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  • British and Irish Women in Black Spirits October 31, 2021

    Author: Beach Combing | in : Modern
    British and Irish Women in Black Spirits

    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 […]

    Biggest European Cities: 1800-2018 May 8, 2018

    Author: Beach Combing | in : Contemporary, Modern
    Biggest European Cities: 1800-2018

    Messing around with numbers for the great European cities over the last two hundred years: I’m not interested so much in the biggest cities as the capitals of the most important countries. Can these be taken as barometers for the successes and failures of their countries? A few things stand out. First, growth is constant […]

    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 […]

    A Motor Car A Hundred Years Too Early April 27, 2018

    Author: Beach Combing | in : Modern
    A Motor Car A Hundred Years Too Early

    This blog has frequently pioneered ‘wrong time’ objects: things that appear decades or generations before we might reasonably expect them to. Here is an instance (not our first, wrong time car readers might remember) of a motor car about one hundred and fifty years before the car was invented. We are in London in 1742 […]

    Mermaid Monday: Thames Monster! April 23, 2018

    Author: Beach Combing | in : Modern
    Mermaid Monday: Thames Monster!

    Ok this is a bit of a cheeky addition to the list. It is not your typical mermaid, but then it is not your typical monster either. We are in 1742 in London. To be seen, at the Mitre Tavern, Charing-Cross. The largest Thames-Monster, or miraculous man-eater, that was ever in the World, taken on […]

    York-London Horse Race April 12, 2018

    Author: Beach Combing | in : Modern
    York-London Horse Race

    This story comes out of Kirby’s Wonderful Museum, vol IV, p. 359. Kirby claimed to have extracted it from a 1618 publication, The Abridgement of the English Chronicle. We are back to stupid sport bets. In this moneth [but which year?], John Lepton of Kepwick, in the county of Yorke, Esquire, a gentleman of an […]

    Mermaid Monday: Mermaid in London March 26, 2018

    Author: Beach Combing | in : Modern
    Mermaid Monday: Mermaid in London

    This is a weird entry that I haven’t been able to find my way into. The year is 1891 and this is clearly a mechanism of some kind: but how did they do it? drbeachcombing AT gmail DOT com Or was it a light show, like Pepper’s Ghost. The latest addition to the side shows […]

    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 […]

    Victorian Urban Legend: The Nail Ghost February 24, 2018

    Author: Beach Combing | in : Modern
    Victorian Urban Legend: The Nail Ghost

    This is a very enjoyable ghost story: it is classed as an urban legend because this blogger has come across it before but cannot remember where. Can anyone help: drbeachcombing AT gmail DOT com The text comes from The Life and Times of Henry Lord Brougham (the good Lord’s autobiography, published in 1871: flor. 1778-1868). […]

    Ghost Riot and Fakery, 1897 February 20, 2018

    Author: Beach Combing | in : Modern
    Ghost Riot and Fakery, 1897

    An 1897 ghost story, with a small ghost riot, exceptional for this extraordinary illustration from the Illustrated Police News. Regrettably the story was not more widely reported. Can anyone give more? drbeachcombing AT gmail DOT com PLUMSTEAD, near Woolwich, has for the past week been the scene of a ghostly visitation, in which the ‘spirit’ […]

    The History of the Playpen November 2, 2017

    Author: Beach Combing | in : Contemporary, Modern
    The History of the Playpen

    The playpen originated when a hunter-gatherer mother realized, many thousands of years ago, that she could keep her child in a safe corner of the cave with a simple barrier. But when did the business of playpens becomes serious, when were the first commercial models available in the shops? Beach set himself the task of trying […]

    Flight Hoaxes at Norwich October 7, 2017

    Author: Beach Combing | in : Modern
    Flight Hoaxes at Norwich

    Beach recently came across this remarkable hoax from Norwich UK from 1826. The public are respectfully informed that Signor Carlo Grain Villecrop [these sound like foreign names made up by an English writer], the celebrated Swiss Mountain-flyer, from Geneva, and Mont Blanc, is just arrived in this city, and will exhibit, with Tyrolese pole, fifty feet […]

    A Jack the Ripper Urban Legend September 22, 2017

    Author: Beach Combing | in : Contemporary, Modern
    A Jack the Ripper Urban Legend

    4 Aug 1941 (barely a month into Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union) this ‘funny story’ appeared in a London newspaper. Perhaps we should think of it as a bit of nostalgia from the times when knives not Nazi bombs were the most dangerous thing in the East End. During the scare caused by Jack […]

    The Origins of Jill the Ripper September 16, 2017

    Author: Beach Combing | in : Modern
    The Origins of Jill the Ripper

    There has long been a minority opinion that Jack the Ripper was a woman: the so-called ‘Jill the Ripper theory’. It is often said that the theory begins with William Douglas Steward, Jack The Ripper: A New Theory in 1939. Steward established to his own satisfaction, that Jill was a deranged midwife. But Steward was […]

    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 […]