"The Whistling Room" (1910)

I liked this story by William Hope Hodgson pretty well, though it wears its mystery story formula on its sleeve. It's part of a series featuring a psychic investigator named Carnacki (not to be confused with Johnny Carson's Carnac the Magnificent). Carnacki is a rational man of science but more willing than Sherlock Holmes to credit the supernatural. He's also not nearly as erudite as H.P. Lovecraft's various library-bound bookworms. Once it gets down to business "The Whistling Room" is full of good effects plus one that goes ridiculously over the top. Without a doubt this is a story about the supernatural. Specifically, a haunted room in a castle, which emits unnerving and sometimes very loud whistling tones at night, "an extraordinary, grotesque parody of human whistling, too gigantic to be human—as if something gargantuan and monstrous made the sounds softly." Carnacki does resort to peppering his pursuit of a solution with Lovecraft-type nonsense syllable words (I suspect a linguist would trace the mumbo-jumbo of both Hodgson and Lovecraft unerringly to English, as they have with Christian "speaking in tongues" episodes), e.g., "the Unknown Last Line of the Saaamaaa Ritual" (dig those crazy extra As). "The Whistling Room" is a decent ghost story but actually even more skillful as a mystery. At one point midway a red herring makes it appear it might somehow be natural phenomena after all. The weird stuff is weird and gets systematically weirder, though it's decidedly cerebral. Helpful explanations are sprinkled in along the way. I like how parts of it are knowable and other parts are not. Too much is knowable, unfortunately, but it preserves some element of the unknown even as Carnacki is a show-offy know-it-all like Sherlock Holmes, with elementary my dear sir explanations for many things. I love the climaxing image (spoiler)—the room itself is whistling, the wood planking floor animated into lips—but it's also fairly silly in the larger haunted house scheme of things. Still, all's well that ends well for Carnacki and his little band of followers hanging on every word. It is tidy business indeed with the satisfaction of a mystery laid to rest, packed full of incident, moves at good tempo, and manages some nice scares too.

The Big Book of the Masters of Horror, Weird and Supernatural Short Stories, pub. Dark Chaos
Alfred Hitchcock Presents Stories for Late at Night, ed. Robert Arthur (out of print)
Read story online.