Beachcombing's Bizarre History Blog

John Man, Saladin: The Sultan Who Vanquished the Crusaders and Built an Islamic Empire A new biography of the great Kurdish leader of the Arab world.  

Ho, ho, ho!

Witches fly in many different cultures: the British anthropologist Needham argued that it was a way of expressing their power, their ability to bring maleficum to all who get in their way or on their nerves. But in the European tradition witches have been associated, above all, with broomsticks: though note that witches were also […]

Always love the crests…

A lovely story from New Market in Co Cork in the wild west of Ireland and another episode from the series on horse charming. Not least interesting is the fact that this seems to be the origin of the modern phrase ‘horse whispering’. Among the curiosities of this district [New Market, 1810] may be properly included […]

Remarkable sword from the Civil War: brings out my inner cavalier.

Surrenders are never very easy moments but the meeting between William Tecumseh Sherman and Joseph E. Johnston at Bennett Place on 17 and 18 April 1865 as the American Civil War was winding down proved a generally civilized affair. Sherman, the Union commander, was a Democrat and had a natural sympathy for the south: despite […]

Paris, anteaters…

How the chaps in purple bought it…

Sometimes the blogger finds a newstory that he cannot let go. After a week of wrestling with his conscience Beach has decided that he simply has to give this particular incidence of love between the peoples of Europe wider coverage. We are in 1931. Prague. Thursday. Two schoolboys were killed in the course of a […]

Beach has recently been looking at cases of men and women who accidentally, or deliberately, or accidentally-deliberatishly slept with demons. The following comes from a seventeenth-century account and it is interesting to see an idea that defined the Middle Ages surviving so powerfully into the early modern period: Beach wonders when the latest record would […]

Raid on an illegal whisky still in prohibition…

William Geroux, The Mathews Men: Seven Brothers and the War Against Hitler’s Uboats Always up for Battle of the Atlantic books…

Robert Damon Schneck, The Bye Bye Man and Other Strange-but-True-Tales (New York 2014) RDS has built a reputation, in the last decade, for ‘strange stories’ well told with a strong bias towards the supernatural. This ‘new’ collection – actually originally published by Anomalist Press in 2005 as The President’s Vampire – has the typical RDS […]

Horowitz, Kosher USA (Columbia University Press) Food history is always good and some of the manipulations described in the blurb got my curiosity going.