ROLFUDRETUS and Last Country Standing
This is a bad period in Italy. The self-employed, a quarter of the population, are presently being taxed at about 50%. The public sector is inefficient and weighs the country down. The law – always a...
View ArticleDeclaring War in WW2: National Styles
The characters of countries are reflected in their cuisines, their clothes, and their soap operas, so why not in their declarations of war? Thought it might be fun to see whether this notion stands up...
View ArticleMeteorite Weapons
***Thanks to Radko for inspiring this post*** Imagine a blade made from a star. Now this is not actually as far fetched as it might first seem. After all, ‘stars’ (aka meteorites) sometimes fall to...
View ArticleMigration, Inundation… Top Scorers
Migration – seasonal, circular, forced, permanent… – is as old as history. Folks from one community cross the river and go and live with folks on the other side. They work together, live together and...
View ArticleThe Dominions and WW2
The Dominions were a precise administrative category within the British Empire. They referred to the territories that had reached, according to omniscient London, the ability to govern themselves with...
View ArticleThe Sasquatch: Bigger is Better
There is a natural and very understandable human tendency to see a terrifying four-foot dog and describe it, honestly, to your neighbour as a terrifying six-foot dog. This is well known, of course, and...
View ArticleA Canadian Fear Census
John Widdowson is one of our finest British folklorists and some of his most interesting work has been on how to scare the living bejesus out of ten year olds. Indeed, his first book had the winsome...
View ArticleWhite Woman of Bell Island
Beach recently had the immense pleasure or reading John Widdowson’s If You Be Don’t Be Good, a collection (and analysis) of bogeys used by Newfoundland parents in the interwar and immediate postwar....
View ArticleWolfe and the Seargent
This little snippet comes from 1827 and Hone’s Table Book. It describes, of course, the death of that great British hero, James Wolfe, just outside Quebec, in 1759, one of the most famous moments of...
View ArticleStrange Labrador Monster
Here’s a creepy little report of an unidentified creature from the Canadian North East. Labrador is the mainland territory just past Newfoundland. This was the territory that c. 1000 Vikings visited to...
View ArticleWrong Time Bread, Wrong Place Fairies
Beach wants to introduce today a folklore custom that survived unexpectedly for three hundred years in the dark, before emerging to be briefly photographed by stunned folklorists at the end of the...
View ArticleHow Fast Do Fairies Fly?
This comes from a story told in the The Prince Edward Island Magazine (June 1902), which uniquely, gives us the evidence for fairy flight speed. We are in the Canadian Maritimes, on the eastern coast...
View ArticleA Canadian Fairy Hole (with Wigwam)
The Fairy Hole on Cape Breton in Nova Scotia is a huge cave on a mountain side, some twenty yards across. There are several videos on youtube that give some sense of what it is like inside and...
View ArticleWrecking Fairies
This experience from early twentieth-century Canada combines an unlikely set of the criminal and paranormal elements: sailing, wrecking and fairies. We are in Labrador and Beach has previously...
View ArticleCreepy Christmas Fairy Tale
Here is a remarkable fairy account from Newfoundland. We are in Canada and the report appeared in the Evening Telegraph 26 Dec 1900. This, then, is a creepy Christmas story. A resident of this city,...
View ArticleWhat 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...
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