Gordon McCreagh

Gordon MacCreagh was a writer associated with adventure, travel, and some weird fiction. Reliable reference sources disagree about parts of his life story, but they broadly place his birth around 1889 in Scotland and his death in 1953 in Pinellas, Florida.

He built a reputation on tales shaped by exploration and danger, and later publishers described him as not only an author but also an ethnologist, photographer, lecturer, Nile barge captain, and tea plantation manager. His best-known nonfiction book today is White Waters and Black, an often funny, unsentimental memoir of an Amazon expedition that has helped keep his name in print.

MacCreagh also wrote popular adventure novels and magazine fiction, including supernatural and occult stories such as Dr. Muncing, Exorcist. One reason he remains intriguing is that even modern reference works note he was not always reliable about his own biography, which gives his life an extra layer of mystery as well as color.