Number 1641: Do you believe in spooks?

It is October, and we lead up to Halloween with some spooky stories . First up is a tale of a ghost detective from Adventures Into the Unknown #4 (1949), then a two-pager about a sailor and a ghost.

“Specialist in Spooks” begins provocatively. The caption in the splash panel asks, “Do ghosts exist? We say NO.” It then goes on to tell its story without trying to disprove the existence of the supernatural. Personally, I say NO to whether ghosts exist, also. That doesn’t stop me from shuddering in the middle of the night — especially after reading ghost stories, then hearing mysterious noises from downstairs. As a human being I am hard-wired for a primitive superstition, deep inside my brain, that there might be something to those stories. It probably comes from ancestors of thousands of years in the past, huddling together around a nighttime fire or in a cave, fearful of the invisible world and things coming out of the darkness.

The Grand Comics Database attributes the art to Charles Sultan. Art on “St. Mary’s Spectre” is credited to Max Elkan.