After my grandmother died, my mother and I flew to Florida for her funeral and slept in the room that had been hers during the last years of her life. In the middle of the night, I woke suddenly and sat up gasping, staring at the pale shape fading quickly above my head, where the ceiling met the wall. My mother awoke and asked what was up. Nothing, I replied. I knew it was my grandmother, come back from the dead to check on us and let us know that everything was okay. It was startling but not frightening, for I knew what it was and it didn’t mean anything menacing to us.

Another time, I was home alone in the late hours of the night. I had lit the lamp in my room, then left the room to brush my teeth, and then returned and was startled by a horrific shadow on the wall, a sort of distorted bird, or perhaps a dinosaur, a monster of some kind – until I moved and realized it was my arm that made the strange shadow, not a monster. But even now – decades later – I remember the terror that I felt, not knowing what it was that I saw.

We are often so frightened of what we don’t know. That strange pain in your belly – is it cancer or gas? Once you know it’s cancer, you can screw your courage to the sticking place and take it on.

This book, a simple six stories from Carnacki, a ghost-hunter from the first decade of the 20th Century. His experiences clearly inspired Lockwood and Co. – and would send any Ghost Hunter on the Discovery Channel running for safety.

These stories are so scary that, at one point today, reading them on my phone while supposedly watching Sunday football, I cried out, “Oh No!” and my husband, who as mixing some much needed Vespers, giving how the Giants were playing, came running out of the kitchen, shaker in hand, asking, “What? What?” And I had to confess that I wasn’t watching the Giants lose but reading a ghost story on my phone that surprised me. And then, two pages later, after he had returned to the kitchen, I cried out again in surprise and, again, he came running out of the kitchen.

That’s how scary this book was. Top that, Stephen King. I never call out like that. I may mutter under my breath how stupid a book is, but I never call out in surprise as if the Giants had scored, which would be a surprise right now.

Six simple stories.

And Carnacki, in recounting his tales first-hand to his dining buddies, is not afraid to describe the terror he feels – even when it turns out the “ghost” is really humans pretending to be ghosts.

Imagine this: you are asked to a house, an Irish castle that everyone warned a foolish Englishman not to buy but he wasn’t going to give into the suspicions of these backwards Irishmen. In the castle, you set up shop in the grand hall, with one big gate leading out of the castle, which your latch open, and six doors aligned along one wall, which you seal shut. You peg two ferocious dogs, one in each corner along the wall with all the doors, and encircle them with candles and salt and holy water. And then, in the center of the room, you draw a pentagram, encircle it with a chalk circle, and then a salt circle, and a holy water circle, and then an electric circle (electricity being cool and magical in those days), and you set your police escort within that circle.

And wait.

And wait.

And then the main door unlatches itself and swings closed, slowly at first and then suddenly slamming shut. The six doors along the wall open one by one, slowly at first and then suddenly. A cold wind swirls through the cavernous room, extinguishing the candles one by one, followed by the bonfire. One of the dogs barks and snarls and then, following a whimper and a horrific crushing sound out of the dark, falls ominously silent. Something drips onto you, you turn on your flashlight, and find that it’s blood.

I am as big a skeptic concerning the truth of ghost tales as any man you are likely to meet; only I am what you might term an unprejudiced skeptic. I am not given to either believing or disbelieving things ‘on principle’ as I have found many idiots prone to be, and what is more, some of them not ashamed to boast of the insane fact. I view all reported ‘hauntings” as unproven until I have examined into them, and I am boudn to admit that ninety-nine cases in a hundred turn out to be sheer bosh and fancy.

While remaining a skeptic, Carnacki is not afraid to admit that he is terrified. He sets up his cameras and piano wire and ghost traps, while shaking and quivering and running for safety, as much as the next man.

Well, perhaps not as quickly as the constable in one story whose inspector, following a mysterious set of squishy footprints across the living room to a cellar door, and then pitches the reluctant constable, screaming, down the stairs, marching down after him, followed by Carnacki and the landlord who had rented Carnacki and his mother the cottage – even though he knew previous tenants had claimed it to be haunted.

And the thing that makes it so frightening to Carnacki is the uncertainty of what he is up against. Once he knows that something is truly supernatural, he masters his fear and proceeds accordingly. Or once he realizes that something is caused by people, he bravely sallies forth to apprehend the culprit – only then to discover, from time to time, that the fakery has generated something truly spectral.

Give Carnacki a chance – it’s much better than watching the Giants lose yet again.