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Post by Johnlprobert on Jul 3, 2009 15:52:59 GMT
Casebook of Ghosts Volume 1 by Elliott O'Donnell (1971)
Edited by Harry Ludlam
Contents:
The House of the Bloody Cat My First Ghost The Cry of the Banshee The Eyeless Woman The Highbury Horror Nights of a Ghost Hunter The Dead Man's Hand The Death Bogle and the Inextinguishable Candle The Orange-Haired Footman The House on the Cliff The Midnight Bride The Phantom Dachsund The Floating Head Rebecca of Bedlam
Some cracking titles here (After all you must know what you're talking about if you've the nerve to call something The Death Bogle and the Inextinguishable Candle). A quick flick through shows references to Aberystwyth, Clifton in Bristol & Kennedy's Latin Primer, all of which I have had interesting experiences with myself so I may have to forego my current reading material to immerse myself in this rather entertaining-looking tome!
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Post by lordfroggy on Jul 7, 2009 16:58:46 GMT
By a strange coincidence I found a copy of the hardcover today, and as I'm owed books from the particular market vendor who was offering it up for purchase, I got to take it home without handing over a single coin... ...he did have it priced at a £1.00, which would have been absolute bargain anyway.
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Post by ripper on Aug 26, 2013 13:54:58 GMT
Just finished reading this. Very entertaining with some dramatic (and melodramatic) accounts, though I am not really sure how seriously these purportedly true hauntings should be taken. My favourites? The Death Bogle (a "thing" that waits for travellers to come along and then runs after them...if it touches you, you're dead within a year), The Orange-Haired Footman (a lady guest in a house is haunted by the ghost of a footman, but only she can see him) and The Headless Cat (a house is haunted by the ghost of a cat who lost its head when a dog was set upon it). I have come across some of these accounts in other books by o'Donnell, so was Harry Ludlam just collecting together some of Elliott's highlights?
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Post by dem bones on Feb 29, 2016 5:46:55 GMT
Elliott O'Donnell - Great Ghost Stories (Foulsham, 1983) The Veiled Ghost of Highgate The Screaming Skulls of Calgarth Hall The Fifth Stair The Fatal Phantom of Eringle Truagh The Grey Horror The Ghost of Fred Archer The Haunting of the Gory Hotel The London Villa of Ghostly Dread An Unsolved Mystery The Haunted Buoy The Man in Boiling Lead The Creeping Hand of Maida Vale The Man on the Landing The Legend of Cooke's Folly The Mauthe Doog The Phantom Drummer of Cortachy The Ghosts of the Beeches The Phantom Clock of Portman Square Horror in Skye Ghosts and Murder A Haunted Hampstead House The Haunted Quarry The Spectres of the Gables Pearlin Jean of Allanbank The Haunting of Allum Court The Ghosts of The White Garter The Nun of Digby Court The Phantom Lady of Berry Pomeroy The Haunting of St. Giles The Phantom Drummer of Fyvie The Phantom Rider My Night in Old Whittlebury Forest The Fourth Tree in the Avenue A Night Vigil At Christchurch The Haunted Stream The Castle Terrors The House In Berkley Square Will-'o-the-wisp and Corpse Candles ---------- The House of the Bloody Cat My First Ghosts The Cry of the Banshee The Eyeless Woman The Highbury Horror Nights of a Ghost-hunter The Dead Man's Hand The Death Bogle : And the Inextinguishable Candle The Orange-Haired Footman The House on the Cliff The Midnight Bride The Phantom Dachshund The Floating Head Rebecca of Bedlam The Strange Affair at Syderstone Jane of George Street The Letter The Headless Cat Hunting Ghosts In America The Vanished Secretary The Sudden Dead The Beautiful Spoiler The Hand Of Promise The Hindu Child Phantoms From My Notebook The Red Fingers The Listener The Lady In White From The Cellar It Came The Sign Of The WerewolfAn Omnibus edition comprising The Screaming Skulls & Other Ghosts and Casebook Of Ghosts in their entirety. Have read and been hugely entertained by the former, but Casebook, as reviewed above in it's abbreviated form by JLP, eluded me until yesterday when I landed this monster for 50p at market. The Nun of Digby Court: December 1920. Ralph Marlow accepts an invitation from a fellow old Harrovian to spend Christmas at his newly inherited property in Warwickshire. Neither party is aware that the house is shunned due to it's resident spooks, prominent among them a malodorous Nun possibly gone AWOL from Thurnley Abbey. "My God! Horrible! Ghastly! What does it mean? Don't tell the ladies!" The Phantom Rider: Back in the seventeenth century, beautiful but heartless Emily Leech was cursed by the lover she toyed with. Poor chap committed suicide by throwing himself down a pit. Now her glamorous ghost entices a participant in the Dingborough Hunt to follow his example. The House In Berkley Square: First read about this case in Aidan Chambers' Haunted Houses as a tiny, and incredibly, he makes a better fist of it than the famous ghost hunter. All that opportunity for embellishment - what did the sailors see? - and Mr. O'Donnell restricts himself to boring old 'facts'? While this might be commendable in any other author, in O'Donnell's case it is tantamount to dereliction of duty. The Fatal Phantom of Eringle Truagh: Hangs around at funerals selecting today's victim, whereupon it assumes the form of either a beautiful young man or woman as situation requires. Should you agree to meet him/ her in the cemetery this time next month, you're doomed.
