THE MASTER GHOST HUNTER: A LIFE OF ELLIOTT O'DONNELL

THE MASTER GHOST HUNTER: A LIFE OF ELLIOTT O'DONNELL
by Richard Whittington-Egan

A dapper figure - gold-rimmed pince-nez, scarlet-lined cloak, silver-knobbed cane - Elliott O'Donnell was the world-famed prince of ghost hunters. His life spanned 93 years, 1872-1965. He remembered Jack the Ripper, the ghost of whose victims he sought, and Kate Webster, the savage Irish cook of Richmond, who slaughtered her mistress, Mrs Julia Thomas, and boiled her head up in a saucepan.

Other phantoms ranged from poltergeist, weird box-headed elemental spirits with eyes that glowed like yellow moons, sweet-visaged old ladies in bonnets and crinolines, to an evil Dublin ghost that tried to strangle him.

He hunted the haunted and the haunters throughout England, Ireland, Scotland, and Wales. Further afield, he came face to face with asupernatural horrors in New York, and San Francisco, and we accompany him on a horse-ridden expedition into the heart of a haunted American forest.

The author was granted access to O'Donnell's private papers lodged with the Maryland Historial Society.

Paperback.