In 1901, a woman named E.A. Stuart wanted to find a haunted house. Though she had experienced some peculiar occurrences in a house where she once lived, Stuart was intending to debunk the notion of ghosts. I haven’t found anything to suggest she ever attained her goal, but one of the newspaper articles I found about her quest suggests she inspired others to go ghost-hunting, too.
Therefore, I can’t really induct Stuart into the Ghost Hunter Hall of Fame as a full-fledged inductee, but she qualifies for Honorable Mention. She’s the second person to receive this status there.
Visit the Hall, and you might see I made some minor design changes. Hopefully, they’re improvements, but so slight, I kind of doubt anyone actually will notice. In addition, I’m in the slow process of converting all of the pages and posts here at BromBonesBooks.com from “full-justified” to “left-justified/ragged right.” In other words, instead of what you’d see in a newspaper column or in most books, the lines here will end when they end instead of being stretched so that they touch that right margin. Apparently, this is routinely recommended in web design to ease reading by avoiding wonky spacing, something I’ve noticed especially on my phone. No doubt, I should have done this years ago.
This autumnal spring cleaning has inspired me to also take a close look at the Chronological Bibliography of Early Occult Detectives. I want to attend to any dead links and otherwise give it a good polishing. As always, if you have any suggestions for pre-1925 fiction that might belong there (and, ahem, isn’t already there), please let me know.
The story of E.A. Stuart’s search for a haunted house is here, and the Ghost Hunter Hall of Fame is here. The Chronological Bibliography of Early Occult Detectives is here. Please wander around — and feel very free to do a bit of dusting or mopping!
— Tim
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