Verona Wood, a twenty-four-year-old London girl who works in an office to make ends meet, responds to a newspaper advertisement offering holiday accommodation to ‘an unmarried lady’ and goes to spend her three-week vacation with Miss Rose Bullivant at ‘The Nest’ in Wensley, Kent. While out walking in the neighbouring countryside, she comes across ‘Virginia’, the house built by Colonel Belasco, a plantation owner from Virginia who moved to England with his wife in 1866, about a year after the American Civil War ended, bringing with him three former slaves. After encountering the spirit of Quentin Belasco, the colonel’s son, who committed suicide at the property fifty years earlier, Verona makes up her mind to live in the long-empty house. But there is something terribly wrong with ‘Virginia’, and Verona soon finds herself isolated and afraid in her new home, alone save for an ‘obsessed’ housekeeper, and at the mercy of the malevolent force that haunts the very land the Belasco house sits on.
 
First published in 1926, this new edition of Unholy Depths includes a 14-page biographical essay by Gina R. Collia: ‘Gertrude Dunn: Creating a Strong Belief in the Incredible’.
 
‘Wraiths and materialisations and demoniac possessions are thick as autumn leaves.’ The Sketch, November 1926.
 
‘The creepy effect is well sustained—no easy task in the length of a fair-sized novel. The sequence of occult events is carefully thought out; so that if you are impressed by this sort of thing, this is the sort of thing that will impress you—and in any case the story is weird and exciting.’ The Sketch, November 1926.
 
‘The psychic thriller is not an easy form of fiction, but the author of this story of a haunted country house is able to contrive the necessary atmosphere, and, having got events moving, to write with considerable power.’ London Daily Chronicle, 30 December 1926
 
Cover: Hypnose by Ferdinand Freiherr von Reznicek, 1896..