A man of great height and greater girth, Judge Keith Hilary Pursuivant, after retiring from the bench, devoted his golden years to investigating the occult in the works of North Carolina author, Manly Wade Wellman. Pursuivant, with his broad bulbous nose and protruding, warm eyes, was one of a half-dozen occult investigators created by Wellman over the course of his career, though the Judge has the distinction of being the first, and, in many ways, the most important of the…

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Aylmer Vance, agent of the enigmatic Ghost Circle, made his first appearance on the nightmare stage in 1914. The creation of husband-and-wife writing team Alice and Claude Askew, Vance appeared in eight consecutive issues of The Weekly Tale-Teller between July and August. The stories-“The Invader”, “The Stranger”, “Lady Green-Sleeves”, “The Fire Unquenchable”, “The Vampire”, “The Boy of Blackstock”, “The Indissoluble Bond” and “The Fear”-ranged from grotesque to gentle, and are, by and large, of a slower pace than those featuring…

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William Hope Hodgson’s Carnacki outlived his creator with a tenacity that Hodgson, a bantam rooster of a man, would have appreciated. Thomas Carnacki, resident of 472 Cheyne Walk, London, first appeared in a series of five stories (“Gateway of the Monster”, “The House Among the Laurels”, “The Whistling Room”, “The Horse of the Invisible”, and “The Searcher of the End House”) in The Idler Magazine in the January through April, as well as June, issues of 1910. But despite Hodgson’s…

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