OPEN POST: The Sunday Roast featuring Carnacki, the Ghost Finder!
Getty There's a helluva job title, eh? Consulting Detective Sherlock Holmes has inspired a myriad of imitators, but among them Carnacki stands out as both a highly effective literary character AND the one most likely to really piss off Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Doyle didn't like it when people didn't take woo-woo seriously; he was very into woo-woo, was old Sir A. William Hope Hodgson, the author who created Carnacki, was not, and insisted on bring a lens of pure, relentless logic to the supernatural. The only difference between him and skeptics is that, for the purposes of his fiction, he assumed the supernatural to be real, and to be governed by laws only too poorly understood by the mainstream, and even by spiritualists, whom he considered sentimental, maudlin, and tacky. Carnacki, though, was a ghost detective. Oh, he wasn't a ghost himself, though had he ever been real he might be one right now. No, nor was he like those modern paranormal "researchers" w...