The Ghost Adventure team has nothing on Thomas Carnacki, one of the first (albeit fictional) paranormal investigators to utilize both arcane manuscripts and scientific methods in his investigations into the macabre.

The Complete Carnacki, The Ghost Finder – William Hope Hodgson, 1913. Rating: 4.5/5

Living in London at beginning of twentieth century, Carnacki is called on to examine suspected hauntings and lay them to rest. Each of the nine tales in this collection is framed by his friend Dodgson, who, along with three of Carnacki’s other confidants, enjoys visiting the detective for a comfortable dinner followed by a harrowing story of the occult detective’s most recent adventure. An “unprejudiced skeptic,” Carnacki asserts that ninety-nine out of a hundred hauntings are “sheer bosh,” then rhapsodizes, “But the hundredth!”

Carnacki sets up his physical—and spiritual—protections using both time-proven words from ancient rituals, along with his own inventions including an electric pentacle and a battery-operated color-spectrum vacuum tube defense. Carnacki relies on his intelligence and open mind during his encounters with such horrors as a whistling room, an invisible phantom horse, and a powerful monstrosity from the Outer Circle. With pluck and aplomb, Carnacki deals with possessions, hauntings, and spectral manifestations as well as his share of hoaxes.

While these stories are gloriously classic ghost stories in some ways—filled with curses and old castles and moldering English manors—they have a fresh energy about them thanks to Carnacki’s enigmatic and unique approaches to the “ab-natural.”

A body builder, sailor, and lieutenant in the Royal Artillery during WWI, William Hope Hodgson produced everything from poetry and science-fiction, to horror and sea stories before his death in 1918 in the Fourth Battle of Ypres. His 1908 horror novel, The House on the Borderland, is perhaps Hodgson’s most well-known work. It, and the bulk of his horror writing, was greatly admired by H.P. Lovecraft. The Complete Carnacki, The Ghost Finder is a gem. Wait for a nice, grey afternoon, pour yourself a cup of tea or a tot of whiskey, settle back in a comfortable armchair, and treat yourself to a Carnacki story. You’ll be glad you did.