Beachcombing's Bizarre History Blog

Bored, got nothing to do? Here’s a thought. Why not blind a friend for a lark? There are a couple score newspaper stories from 1850-1950 of workmen, companions and complete strangers giving victims pipes that have been doctored with gunpowder. Typically the smoker puts a match to the shag of tobacco, takes a deep breath and […]

Michael J. McCarthy, Confederate Waterloo Honestly, I’m going to get this just to learn more about Pickett’s long lunch…

Beach is eternally worried about mystics, people who have or believe that they have paranormal powers. Where do they come from? What do they mean? Most studies of ‘mystics’ put them in a historical tradition. The Cunning Man in the English or, for that matter, New England countryside in the 1700s draws on Christianity, Anglo-Saxon […]

Anders Rydell, The Book Thieves: The Nazi Looting of Europe’s Libraries and the Race to Return a Literary Inheritance Nazis, libraries… what’s not to like?

A busy day today so here is a little 19C story: A practical joke of a strange kind was played recently on a young lady travelling in first class railway carriage in the West Riding of Yorkshire…. She had the carriage to herself until, at the station from which the train had a long run […]

Location: this spell seems to have been used throughout the west Midlands and North of England. Aim: to seduce a man or to cement a sexual relationship with a man. Ingredients: flour, water, salt, a good sense of rhythm and an ample backside. Method (i) young woman makes bread (ii) when the bread is ready […]

Iconic picture from First of the Few. Three surviving spitfires flying towards the sun.

Beach has recently been looking at ring stories in his quest for Victorian urban legends. Here is one that sounds simply impossible: though if any poultry experts want to contradict: drbeachcombing AT yahoo DOT com A doctor, residing in Moringa, in Australia, writes to the Revue Sanitaire to solicit the attention of naturalists to the […]

Soviet’s practice for the German advance: Soviet officer and partisan child. Goes without saying that neither are likely to have survived the war….

Beach has been wondering more about the legend of snakes as milk stealers: the satisfyingly bizarre idea that snakes suck milk both from nursing mother’s breasts and from cows’ and other ruminants’ udders. Beach has given examples of this belief and also speculated about the origins of this belief: was the idea Paleolithic or Neolithic […]

Watch that spider…

Obviously this never happened. But credit to the hack who came up with it. Note the event took place in France, the favourite land of madness for 19C English journalists… A curious duel has taken place in a travelling circus temporally stationed in village outside Paris. Two acrobats quarrelled and resolved to fight a duel. […]

Thinking of poor Carrie Fischer today. The crew before filming began.

Mmmmm….

From 1060-1091 Christian warriors, ‘Normans’, defeated the Islamic powers in Sicily and returned the island to the Catholic flock. For most historians this is the end of Arab civilization there, with the exception of some starbursts of Arab architecture and Arab art through the next two to three generations. However, there is one final Arab […]