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  • Victorian Urban Legends: Story-Killers! August 27, 2022

    Author: Beach Combing | in : Modern
    Victorian Urban Legends: Story-Killers!

    ***I’m putting a series of Victorian Urban Legends posts up to draw the reader’s attention to my just released book: The Nail in the Skull and Other Victorian Urban Legends. This legend (with full references) will appear in a second volume. If anyone can fill in missing pieces or offer other sources… I’ll be grateful and you’ll be […]

    John Clare and ‘Will O Wisp’ July 1, 2022

    Author: Beach Combing | in : Modern
    John Clare and 'Will O Wisp'

    John Clare (1793-1864) was a Northamptonshire poet from a poor rural background. He includes in his writings a series of supernatural experiences that are more usually filtered through the educated writing of Clare’s ‘betters’. As Chris Woodyard and I speak, on this month’s Boggart and Banshee, about spook lights, I thought I’d revisit Clare’s run […]

    Explaining Death Omens May 1, 2022

    Author: Beach Combing | in : Contemporary, Modern
    Explaining Death Omens

    I just can’t take pre-cognition and death omens seriously: a bat flying into the window, a rooster singing loud at midnight, even an encounter with a tall woman combing her hair. Yes, yes, all these are picturesque folklore confetti. But to say, as many of our ancestors did, that they represent the grim reaper throwing […]

    The Boggart: A Study in Shadows February 15, 2022

    Author: Beach Combing | in : Contemporary, Modern
    The Boggart: A Study in Shadows

    This morning, my new book comes out – The Boggart: Folklore, History, Placenames and Dialect. It is three hundred pages long and has just shy of a thousand items in the bibliography. There are lots of maps and images and, reader, if it dropped on your head from a three-storey building it would brain you. […]

    A Manx Wizard in Victorian Liverpool June 30, 2020

    Author: Beach Combing | in : Modern
    A Manx Wizard in Victorian Liverpool

    Introducing the Magic Mersey Between 9 March 1857 and 22 June of the same year the Liverpool Mercury ran a series of thirteen articles on ‘fortune-tellers and their dupes’. I’ve just published these articles (about 30,000 words) in a pamphlet entitled: The Wizards, Astrologers, Fairy Seers and Witches of Victorian Liverpool.*  Taken together they are […]

    Ghost or Fairy on the Road from Wilden to Ravensden? June 25, 2020

    Author: Beach Combing | in : Modern
    Ghost or Fairy on the Road from Wilden to Ravensden?

    1873, 2 women see a weird humanoid on the road between 2 Bedfordshire villages. Was it a ghost, a fairy, death or an itinerant tramp?

    Cake-Eating Fairy in 19C Staffordshire March 10, 2018

    Author: Beach Combing | in : Modern
    Cake-Eating Fairy in 19C Staffordshire

    Introducing Nancy This little passage is a troubling one for all kinds of reasons. In the mid-late nineteenth century, an itinerant preacher recounted an experience from his time in Staffordshire (a Midlands English county that ranged, in this period, from the beautifully wild to the grimily industrial). He had evidently begged a bed in the […]

    A Fairy Foot? February 17, 2018

    Author: Beach Combing | in : Modern
    A Fairy Foot?

    In 1871 a man in a cattle market in Ipswich (England) watched a dealer remove, from his pocket, various objects and was shocked to see a small skeletal foot there. On being asked what the object was: the cattle dealer responded that it was a ‘fairy foot’ and that it was a ‘sovereign protection against […]

    Goblins Under the Bed January 23, 2018

    Author: Beach Combing | in : Contemporary, Modern
    Goblins Under the Bed

    Here is a bit of a cheeky post as the photo is ‘borrowed’ from an Italian site (Matteo Rubboli): but as the text is overwhelmingly in Italian there is the fear that an international audience might not find it easily. This is particularly a shame as the text is just a mild commentary and the pictures are so […]

    Hilarious Ghost-Ewe Incident in Scotland January 19, 2018

    Author: Beach Combing | in : Modern
    Hilarious Ghost-Ewe Incident in Scotland

    Bureaucracy hell at the moment in Italy so here is a simple but marvelous stocking filler from 1870. Reminds Beach of one of his favourite ever posts, on a hare in a Manx courtroom. Perhaps not quite as good but almost… We are in northern Scotland near Inverness. The other evening, while two servant girls […]

    Children, Folklore and the Supernatural January 7, 2018

    Author: Beach Combing | in : Contemporary, Modern
    Children, Folklore and the Supernatural

    Children, we are told, have supernatural encounters more easily than adults. On several levels this would make sense. But forgetting, for a moment, about whether this is true or false, where does the idea come from? There is a very strong notion among spiritualists and theosophists in the later 19C that kids had greater potential […]

    Katharine Briggs: Some Thoughts December 12, 2017

    Author: Beach Combing | in : Contemporary
    Katharine Briggs: Some Thoughts

    Anyone who studies fairies, witches and the supernatural generally will have a simple series of thoughts about Katharine Briggs (1898-1980): gratitude for keeping the Folklore Society going over a rocky couple of decades; love of her marvelous books, including one of the great fairy novels; and an affection for that brooding severe child of Victorian […]

    Roy Vickery, the Green Man October 24, 2017

    Author: Beach Combing | in : Contemporary
    Roy Vickery, the Green Man

    Much of British folklore has been carefully curated and packed into volumes on library shelves: but most of British folklore lies, in truth, uncollected out in the fields. This brings us to one of the heroes of modern British folklore, Roy Vickery. RV is a botanist with a long-term interest in the folklore of plants: […]

    The Hobgoblin Club September 21, 2017

    Author: Beach Combing | in : Modern
    The Hobgoblin Club

    It is 1891. You are living in a small Cornish village and your neighbours get jumpy every time they see a shadow (‘the ghost…’ etc) and talk darkly of Mother Jones being a witch. Well, in most British villages it was a question of sermons, railway timetables and opening parish schools. But in Ludgvan, close […]

    Werewhales! September 3, 2017

    Author: Beach Combing | in : Medieval
    Werewhales!

    Different countries, of course, have different shape-shifters. Northern Europe and France have a strong werewolf tradition. Amerindian peoples have a lot of changing into birds. In northern Scandinavia shaman became deer. Early modern Britons did not change into bears, but they often met headless bears that changed into other things: confusing I know. Vampires are […]