Alfred McLelland Burrage (1889–1956) was noted in his time as an author of fiction for boys which he published under the pseudonym Frank Lelland, including a popular series called “Tufty”. After his death, however, Burrage became best known for his ghost stories. After his father died in 1906, A. M. Burrage began writing fiction, partly to support his family. Burrage’s main market for his fiction were British pulp magazines, such as The Grand Magazine, The Novel Magazine, Cassell’s Magazine and The Weekly Tale-Teller.

He served in the Artists Rifles in the First World War, and published a memoir of his war experiences, War Is War, as “Ex-Private X”. Burrage is now remembered mainly for his horror fiction, some of which was originally collected in the books Some Ghost Stories (1927) and Someone in the Room (1931) – often under his “Ex-Private X” name. His work generally is on a spectrum somewhere between the ghost stories of M.R. James and H.R. Wakefield, neither as stuffily antiquarian as the former, nor as sensationalistic as the latter. He died at Edgware General Hospital at the age of sixty-seven on 18 December 1956.