The Mystery of the Crimson Ghost by Phyllis Whitney, 1969.

Janey Oakes loves horses and wishes that she had one of her own.  Her family lives on Staten Island in New York, so they don’t have room to keep a horse.  The only horses that she has ridden are rented ones.  However, her parents are now considering moving to the countryside in northern New Jersey, where Janey’s Aunt Viv lives.  If they do, there will be room for Janey to keep a horse, so she is hopeful.

Janey’s parents take her to visit Aunt Viv during the summer, while they decide if they want to move.  Along the way, they stop to ask directions at a half-ruined house.  The people there, Mrs. Burley and her grandson Roger, aren’t too friendly, and when Janey thinks that she hears a horse there, they seem oddly resentful and say that she should ask her aunt about it.

Aunt Viv seems oddly evasive on the subject of horses when Janey asks, saying that she doesn’t ride anymore.  She does tell Janey more about the strange, half-ruined house.  It was once a hotel for people who came to take the spring waters.  However, it eventually lost its popularity and was partly destroyed in a fire.  Mrs. Burley’s husband died in the fire, but she has remained living in the part of the house that is still standing, raising a couple of grandsons there after the death of her younger son.  Her older son is a doctor in New York City.  Aunt Viv says that she used to be friends with the younger of the two grandsons, Denis, but that ended when she did something wrong and something bad happened which she doesn’t want to talk about.

Aunt Viv introduces Janey to a girl who lives nearby named Coral, in the hopes that they will be friends.  Coral isn’t interested in horses, but when Janey questions her about the Burleys, she confirms that they do have a horse called the Star of Sussex.  She takes Janey up to the Burleys’ house again (partly in the hopes of seeing the older Burley boy, Roger, who she has a crush on).  There, Denis and Roger each explain to Janey that their grandmother had hoped to train Star as a racing horse.  Star is an excellent horse and had a lot of potential for racing, but Denis allowed Aunt Viv to ride her one day, and the horse stepped in a woodchuck hole and injured her leg.  The leg has healed, and the horse is able to gallop, but she still limps and can’t run at the same speeds she used to, ending Mrs. Burley’s racing hopes.  Since then, Mrs. Burley has been very bitter, especially toward Aunt Viv.  She behaves strangely, driving people away, and is also angry toward Denis for allowing Aunt Viv to ride the horse in the first place.  It was just an accident, but she blames them both.  Roger realistically thinks that they should sell Star for breeding because she has a good bloodline, and Denis’s real interest lies with airplanes, which fascinate him in the same way that horses fascinate Janey.  Their differing interests seem to support what Aunt Viv says about how the family should move and that the boys would probably have a better life away from the old, ruined hotel and Mrs. Burley’s obsession with the past.

Coral also tells Janey about a ghost dog that supposedly appears on nights when a strange red light appears on the Burleys’ property.  Later, Janey hears the howling at night. Aunt Viv doesn’t think it’s a ghost.  She says that people have tried to talk to Mrs. Burley about her dog, but she denies having one and gets really angry with people for accusing her of having one.  Yet, the howling does seem to come from the Burleys’ property, and Denis even says that he’s seen the ghost dog, that it seems to be covered in flames.  He claims that it’s the ghost of his grandfather’s dog, who died in the fire years ago.  Aunt Viv thinks that Denis is just saying that to try to protect his grandmother and because he can’t handle what other people have come to believe about her: that she’s losing her mind.  Mrs. Burley’s behavior is undeniably odd, and she’s prone to sudden mood swings.  People are worried that she’ll drive newcomers away from the area and drive down property values, and they think that she might need professional help.

Janey doesn’t think that Mrs. Burley’s mind is gone as much as people believe.  When she sneaks over one day to visit Star, Mrs. Burley is angry but notes that she has a good manner with horses.  To Janey’s surprise, Mrs. Burley agrees to let Janey ride Star.  Denis almost ruins things by making Janey believe that Mrs. Burley has changed her mind about the invitation and also by not telling his grandmother that Janey asked to meet at a later time.  Janey isn’t sure why Denis seems to have a grudge against her, although it might have to do with his own guilt for allowing the horse to be ridden and injured in the first place; his own grandmother still seems to have a grudge against him for that.  Neither one of them tells Janey that Star has a particular trick for throwing riders, even though she had specifically asked if there was anything that she should know about the horse or if it had any tricks.  After she’s thrown by the horse, however, Janey gets back on and proves to both the Burleys and to Star that she’s not intimidated and not going to fall for the trick again.  (The Burleys have deep, personal hurts, but I wouldn’t call them nice people.  There are people who would probably view this is a test of Janey’s skills and her ability to stick with a challenge, but I think that their lies and deliberate deception when Janey was asking the right questions show only their immaturity.  It may not bother some readers as much as it did me, but I have a very low threshold of patience for such things, and the characters lost a lot of my sympathy right there.)

