Some Haunted Houses of England & Wales.

Elliott O'Donnell was not your typical ghost story writer. A seasoned investigator in psychical research who had witnessed genuine occult manifestations himself, he spent years documenting hauntings that no one else had bothered to record. This 1908 collection deliberately avoids the famous spectral locales that had been done to death Glamis Castle, the Tower of London, and their ilk. Instead, O'Donnell sought out the forgotten hauntings of ordinary houses, the kind of places where working families lived and died and, occasionally, refused to leave. He gathered testimony directly from witnesses, transcribing their words as closely as possible, presenting their accounts not as fireside tales but as cases to be examined. The result is something stranger and more unsettling than typical Victorian ghost fiction: these are hauntings in back bedrooms and village inns, witnessed by people with nothing to gain and everything to lose by speaking out. The Green Bank Hotel opens the collection with a particularly chilling example a ghostly race between a Cavalier and Roundhead that ends in murder, the spectral event replaying across decades. For readers who have tired of aristocratic specters in baronial halls, O'Donnell offers something more intimate, more disturbing: the ghosts of ordinary English and Welsh homes, where the past refuses to stay buried.