Beachcombing's Bizarre History Blog

***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 […]

***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 […]

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 […]

***I’m putting a series of Victorian Urban Legends posts up to draw the reader’s attention to my forthcoming 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 […]

***I’m putting a series of Victorian Urban Legends posts up to draw the reader’s attention to my forthcoming 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 […]

***I’m putting a series of Victorian Urban Legends posts up to draw the reader’s attention to my forthcoming 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 German sources… I’ll be grateful and you’ll be […]

*This is the subject of Chris and my most recent Boggart and Banshee podcast* **For the source file; and for other Puca books and pamphlets** William Butterfield’s run in with the fairies at Ilkley is one of the best-known encounters in British supernatural folklore. An account appeared in the first number of Folk-lore Record in […]

***I’m putting a series of Victorian Urban Legends posts up to draw the reader’s attention to my forthcoming 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 German sources… I’ll be grateful and you’ll […]

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 […]

Boggart and Banshee’s new podcast is here on the Wesley Poltergeist. Readers of many years may recall that I visited this case in a long thread of posts back in 2015. Well, now Chris and I have returned to rake through the poltergeist ashes. I was struck again by how while this might not be […]

Boggart Hole Clough, the subject of this month’s Boggart and Banshee podcast, is a large park to the north of Manchester. Now it is well within the conurbation (the modern park is discussed in my new book): once it was an obscure, haunted (as the name suggests) ravine between two parishes. In the podcast we […]

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. […]

The boggle factor is a crucial concept in anomaly studies: at what point do you just lose all patience with an account. For instance, John Smith tells you that he saw a ghost with its head tucked underneath its arm. OK, we smile politely. John Jones, meanwhile, tells you that he saw a ghost with […]

The subject of this month’s podcast is Ann Jefferies (1625-1713), a Cornish fairy witch. An accompanying Pwca book is available on Amazon: Ann Jefferies and the Fairies A Source Book for a Seventeenth-Century Cornish Fairy Witch Introduction: Ann and the Fairy Witches Ann Jefferies (aka Anne Jefferies, Ann Jeffries etc) started seeing fairies in 1645. […]

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 […]