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  • Jack the Ripper and the Spiritualists April 29, 2018

    Author: Beach Combing | in : Modern
    Jack the Ripper and the Spiritualists

    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 […]

    Smuggling by Hot Air Balloon, 1838 April 24, 2018

    Author: Beach Combing | in : Modern
    Smuggling by Hot Air Balloon, 1838

    Humans adapt new technologies quickly to almost every imaginable use. This was true with flight. The first manned hot air balloon flew in 1782. The first military use of hot air balloons came at the Battle of Fleurus in 1794: France became the first nation to ever use air power in war. However, what about […]

    Victorian Urban Legend: Doppelganger April 8, 2018

    Author: Beach Combing | in : Modern
    Victorian Urban Legend: Doppelganger

    Doppelganger and Familiar Robber This is a very unusual story and has two acts. Note that it is put here for the familiar robbers story in the second part: the subject of two previous posts, one from the US one from Spain. But is the doppelganger tale also an urban legend? The story is messy. […]

    What Happened to William Hare? March 17, 2018

    Author: Beach Combing | in : Modern
    What Happened to William Hare?

    Introduction William Burke and William Hare were two ne’er-do-wells who, in 1828, discovered that murdering people in the Edinburgh slums and selling their corpses to doctors made for good money. They were finally arrested after an incredible sixteen men and women had been done away with. Burke was tried, found guilty and hung; his common […]

    Ghosts and a Bleeding Corpse in the Courtroom March 9, 2018

    Author: Beach Combing | in : Modern
    Ghosts and a Bleeding Corpse in the Courtroom

    Introduction In that wonderful book by Andrew Lang, Dreams and Ghosts (1897) there is a description of a phantom finding its way into a British courtroom in 1829 (pp. 143-144). Lang did not have access to the British Newspaper Archive – what fun he would have had there! – so his reference is brief and unsatisfactory. Here is […]

    Lobasha, A Psychic Boy Detective December 10, 2017

    Author: Beach Combing | in : Modern
    Lobasha, A Psychic Boy Detective

    Had something stolen? A close friend has been murdered? Or has there been a kidnapping in the family? Help unfortunately is not at hand. The FBI are busy with the Patriot Act, the A Team are lost in the Los Angeles Underground and Le Chevalier C. Auguste Dupin is regrettably fictional. However, do not despair for […]

    Haunted Tree Swindle in Italy November 9, 2017

    Author: Beach Combing | in : Modern
    Haunted Tree Swindle in Italy

    This story appeared in a British newspaper in September of 1861. It relates to Gubbio in Umbria: the unity of Italy has just happened. A rural parish in the region of Agubbio, which was relieved last year of the Pope’s temporal rule, but which still endures the evils of ignorance and superstition consequent on many […]

    The Nun, the Pickpocket and the French Prison August 29, 2017

    Author: Beach Combing | in : Modern
    The Nun, the Pickpocket and the French Prison

    Beach began to write about pickpockets some years ago because of their habit of attracting urban legends. However, he is ever more convinced that there are some good books to be written on the sly-fingered Victorian professionals who plagued London and Paris… Interestingly, English pickpockets were exported to France and the word ‘pickpocket’ was taken […]

    Beggar for a Day June 18, 2017

    Author: Beach Combing | in : Modern
    Beggar for a Day

    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 […]

    Review: Meredith Kercher, Amanda Knox and Murder in Perugia May 24, 2017

    Author: Beach Combing | in : Contemporary
    Review: Meredith Kercher, Amanda Knox and Murder in Perugia

    Nina Burleigh, The Fatal Gift of Beauty In 2007 a young British student Meredith Kercher was murdered in her flat in Perugia, Italy: she had possibly been raped before her death. The crime was a horrible one, but the victim was all too often forgotten in the events that followed. The prosecutors in Perugia decided […]

    Urban Legend: the Magic Letter May 19, 2017

    Author: Beach Combing | in : Modern
    Urban Legend: the Magic Letter

    In the last months Beach has put up a number of posts on possible nineteenth-century urban legends: as they are reported as facts though and as the nineteenth-century was a foreign country (‘they did things differently there’) it is difficult, perhaps impossible with any certainty to distinguish the legendary from the simply bizarre. This is […]

    Victorian Urban Legends: Music Boxes and Watch Sacks April 25, 2017

    Author: Beach Combing | in : Modern
    Victorian Urban Legends: Music Boxes and Watch Sacks

    Truly Beach isn’t that interested in this ignorant-native story from India, but the comparison to what is evidently a home grown British urban legend: A good story of a thief comes from Calcutta. ‘The Native,’ as Miss Fox called Major B ‘s servant, stole a musical box, ignorant of its use, and fancying it contained […]

    Gulled at Hull April 16, 2017

    Author: Beach Combing | in : Modern
    Gulled at Hull

    This is a uniquely charming Victorian confidence trick to add to our collection. Enjoy! Hull Fair is acknowledged to be one of the largest of its kind in the country. Thousands of excursionists flock into the city on October 11th, and the succeeding days, and every blackguard, thief, and confidence trickster in the North of […]

    Victorian Urban Legend: Familiar Robbers February 16, 2017

    Author: Beach Combing | in : Modern
    Victorian Urban Legend: Familiar Robbers

    This is a cute story from the States, picked up by an Irish newspaper in 1873. Whether this story is true or false we do not know; but it is said here that recently in the parish of St. Martin, Iberia, or somewhere down that way, an old widow lady, whose children had all married […]

    The Ring Dodge February 3, 2017

    Author: Beach Combing | in : Modern
    The Ring Dodge

    This trick is so well known that Beach has seen versions of it on crass TV shows. Still here is the ring dodge in all its pristine glory from 1894. At the London Guildhall, on Monday, Ann Francis was charged with attempting to obtain money by false pretences. Detective Evans, of the Great Eastern Railway […]