A Watcher in the Woods by Florence Engel Randall, 1976.

The Carstairs family is moving from Ohio to a small town in Massachusetts because Professor Carstairs will be taking a new job as head of the English department at the local college. Fifteen-year-old Jan knows that she will find the move harder than her parents or her younger sister. Her father will be busy with his work, and her mother will make friends with the wives of other faculty at the college. Jan knows that her little sister, Ellie, is still very young and in elementary school, and she won’t find changing schools as difficult as she will. Jan isn’t looking forward to trying to fit in at the local high school.

The family’s first difficulty in moving is finding a house in this new town that they like. Because it’s a small town, their options are limited, and it seems like there’s something wrong with each of the houses they see. Then, their realtor suggests that they view the old Aylwood place outside of town. Living there would mean a longer distance to drive to the college and the girls’ schools, but it’s a nice, big house with some land attached to it. The land includes woods and a pond. Elderly Mrs. Aylwood can’t afford to maintain the place anymore, but she has been reluctant to sell the house. She is very attached to it and she wants to make sure that, if she sells, that she will sell it to the right kind of people, who will take care of the land and woods.

From the first time that Jan and her family visit the house, it gives Jan a strange feeling. She has the oddest feeling that someone (or something) is watching them from the woods, and it frightens her. However, when she tries to explain her uneasy feelings to her mother, her mother thinks that it’s her imagination. Jan can’t deny that the house and wood give her the feeling of a fairy tale and that Mrs. Aylwood reminds her of a fairy tale witch.

For some reason, Mrs. Aylwood becomes more welcoming to the Carstairs family after she sees Jan, and she begins asking Jan some rather odd questions about herself. Mrs. Aylwood admits that Jan reminds her of her own daughter, Karen, who she lost 50 years ago when she was only 15 years old. Jan begins to understand that Mrs. Aylwood’s attachment to the house is because it’s a link to her daughter’s memory, but she soon begins to realize that there’s more to it than that. Mrs. Aylwood asks Jan what kind of person she is and makes a cryptic comment about how Jan is a human but there are other things besides humans.

Jan’s uneasy feeling of being watched continues, and mirrors in the house are inexplicably broken in an x-shaped pattern. When she befriends a neighbor, Mark, and talks to him and his mother about the house, she learns that Karen did not die but that she disappeared 50 years ago. She apparently went out for a walk to the pond in the woods one summer morning and simply vanished with no explanation. Searches for her never lead anywhere. Most of the local people believe that Karen ran away from home, although it would have been out of character for her to do that. Jan begins to wonder if the watcher she senses in the woods could be Karen, somehow hiding out or having returned after all these years, although Mark says that doesn’t make sense. Then, remembering Mrs. Aylwood’s comment about things that aren’t human, Jan wonders if the watcher could be Karen’s ghost. What if she died all those years ago, and her spirit haunts the woods?

It seems like someone or something is communicating with Ellie. Ellie seems to hear something speaking or humming when Jan can’t. Something even suggests to Ellie that she name her new puppy Nerak, which Jan realizes is “Karen” spelled backwards. Is Karen trying to communicate with them, or is it something else?

The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive. This book has been made into movie versions twice, but the Disney movie from 1980 is more faithful to the original story. I’ll explain why below, but it involves spoilers.

My Reaction and Spoilers

When talking about my opinion of this book, I really need to include some spoilers. This is a very unusual book because it isn’t obvious until about halfway through what kind of story it really is. From the beginning, it’s set up like a ghost story, with Karen’s mysterious disappearance, the sense of something watching the house and family from the woods, and something trying to communicate through Ellie. It’s very suspenseful and mysterious, but this is not actually a ghost story. It’s really science fiction.

Karen isn’t dead, but she has been trapped in an alternate dimension since she disappeared 50 years ago. A being from that other dimension has also been trapped in our world since then. This other being is the mysterious watcher in the woods. Jan correctly senses that this other being is also female and a child, although beings of its kind live extraordinarily long lives because time works differently in their dimension. What has been 50 years for everyone else has only seemed like a day to her. She wants to return home, but she has had to wait for conditions to be right. She also wants to help Karen, and she has been struggling to communicate with Mrs. Aylwood and Jan and her sister so she can tell them what they need to do.

In the Disney movie, there are a couple of major changes from the original book. The first is that the location is changed from the US to England, although Jan and her family are Americans. It also features a kind of initiation ritual that Jan was undergoing just as her switch with the creature from the other dimension happened, adding an element that seems supernatural, although it is still science fiction. At the very end of the Disney movie, Jan brings Karen back from the other dimension, but in the book (Spoiler!) Mrs. Aylwood goes to join Karen in the other dimension instead.

In the book, Jan’s mother worries about what life would be like for Karen if she returns, aged 50 years in what must have seemed like only a day, having lost most of her life, or what it would be like if she has not changed at all but her mother has aged 50 years, and the world has been through so many major changes since she left. It isn’t clear whether or not Karen has aged in the other dimension, but Jan’s mother’s point is that the world she came from has definitely changed. Karen can’t go back to her old life, and there is some sadness about that and about what Mrs. Aylwood has been going through since Karen disappeared. However, Mrs. Aylwood decides to join Karen in this other world, where she’s been. We don’t really know what Karen’s condition is in the other dimension because we don’t see her. She may have aged very fast there, although I think they imply that she has not aged at all because time works differently in the other dimension. Since time works differently there, it seems like they either won’t age further there or will do so much more slowly than they would on Earth.

Between the two movie versions, the Disney movie version of this book from 1980 is more faithful to the original story because it maintains the concept that this is a science fiction story and that the watcher in the woods is a being from another dimension. The movie version from 2017 turns the story into a ghost story with no science fiction elements. In the ghost story version, Karen is also still alive and hasn’t aged after being gone for many years, but the watcher in the woods is a ghost who is holding her captive. It’s a spookier version, but I think the logic of the original book, with its science fiction theme, makes more sense. 

The premise of the ghost story didn’t make as much sense to me because the ghost’s motives seem confused. First, the ghost takes Karen captive because she was staging a stunt for some friends where she appeared to be mocking the way he died. Then, he seemed to want to keep a girl for company, which is weird because it doesn’t seem like he interacts with Karen while he has her. He tries to make a bargain where he would be willing to release Karen in exchange for Ellie, but in the end, it turns out that human company isn’t really what he wants. (Spoiler!) He wants a ritual for his death that he was deprived from having when he was killed. The story just seemed to be all over the place with the ghost’s motives and desires. Is he out to punish Karen for her disrespect, lonely without human company, or just trying to get attention from the living to fulfill his final wishes? Even he doesn’t seem clear about that, which is why I prefer the sci-fi version. 

I also thought that the premise of the sci-fi story was more original, and I enjoyed the twist of a story that seems like a ghost story but really isn’t. If any sufficiently advanced technology might look like magic to someone who had never seen it before, as Arthur C. Clarke said, it makes sense that any being who was sufficiently different from the human experience might appear to be some kind of supernatural creature to human beings who didn’t know what they were perceiving.

The Disney version from 1980 actually has multiple endings because the first endings they filmed didn’t quite work and didn’t get a good reaction from audiences. If you’re curious about what the three endings are like, Jess Lambert explains them in her YouTube review of the movie.