The ghost of a poor Afghan returns to haunt the doctor who once amputated his hand. A mysterious and malignant force inhabits a room in an ancestral home and attacks all who sleep in it. A man who desecrates an Indian temple is transformed into a ravening beast. A Tyrolean castle is the setting for an aristocratic murderer's apparent resurrection.

In the stories in this collection compiled by Nick Rennison, horrors from beyond the grave and other dimensions visit the everyday world and demand to be investigated. The Sherlocks of the supernatural - from William Hope Hodgson's 'Thomas Carnacki, the Ghost Finder', to Alice and Claude Askew's 'Aylmer Vance' - are those courageous souls who risk their lives and their sanity to pursue the truth about ghosts, ghouls and things that go bump in the night.

The period between 1890 and 1930 was a Golden Age for the occult detective. Famous authors like Kipling and Conan Doyle wrote stories about them, as did less familiar writers such as the occultist and magician Dion Fortune and Henry S. Whitehead, a friend of HP Lovecraft and fellow-contributor to the pulp magazines of the period. Nick Rennison, editor of The Rivals of Sherlock Holmes and The Rivals of Dracula, has chosen fifteen tales from that era to raise the hair and chill the spines of modern readers.