Beachcombing's Bizarre History Blog

Walter Scott refers, in one of his poems, to ‘the noontide hag’, a creature he explains in a note as ‘a tall, emaciated, gigantic female figure, is supposed, in particular, to haunt the district of Knoidart’ and ‘which, contrary to the general rule of ghostly creatures, appeared in the full blaze of noon.’ Quite how […]

Julia Lee, Our Gang, a Racial History Watched the early and the modern recently….

Were there self made men in Victorian Britain? The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography as well as being the single most impressive collection of biographies yet put together is useful in measuring money as for most modern individuals, say from the eighteenth century onwards, the vox-writer has included wealth at death (something recorded in Britain […]

They deserved each other…

The following is a report from Reuters from Turkey from June 1937. Pretending to be a ghost, a beautiful young woman in Istanbul, who appeared naked at night in the house of a priest, and danced before him, has made big haul money and other valuables. When he first saw what he described as a […]

St Bartholomew’s massacre in France

Imagine a watering hole where Hans Christian Andersen has cocktails with Genghis Khan and where Sigmund Freud takes to the dance-floor with Greta Garbo and makes innuendos. A world in which Nelson Mandela plays darts with Benjamin Franklin and St Martin gets into a fight with Pharaoh Khafra. Have we strayed into a parallel dimension […]

Bardossy executed in 1945 1946 in Hungary Thanks to Ashley for correction

A month ago Beach offered up some of the most offensive names that farmer’s gave their fields in medieval and modern England: Judas, Kiss Arse Hill, and Poison Piddle being some of the highlights. Our reference guide, Mark Field’s English field names, goes beyond the offensive though to the downright bizarre. Perhaps the most striking example […]

Beachcombing has a tradition of epiphany gifts. Here is the latest. Enys Tregarthen Piskeys These are by no means all of Enys Tregarthen‘s pixy stories, but these are five that are unavailable online. Enjoy!

The danger of trains…

Frederick II stands as one of the most fascinating figures of the Middle Ages. Not the least interesting aspect of his personality was his entirely unmedieval attitude to God and to matters religious, perhaps partly a result of his upbringing in a still residually Muslim Sicily: he had a disconcerting habit of acting like an enlightenment […]

Fighting modernity…

Word history is particularly fraught where supernatural creatures are involved. Uncanny things multiply with such disconcerting speed (often varying from valley to valley) that the normal philological approaches can easily get stuck in the mud. A particularly painful example of this is what might be called the bugge family. Bugge meant demon or spirit in Middle English: […]

Froom, Evasion and Escape Devices Looks great, a bit expensive perhaps.