Mrs. Burley warms up to Janey after that and confides in her some of the reasons why she has been so unfriendly, trying to drive people away, and why the horse meant so much to her.  Years ago, she and her husband made quite a lot of money, raising racing horses.  Star is from the same bloodline as their original horses.  Mr. Burley lost quite a lot of their money on various business ventures that didn’t work out, even before the hotel fire that killed him, but for a long time, Mrs. Burley was always able to keep one horse from that bloodline, hoping to get at least one last racing horse.  Star is an excellent horse who really would have made a good racing horse, but Mrs. Burley’s hopes were destroyed when Star was injured.  Mrs. Burley thinks that she’s too old now to raise another, that she wouldn’t live to see any of Star’s offspring become racers.  Janey still thinks that Star has the potential to be a racer, but Mrs. Burley says that the effects of her injury won’t let her get the speed she once had.  Mrs. Burley resents outsiders hanging around because she fears their “interference” in her life, and the injury of Star while Aunt Viv was riding her seems to prove that her fears are justified.

Janey tries to talk to Mrs. Burley about the ghost dog, but she gets angry with Janey for believing the things that people have been saying about her.  Worse still, Roger tells her that Mrs. Burley will probably sell Star soon.  She needs money badly and has been refusing to let anybody help her, even her son in New York.  Her pride at her independence may be her undoing.  Now that Janey has ridden Star successfully, she can’t bear the thought that the horse might be sold and sent away.  If only she could unravel the mysteries surrounding the Burley family, the strange red light, and the ghost dog!

My Reaction and Spoiler

Toward the end of the story, one of the characters talks to Janey about Mrs. Burley’s attitude, saying that “it’s important in life to have something to fight for.  Something we care about and want.  I don’t mean fight for with our fists, but something to try for, struggle for.  Something we can do that uses whatever we are to win the fight.”  He means that people need a purpose in life, something like a cause to believe in or a way of life to pursue that is suited to their talents. Janey says that she doesn’t like struggles, but the person points out to her that everything in life that you want involves a struggle, including the horses Janey loves. Janey has focused mostly on the struggle of getting her parents to agree to let her have a horse and Mrs. Burley to agree to let her ride Star, but even if she ended up owning a horse, including Star, there would still be the struggle of caring for the horse, devoting time to keeping the horse happy and healthy. Janey might enjoy that kind of struggle because it appeals to her talents and interests, but it would still require time and sacrifice on her part. Mrs. Burley loves horses as much as Janey does, and she loves the area where she lives to the point where she can’t image living anywhere else. All of her efforts focus on allowing her to continue living in the place she loves, although she feels like her horse dreams are lost.

Much of the emphasis of the book is placed on Mrs. Burley’s determination to maintain her independence as part of the lifestyle she loves, but I wish that there was a little more emphasis on the methods that people use to get what they want in life because that is central to the secret of the “ghost.”  That the “ghost” isn’t really a ghost isn’t too much of a spoiler, but while people in the area think that Mrs. Burley is faking the ghost because she’s mentally unbalanced, the real culprit is someone who wants Mrs. Burley to leave because there’s something that he wants very badly and doesn’t think that he’ll get it otherwise.  Once his scheme is exposed, the others make sure that he doesn’t get what he wants because, after what he has done, he doesn’t deserve a reward.  However, I wish that they had explained a little more plainly that there were other ways of getting what he wanted besides the scheme he planned.  The culprit thinks that no one was listening to him and what he wanted, but from my perspective, what he wanted was simply a matter of time, and he wasn’t willing to wait.  His scheme would have ended with Mrs. Burley being declared mentally incompetent and being put away in a home, which is a cruel thing to do to someone.  The other characters tell him that, but I wanted someone to explain to him that harming others for his own benefit would make him no better than someone who robs a bank because they want money.  That is, crime and fraud are still wrong even if they succeed because the ends don’t justify the means.  In some ways, I think that Mrs. Burley was selfish, but she still didn’t deserve to be labeled as crazy, and even if people weren’t listening to the culprit and taking him seriously as much as they should, the scheme still wasn’t his only option. 

To say more would be to tell you who the culprit is, and it’s not as obvious as it might seem. It was one of my favorite suspects, but I changed my mind a few times, going back and forth between suspects up until the end. In the end, Mrs. Burley is prepared to forgive the culprit and start over again, and there are hints that he may get what he wants in the future if he behaves better.  Personally, I think he probably would have gotten it eventually, anyway, so his situation is relatively unchanged, although he is now under pressure to prove his behavior to everyone. 

As for Star, she does become Janey’s horse as a gift from the one person who is in a position to give the horse to her while making sure that Mrs. Burley gets the money she needs.  Because of Janey’s help in revealing the culprit to Mrs. Burley and because of her devotion to the horse, Mrs. Burley is fine with the arrangement.