Plot:
Carnacki recounts his adventures at (fictional) Iastrae Castle, some twenty miles northeast of Galway, Ireland. Mr. Sid K. Tassoc, the new owner, requested his help after finding the castle haunted. He bought the castle, intending to renovate it before marrying and bringing his bride to live there. He’s frustrated because sounds—whistling and sometimes screaming—come from one particular room, seemingly without rhyme or reason. He can’t bring his bride-to-be home to that.
On the first instance of hearing the whistling, Carnacki enters the room, followed by Tassoc and his brother, all holding their candles high. They see nothing, but in the racket, it seems the room itself is rocking. As Carnacki later tells his fellows, it was as if he heard a voice telling him, “Get out of here—quick! Quick! Quick!” He tells the others to leave immediately.
A scream follows their retreat and then, like a clap of thunder, dead silence.
The party retreats downstairs for whiskey.
Thoughts:
On the one hand, this is a classic ghost mystery. The ghost has plenty to be pissed off about, though those who harmed him have long since gone on to their reward.
The narrator spends a lot of energy trying to explain that the events were worse to experience than the description may suggest. On entering the Whistling Room the first time the noises start, he tells his friends at the club, “It was as if someone showed you the mouth of a vast pit suddenly, and said:—That’s Hell. And you knew that they had spoken the truth. Do you get it, even a little bit?”
However, the revelation of the ghost was so absurd that I could not buy it. I’d followed up to that point but was lost there. It made me wonder how much whiskey he and his buddies were downing at that castle.
The character Carnacki is an occult detective whose tales are often related in “club stories,” a framing device of (usually) one member of a group of friends in a safe and comfortable place, relating his adventure in a far-off land or some unusual and dangerous circumstance. The typical place is a nineteenth-century men’s club with one member regaling the others with his tales of adventures to Solomon’s Mines, snipe hunting, or some such, but the definition is broader than that.
Hodgson published five Carnacki stories beginning in 1910. A few appeared posthumously. Since then, several others have used the character and continued the series.
I really wanted to like this tale.
Bio: William Hope Hodgson (1877-1918) ran away to sea at a young age and spent nine years as a merchant marine. His experiences at sea affected his writing and poetry. His occult detective, Carnacki, through the force of science, often found rational explanations for odd phenomena—but not always. The short story “Voices in the Night” is regarded as one of his strongest. H. P. Lovecraft praised his novel The Borderlands—conditionally. Hodgson was killed in battle at Ypres in 1918.
This story can be read here:
This story can be listened to here: (39:22)
Title: “The Whistling Room”
Author: William Hope Hodgson (1877-1918)
First Published: The Idler, March 1910
Length: short story
Series: Carnacki
Reviews of Old and New Stories. Mostly Old 
The return of Halloween! Happy October!
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