Beachcombing's Bizarre History Blog

In today’s Boggart and Banshee podcast Chris Woodyard and I talk about the Woman in Black, a largely forgotten and utterly terrifying supernatural figure of American provenance. WiB, as devotees fondly call her, started to be seen in the 1860s in the United States. She would, in the next decades, be spotted in all corners […]

There are several reports from early twentieth-century Ireland of crowds of boys chasing leprechauns. This is the best attested of what we might call ‘leprechaun riots’ (named for ghost riots): Belief in the fairies, the ‘good people’ is still prevalent in many of the country districts in Ireland. During the past few days the superstition has been revived in […]

This is an 1851 report from Lough Swilly, a long sea inlet on the coast of Donegal. This was a very poor area in the nineteenth century. A correspondent has solemnly assured us that the crew of a boat in Lough Swilly, on the 4th inst. [October], saw, within twenty yards of them, a real […]

Location: nineteenth-century Ireland Aim: to find out who you are destined to love Ingredients: a snail, two plates, a May night Method: (i) find a snail while walking at night in May (perhaps May 24, the night between the worlds?) (ii) put this snail between two plates before going to sleep (iii) sleep (iv) in […]

This is a mermaid account from mid late 1910 and from County Clare in Ireland. The last reported appearance of a mermaid is so recent as the end of April, 1910. Several people, including Martin Griffin, my informant, saw what they are firmly convinced was a mer-woman in a cove a little to the north […]

You may not believe it, at first glance, but this painting is among the most terrifying ever hung in a gallery in Ireland. It shows a supernatural force threatening a series of Irish men and women. Confused? We’ll return to the fear in a minute. The artist was a young man of twenty two from […]

A duel was described in a British compendium in 1784: the Weekly Entertainer since you ask. The full text is below for connoisseurs, but what was remarkable about it was that eight men died and 2 were injured. Briefly the story went as follows. A group of friends in a tavern in Galway had an argument. At […]

Beach would like to introduce to the sheer unadorned horror of the Irish turkey. Let’s start slow and, then, gradually crank up the volume. Willie Reilly of Gelsha was going home… It was fairly late: when he came to where Johnnie Connor lives now, there was a bend in the road and there was at that […]

Peter Alderson Smith is an English scholar who in 1987 wrote a really very good book on Irish fairies: W. B. Yeats and the Tribes of Danu. In the middle of the book there is one of these passages where you think: what?!? Beach to help inattentive readers has italicized the relevant clause. Note that […]

It is Mermaid Monday and here is an Ulster mermaid from the early nineteenth century. Sir, l beg leave to inform you, for the benefit of the curious, that I am happy that have it in my power to set the public mind at rest, respecting the existence of this wonderful animal, having been so […]

There is a minority tradition about obscene ghosts: ghosts that stalk the living for sexual favours; or that even invade their beds. It is very difficult to know how common these ghosts were because prior to about 1970 it would have been just too much to write about them: paradoxically the source-starved middle ages and […]

Mermaid Monday continues with this gem from western Ireland Galway. The earliest record found so far dates to 22 Sep 1819, Saunder’s Newsletter, 2-3 with the title ‘Mermaid’. However, the originally allegedly (non vidi) appeared in the Galway Advertiser 19 Sep. Naturalists have hitherto doubted of the existence of mermaids and mermen; we have it […]

Elder daughter’s birthday party in a swimming pool coming up in minutes so this is just a curiosity pulled out of the rusty filing cabinet without too much thought. The following is dated to 1341 and appeared in the Annals of Ireland. The Irish annalistic tradition is incredibly complex in its early phase and rather […]

Oh to have been there… Walter Yeeling Evans Wentz was an American eccentric and mystic who from 1908 to 1911 studied British, Irish and Breton fairies. Readers may have come across his curious The Fairy Faith in Celtic Countries, brought out in November 1911, the single most bizarre book every published by Oxford University Press […]

Beach has recently become interested in Walter Yeeling Evans Wentz (or Evans-Wentz as he became)* the American mystic who in his late twenties and early thirties researched Breton, British and Irish fairies, before running off to India to become a guru. Many readers will know Evans Wentz for his Fairy Faith In Celtic Countries, the […]