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Post by ropardoe on Feb 29, 2016 9:32:33 GMT
Elliott O'Donnell - Great Ghost Stories (Foulsham, 1983) The House In Berkley Square: First read about this case in Aidan Chambers' Haunted Houses as a tiny, and incredibly, he makes a better fist of it than the famous ghost hunter. All that opportunity for embellishment - what did the sailors see? - and Mr. O'Donnell restricts himself to boring old 'facts'? While this might be commendable in any other author, in O'Donnell's case it is tantamount to dereliction of duty. There's a very good, and pretty terrifying scene, set in the House in Berkeley Square, in Paul Cornell's brilliant "Shadow Police" supernatural thriller, London Falling. Anyone else read it?
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Post by Dr Strange on Feb 29, 2016 10:44:58 GMT
Yes - I've read London's Falling and enjoyed it (though I haven't tried the sequel Severed Streets). I generally don't have much time for "urban fantasy", but London's Falling seemed to have a stronger horror element than some others I've tried (e.g. Ben Aaaronovitch's Rivers of London series, which I quickly tired of).
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Post by ropardoe on Feb 29, 2016 11:21:11 GMT
Yes - I've read London's Falling and enjoyed it (though I haven't tried the sequel Severed Streets). I generally don't have much time for "urban fantasy", but London's Falling seemed to have a stronger horror element than some others I've tried (e.g. Ben Aaaronovitch's Rivers of London series, which I quickly tired of). The Severed Streets is even better, and doesn't make the mistake of the first book of taking its time to introduced the supernatural aspect. With London Falling I very nearly gave up after a chapter or two. Glad I didn't. I do actually like Ben Aaronovitch's Rivers of London series very much, and it's a shame that you tired of them as they get better as they go along (I'm also a big fan of Christooher Fowler's Bryant & May books). Of the three, at the moment I'd say that the Paul Cornell series is my favourite, maybe because it's that bit darker.
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Post by Dr Strange on Feb 29, 2016 11:56:58 GMT
Well, I am also a big Bryant & May fan - actually I just started on Number 12 (The Burning Man) this weekend. Again, it's a bit odd in that I don't have much time for any of the "golden age" detectives, but there's a good-natured subversiveness about these that I really enjoy.
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Post by dem bones on Mar 2, 2016 11:44:01 GMT
There's a very good, and pretty terrifying scene, set in the House in Berkeley Square, in Paul Cornell's brilliant "Shadow Police" supernatural thriller, London Falling. Anyone else read it? Yes - I've read London's Falling and enjoyed it (though I haven't tried the sequel Severed Streets). I generally don't have much time for "urban fantasy", but London's Falling seemed to have a stronger horror element than some others I've tried (e.g. Ben Aaaronovitch's Rivers of London series, which I quickly tired of). The House in Berkley Square relocated to Bethnal Geen or thereabouts for Whitechapel series 3, episodes 5 & 6 (i.e., Calvin Martis, the last surviving copy of London After Midnight, Bloody Bones, Chandler in love, etc.). Back with Great Ghost Stories: The Ghosts of The White Garter: This is more like it - Haunted Inns. We begin our tour in Portsmouth, where the White Garter mob, led by a gypsy beauty and her lary partner, Charlie, murdered several guests in their beds until potential victim Mr. Samwell, smelled a rat. Mr. Samwell, an officer in the Royal Navy, was initially alerted by the landlady's swanky dress - far too upmarket for a working class girl - and, rightly concluding he'd chanced upon a den of thieving cut-throats, made off into the night. Next day he reported the matter to local Mayor, Sir John Carter, who instigated a raid. The gang wisely scarpered, but a search of premises and garden confirmed Mr. Samwell's worst fears. After all this, the resident spook, a sleepy sailor with a bandaged head, comes as an anti-climax, but never fear, we cut to a patch of wasteland at back of an unidentified Cotswold Inn, where, if you're lucky, you get to witness "a herd of enormous black hogs gnawing and tearing at some white and ghastly-looking object on the ground." The 'object' in question believed to be the husband of former proprietress who drugged him unconscious and fed him to the pigs. There are several other hauntings relating to same premises, but they're not nearly as good. The Ghost of Fred Archer:"Two local people, a mother and daughter, declared that they saw a phantom horseman emerge from a copse, gallop noiselessly towards them and when near, mysteriously vanish. The horse of the phantom rider was grey, and that had been the colour of Archer's favourite steed." No surprise, then, when the fearless phantom finder visits Newmarket to investigate - and his efforts are rewarded! N.B. The Fred Archer in this instance was a world famous jockey who, by time of his premature death in 1886, aged just 29, had won over 2,000 races, and not to be confused with the Fred Archer who wrote Ghosts, Witches - And Murder! for W. H. Allen in 1972.
