William Hope Hodgson

William Hope Hodgson was born on 15 November 1877 at Blackmore End in Essex, the second of twelve children of an Anglican clergyman who moved from parish to parish. He wanted to go to sea, and after at least one attempt to run away he was apprenticed as a cabin boy at thirteen. He spent most of the next eight years as a merchant sailor. He hated much of it, especially the bullying he received, and responded by taking up weight training and becoming very strong. He also took up photography and photographed storms, ships and sea creatures.

In 1899 he left the sea and opened a physical-culture school in Blackburn, Lancashire, training local men, including police officers. When the business struggled he turned to writing, first articles on fitness and then fiction. In quick succession he published four novels: The Boats of the “Glen Carrig” (1907), The House on the Borderland (1908), The Ghost Pirates (1909) and the vast, strange The Night Land (1912). They are now classics of weird fiction. He also wrote dozens of sea-horror stories about derelict ships, fungus-covered islands and things in the Sargasso Sea.

When the First World War began he joined the army, was commissioned in the Royal Field Artillery, and was badly injured in a fall from a horse. He recovered and returned to the front. He was killed by a shell near Ypres in April 1918, at the age of forty. Official records give 17 April and other accounts 19 April.

Thomas Carnacki, the “ghost-finder,” was Hodgson’s most commercial creation. His cases first appeared in magazines from 1910 and were collected as Carnacki, the Ghost-Finder in 1913. Each story is told by Carnacki to a group of friends after dinner at his house in Chelsea. He brings a camera, a toolkit of seals, wax and garlic, an “electric pentacle” of vacuum tubes, and some ancient manuscripts. Some of his cases turn out to be human fraud; others decidedly do not. The two on this site, The Gateway of the Monster and The Whistling Room, are both of the second kind. “The Whistling Room,” set in an Irish castle, is the stranger and better of the pair.