part0016

Elliott O’Donnell (1872–1965) was a larger-than-life character who made his name as a professional ghost hunter or “Spook-Expert”. Although he was born in Bristol, O’Donnell came from a notable Irish family and claimed to have inherited “the faculty of psychic perceptiveness from a long line of Celtic ancestry”. He encountered his first ghost at the age of five, a hideous Satanic Thing composed “of some luminous matter that resembled the light emanating from a glow-worm”. Throughout his life he remained, in his own words, “a magnet of supernatural phenomena”. The O’Donnell family reportedly even had their own Banshee.

O’Donnell’s published work consists of a mixture of supernatural fiction and supposedly factual accounts of real-life hauntings. Since his non-fiction writing draws heavily on the conventions of gothic fiction, it isn’t always easy to tell which is which; The Times in its obituary referred to O’Donnell simply as a “writer of ghost stories”. At the very least, O’Donnell’s adventures with ghosts were notably dramatised. It might be best to think of O’Donnell’s writing as haunting a twilight zone between fact and fiction. ‘The White Lady of Rownam Avenue, Near Stirling’ was published in a volume of Scottish Ghost Stories in 1911, which purports to be a factual account of its topic, although the text isn’t entirely explicit about this. The book is made up of seventeen “cases”, each of which is based in a named location. Some of the locations at least are real: Glamis Castle, Blythswood Square in Glasgow or Great Western Road in Aberdeen, for example. Rownam Avenue, near Stirling, on the other hand, is fictional. The story concerns a haunted avenue of trees leading up to a sixteenth-century manor house, the home of the curmudgeonly Sir E. C. Although the trees here are not without a touch of the eerie, ‘The White Lady’ lingers too on the youthful narrator’s joy in the natural world and the enticing physical quirks of veteran trees.