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Post by dem bones on Mar 5, 2016 7:21:24 GMT
The Man In Boiling Lead: A retelling of John Mackay Wilson's authentic Scottish legend/ Gothic masterpiece, The Doom Of Soulis starring the evil Lord of Hermitage Castle, murderer, black sorcerer and all round bad hat. By way of bonus material, O'Donnell adds a second spook - that of a deliberately forgotten prisoner starved to death in a dungeon. The Screaming Skulls Of Calgarth Hall: Country squire Miles Phillipson intends building a swanky new manor house on his estate but those pesky peasants Kraster and Dorothy Cook refuse to sell their humble cottage. Time to fit them up for theft! As she goes to the gallows, Dorothy curses the Phillipson's and swears they'll know no peace in Calgarth Hall. The conniving Toff, having no time for mumbo jumbo, builds it regardless. The skulls of the Kramers gatecrash the house-warming party. F. Marion Crawford acknowledges a debt to this doubtless well-authenticated haunting at close of The Screaming Skull. Rebecca of Bedlam: A lodging house in vicinity of London Bridge, 1780. Rebecca the maid-servant falls for a gay seducer from the East Indies. Moving on to his next assignment, our heartless Romeo shatters all Rebecca's dreams by handing her a golden guinea for services rendered. Crushed and ashamed, Rebecca goes insane and spends the rest of her days in Bedlam. Her dying wish is that the coin be buried with her, but the scoundrel of a warden has other ideas. Consequently, Rebecca's ghost haunts the asylum, demanding her treasure be returned.
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Post by dem bones on Mar 6, 2016 20:21:33 GMT
The Haunting Of St. Giles: Two doctors fall out over a blonde. When Mackie is seriously injured in a car accident, McGowan deliberately overdoes the anaesthetic, putting his love rival permanently out of commission - or so he thinks. If we were reading fiction, we would feel short changed, because that's not proper killing somebody, more of a mercy murder. Secondly, MacGowan goes on to marry miss dream stuff while Mackie's ghost contents itself with wandering the hospital. It seems even 'true' ghost stories can be rank underwhelming, but never mind because ...
The Eyeless Woman: revives sagging morale. Never mind eyeless, the spectral harridan who monsters Mrs. Greenes servants in Cheyne Walk, Chelsea, hasn't even any sockets "only smooth flesh, just like her forehead." Local wisdom has it that the ghost - also notable for a terrifying hairstyle and long bony fingers - is that of evil blind woman who throttled her husband and step-son.
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Post by ropardoe on May 6, 2016 9:13:40 GMT
Do Vault denizens know about the new biography of Elliott O'Donnell by veteran criminologist Richard Whittington-Egan, from Mango Books? The Master Ghost Hunter: A Life of Elliott O'Donnell is well worth a look - a beautifully produced book with many illustrations from the original books, including six full-colour full-page plates of front-covers. Also of considerable interest is the appendix listing all the chapter/section headings from his various ghost-related volumes (nearly two thousand in total - that's headings, not books; he wasn't quite that prolific!). My favourite is "The Phantom Teeth of Knightsbridge".
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Post by ramseycampbell on May 6, 2016 9:31:14 GMT
By gum, I didn't know W-E was still writing! I cited him in Creatures of the Pool. I'll order this new one at once.
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Post by ropardoe on May 6, 2016 9:48:32 GMT
By gum, I didn't know W-E was still writing! I cited him in Creatures of the Pool. I'll order this new one at once. Which is my favourite of all your novels, incidentally. Yes, W-E is now well into his nineties, apparently. The Master Ghost Hunter is only fifteen quid for a beautiful hard-cover. I honestly don't know how Mango Books do it.
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Post by ripper on May 6, 2016 16:06:04 GMT
Whatever your opinion on the veracity of o'Donnell's accounts, his books are darned entertaining, and those chapter headings are priceless. A biography of the man sounds like a very interesting read.
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