ELLIOTT O’DONNELL (1872-1965) preceded, in the popular consciousness, the more familiar Harry Price as one of the most widely read figures purporting to be a ghost-hunter and investigator into the unknown. Born in Bristol, O’Donnell claimed an encounter at age 5 with an “elemental spirit”, as well as his family line being cursed by a Banshee, as prerequisites for his lifelong interest in the paranormal. On graduating The Queen’s Service Academy (where he claimed to have wrestled a spectral strangler), he went to America, where he lived as a rancher in Oregon, worked as a policeman in Chicago during the great railroad strikes and also claimed to have been a journalist in San Francisco and New York, all while collecting tales of ghosts in the New World, finally returning to England in 1900 to work as a schoolmaster and traveling actor.

His first occult novel, FOR SATAN’S SAKE, made no impact in 1905 so he reinvented himself as a raconteur and ghost hunter – penning dozens of popular books in which he collected folklore about spirits and bogeys and told of his visits to famous haunted sites. He possibly originated the concept of hauntings as localized “recordings” (one of a number of classifications he posited), as later seen in Nigel Kneale’s THE STONE TAPE. Luckily for us, he also wrote many novels and pieces of short fiction designated as such. He never claimed to be a psychic investigator and his writings, when presented as true, still have a highly dramatic and atmospheric style that makes them dubious as true records but very enjoyable as entertainment. “Let me state plainly that I lay no claim to being what is termed a scientific psychical researcher. I am not a member of any august society that conducts its investigations of the other world, or worlds, with the test tube and weighing apparatus; neither do I pretend to be a medium or clairvoyant — I have never undertaken to ‘raise’ ghosts at will for the sensation-seeker or the tourist. I am merely a ghost hunter. One who lays stake by his own eyes and senses; one who honestly believes he inherits in some the degree the faculty of psychic perceptiveness from a long line of Celtic ancestry; and who is, and always has been, deeply and genuinely interested in all questions relative to phantasms and a continuance of individual life after physical dissolution.”