*This review was originally published Aug. 24, 2025, for newsletter subscribers. Sign up for our free newsletter to get exclusive content and never miss anything we publish.

Ted Holiday’s “The Goblin Universe” is a book that feels fresh despite debuting in 1986. The ideas Holiday lays out are ones you’ll hear from thinkers today, making “The Goblin Universe” stand out as a work ahead of its time.

Published seven years after Holiday’s death, writer Colin Wilson provides “The Goblin Universe” with a lengthy intro, using 45 pages of the total 247 to explain who Holiday was and give the book some framework.

Wilson writes that Holiday gave him a rough draft of what would become “The Goblin Universe” some years before his passing, with Wilson finding it enthralling. However, to his dismay, Holiday would later inform Wilson that he’d become “dissatisfied” with the book and abandoned it.

Thankfully, Wilson was able to publish the book Holiday had sent him all those years ago, with the blessing of Holiday’s surviving family, bringing its “daring range and sweep” to readers.

And sweeping “The Goblin Universe” is. With it, Holiday attempts to construct a unified theory of the paranormal. While he doesn’t quite get there, he does better than most.

What Works

The net Holiday cast is wide but mostly focused. Much of the book is concentrated on what Holiday dubs “the phantom menagerie,” which includes the likes of the Loch Ness Monster, Bigfoot, alien big cats and more.

The fifth chapter, “The Mystery Big Cats,” is one of the strongest in the book, focusing on out-of-place animals, with much of the chapter devoted to the mystery of the Surrey Puma. Holiday’s style shines brightest in this chapter. He not only recounts reports of the Puma — an animal which has no earthly reason to be in England — but cross-analyses them with the scientific explanations for what people are seeing to show that the truth is somewhere in the middle.

“It has been obvious that this honeycomb matrix of atoms known as the material world is but a backcloth for an immaterial something which we call life,” Holiday writes in the chapter’s opening.

Holiday never attacks or dismisses the sciences completely, which many paranormal enthusiasts are all too often apt to do. Instead, his critique is that the sciences are currently too shortsighted to explain supernatural phenomena. In the closing chapters of the book, Holiday highlights where science might grow to begin to incorporate these subjects into its understanding of the world.

Sprinkled throughout the book are Holiday’s own experiences with the anomalous. The entire first chapter is devoted to the encounters of he and his close acquaintances with phantoms and haunting phenomena.

What Holiday is ultimately building to is the seventh chapter of “The Goblin Universe,” a recounting of the exorcism of Loch Ness, performed by Rev. Dr. Donald Omand with assistance from Holiday and a few others.

As Wilson notes in his introduction, Holiday was fascinated by Loch Ness, having seen the Loch Ness Monster a handful of times during his life, and the place the loch holds in Holiday’s mind is evident throughout the book. The exorcism of Loch Ness and its aftermath are the anchoring stone for “The Goblin Universe” and drive Holiday’s attempt at a unified theory of the paranormal.

What needs more polish

In his introduction, Wilson warns readers that Holiday gets a touch over his skis in the second chapter of the book on reincarnation. In it, Holiday draws comparisons between Joan of Arc and Gilles de Rais with contemporary figures — namely, de Rais with Edward Paisnel, a notorious sex offender and serial assaulter known as the Beast of Jersey.

The main issue with this chapter is that Holiday relies too much on speculation. Other chapters are built on cases and reports juxtaposed against skeptical inquiry. The reincarnation chapter is more of Holiday connecting dots that may or may not be there, depending on the reader.

Likewise, the third chapter on psychic phenomena also dips a tad too much into what-if scenarios compared to other chapters. While I have no issue with speculation for the sake of speculating, in these two chapters, Holiday is playing a little too fast and loose with his ideas.

However, it’s important to remember that Holiday abandoned the book after growing dissatisfied with it.

I wouldn’t be surprised if Holiday’s attempt to weave these chapters into the book was what left him feeling off about it. While noble to attempt to include all anomalous phenomena into his theory, chapters two and three stick out as odd ducks amongst the core ideas of “The Golbin Universe” and its phantom menagerie.

What I wanted more of

Holiday often tugs at interesting strings of inquiry but stops short of pulling on them. Rather, he’ll drop them as offhand observations. For example, in the chapter concerning the Surrey Puma, Holiday notes that sightings of alien big cats in England seemed to coincide with the country growing more secular, noting that panther-like creatures have long adorned religious artwork as signifiers of evil or the devil. But he goes no further with the idea. It’s an observation that could be wonderfully fleshed out, especially considering Holiday’s later idea in the book concerning “Mind” as the root of these phenomena.

Additionally, Holiday puts his voice to the side in the book. Most of “The Goblin Universe” is either straight reporting or Holiday building ideas, but every once in a while, he lets his humor and wit come through.

My personal favorite comes from “The Phantom Menagerie” chapter, when Holiday is talking about out-of-place animal tracks.

Writing on the Colt Pixie of English folklore and mysterious bipedal pony-like footprints found in Devonshire in 1855, Holiday provides his usual commentary, looking at how different people have attempted to explain away the phenomena. He then punctuates the passage with:

“Until something better turns up, I’ll stick with the hilarious notion of Devonshire girls anxiously locking their doors because a satyr is prancing in the garden. Incidentally, I wish the satyr luck.”

Moments like this help to break up “The Goblin Universe’s” headier aspirations. Sadly, they are few and far between. I would have welcomed a dash or two more of these short asides from Holiday sprinkled throughout the text.

Final thoughts

Ted Holiday’s “The Goblin Universe” is a rich, albeit occasionally unpolished, book that attempts to wrap its arms around a great swath of anomalous phenomena. It should be a staple of any Fortean’s library, both for the ideas Holiday explores and for the room he leaves the reader to continue the exploration in his stead.

It’s clear why Wilson felt “The Goblin Universe” was a work important enough to salvage and see published after Holiday’s passing.