navy. However, within the Persian flotilla, are the ships of the Ionian cities of Asia Minor, Greek-speaking communities who, just ten years before, […]

Wright goes around the Statue of Liberty.

Introduction Been reading a lot about poltergeists recently, perhaps the most fascinating of all Fortean phenomena. I’ve collected a list of my favourite poltergeist actions; and then my favourite poltergeist sounds. I try and pass very quickly over the banal and well known. These come from tens of different cases. Poltergeist Acts Stones thrown; showers […]

Dear Reader, a crappy month with a *serious* wordworm problem in the house and a health disaster in the wider family. As a result the next month might be particularly tricky towards the end. Please be patient if there is interruption in service. The most popular posts this month were Why Did the Chicken Cross […]

The Index Biography is a quiz pioneered by this blog and introduced in a previous post. The creator must find a biography of a famous individual from history, they must turn to the index and write down eight peripheral facts about the individual’s life. We offered up previously here Sheridan le Fanu and Joseph Stalin (he of ripe […]

Beach has recently being looking at the mythology of the Whitechapel killings. He has tried but failed to resist the evidence of spiritualists. Here is an extensive report on the hunt from the table rappers, early October 1888. An extraordinary statement bearing upon the Whitechapel tragedies was made to the Cardiff police yesterday by a […]