Elliott O'Donnell

Writer

• Born: February 27, 1872
• Birthplace: Clifton, Bristol, Gloucestershire, England
• Died: May 8, 1965

Biography

Folklorist and novelist Elliott O’Donnell was born in 1872 in Bristol, England, the son of a clergyman descended from an old and affluent Irish family. He attended Clifton College in Bristol followed by the Queen’s Service Academy in Dublin, Ireland, and he served in the British Auxiliary Army during World War I.

O’Donnell married Ada Caroline William in 1905, the year after he published his first horror novel, For Satan’s Sake. A second horror novel, The Unknown Depths, came out the following year; unlike most of O’Donnell’s work, which focuses on supernatural elements of British culture, this novel explores African occultism. He followed it with two works of nonhorror fiction, Jennie Barlowe, Adventures and Dinevah the Beautiful.

O’Donnell is one of the icons of the contemporary ghost hunter subculture. In pursuit of stories for his books, he traveled extensively, visiting haunted places and meeting with individuals who claimed to have had supernatural experiences. In 1908, he published Some Haunted Houses of England and Wales, the first of his more than fifty works documenting his ideas about and experiences of the supernatural. O’Donnell collected these folktales voraciously, recording some the way they were told to him and developing others into more creative narratives or fictionalized stories. The volumes of collected lore were O’Donnell’s bread and butter; he published an average of one volume a year between 1908 and 1965, the year of his death. He touched on almost every imaginable subject in the Western occult: werewolves, animal ghosts, banshees, sea stories, vampires, poltergeists, cults, and secret societies. However, the majority of his books contained ghost stories from throughout the United Kingdom and Ireland.

The publication of Fatal Kisses, which deals with true crime and has few supernatural elements, marks a rare departure for O’Donnell from the horror genre. His novel, Murder at Hide and Seek, is his only other contribution to the more traditional mystery genre, and he was the editor of the true crime story, The Trial of Kate Webster, about a Victorian woman who was hanged for murder. He also edited Mrs. E. M. Ward’s Reminiscences, about the artist and teacher Henrietta Ward, wife of the famous Victorian painter.

O’Donnell published several nonfiction works recounting his investigations into the supernatural and passing judgment on his topics, particularly the then-trendy pseudoreligious movement known as spiritualism, which he bashed as blasphemous and dangerous in his book, The Menace of Spiritualism. That book was published almost simultaneously with his analysis of the movement, Spiritualism Explained. O’Donnell’s horror writing has been widely anthologized, and he is popular with readers for the volume of information contained in his writing and his consistently spooky style of presentation, which walks a rhetorical line between dispassionate documentation of events and vibrant storytelling.

In addition to his writing, O’Donnell was a film and stage actor. He attended the Neville Dramatic Academy in London and coauthored several radio plays for the National Broadcasting Company (NBC), then primarily a radio network. He contributed articles to Harmsworth’s Encyclopedia and numerous periodicals and held memberships in the Society of Authors and the Royal Commonwealth Society.