The Mystery of the Missing Treasure by Janet Lorimer, 1987.
Pete’s family has moved from the city to a small town because his father has taken a new job, and the move hasn’t been easy for him. Besides leaving his friends and his school, he’s had to give up roller skating because there’s no roller rink and judo because there’s nowhere to take lessons. So far, there are really only two things that Pete likes about his new town: his new friend Danny and the local legend of Captain Scalawag and his treasure.
When Pete asks Danny for details about Captain Scalawag and his treasure, Danny explains that Captain Scalawag (real name Seth Delaney) had been a captain the Confederate army during the Civil War. He was injured and invalided out of the service, so he became a traveling peddler, although he didn’t have much luck with that. Eventually, he came to their small town in California and took a handyman job with the woman who once owned the house where Pete’s family now lives. Many of the people who had settled the town had come from the South, and Captain Scalawag (as he came to be known later) told them stories about the suffering in the South because of the war. Sympathetic townspeople gave Captain Scalawag their jewelry and raised money for him to take back to the South to set up relief efforts. However, Captain Scalawag was a conman and had no intention of using any of that money for its intended purpose. When the townspeople confronted him about it, he refused to return the money and refused to tell anybody where he hid it. The angry townspeople hanged Captain Scalawag for his theft and deception, but they never figured out what he did with their money and jewelry.
Pete is intrigued by the story and says that he wants to find the treasure, but Danny doesn’t think he has much of a chance. Over the years, many people have searched for the treasure, and they’ve never found anything.
Danny takes Pete swimming in the nearby river with some other boys from the town. Pete gets irritated because one boy, Duffy, teases him about being from the city, and the two of them have a diving contest near some dangerous rocks to prove which of them is the best. They both succeed in making their dives, but although the are declared equals, Pete has the feeling that their problems with each other aren’t over.
After the swim, Danny suggests that they go into town and watch people setting up for the play that they have every Fourth of July, which is a reenactment of the story of Captain Scalawag. Pete is interested, but he feels strange and passes out.
When he wakes up, people are fussing over him, and he seems to be in some kind of old-fashioned general store. A woman in old-fashioned clothing, who calls herself his mother is worried about him, and for some reason she calls him Zeb. Then, Pete wakes up again and finds himself in the local doctor’s office. The doctor said that he had heat exhaustion from being out in the sun too long while swimming. Pete’s father is there, and Pete tries to tell him about his vision of being in the general store in the past. Pete’s father thinks he just had a strange dream, although the doctor says that his office is on the site of the town’s old general store, which burned down years ago.
Pete continues to have trouble fitting in with the local kids. One evening, Duffy and Danny take him on a “snipe hunt“, abandoning him in the woods. (This is an old prank, often played at summer camps, but I think this book was actually the first place I heard of it as a kid.) When Pete realizes that he’s been the victim of a joke, he tries to walk home, but gets lost and falls in the mud. Finally, dirty and disheveled, he makes his way to the road and hitches a ride from Bob, the local deputy his older sister is dating.
When Pete explains to Bob what happened, Bob offends him by laughing. Bob explains that it’s an old prank, and he’s amused that anybody is still doing that. Seeing how angry Pete is, he tries to tell him not to be too angry over the prank and to reassure him that the local boys aren’t so bad, in spite of the prank. He says that the boys are just trying to have fun. It’s almost like a kind of hazing or initiation, and although Bob doesn’t quite explain it this way, he seems to think that if Pete accepts it with good grace, it will put him on a better footing with the other boys. Bob thinks that, given time, Pete will start to see the humor in it, and the next time some other new kid moves to town, Pete might well be the first to suggest taking the newbie on a snipe hunt himself, having become one of the initiated.
In spite of Bob’s apparent indulgence for youthful pranks, he does seriously ask Pete who was involved because, as a responsible adult, he can see that there are more serious issues involved in the prank. It was bad enough that Pete ended up dirty and humiliated, but if he had gotten more seriously lost or had fallen in the river, trying to find his way home after dark, none of it would be funny at all. Bob thinks that he should have a word with the other boys about the the consequences of their actions and give them a warning against pulling pranks where people could get hurt. Pete refuses to say who exactly was involved because he thinks that would just make him a snitch and make everything worse for him socially than it already is. Bob decides to let it go for now, just taking Pete home.
That night, Pete has another dream, where he seems to be seeing things through the eyes of Zeb. He sees the house where he’s living now as it used to be in the past, and he sees the man called Captain Scalawag, persuading the people who live there to contribute to relief efforts in the South due to the war. Then, Pete feels ill and seems to pass out in the dream, waking up in modern times in his own bed. He could just shrug it off as a dream, brought on by the stories he’s been hearing about Captain Scalawag and the old things his parents have discovered around the house and the barn that hind at events in the past. However, when his mother shows him more old photographs she’s found, Pete realizes that the details in his dream were far too accurate for him to have simply imagined them, from the details of the house in the past to the faces of the people he saw talking to Captain Scalawag.
More and more, Pete comes to realize that his dreams are no ordinary dreams. For some reason, he is able to see the past through the eyes of Zeb, a boy who died young around the time that Captain Scalawag conned the local people out of their money and treasures and hid the loot somewhere. Is Zeb himself trying to tell him something or show him something that everyone else has missed?
The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive.
My Reaction and Some Spoilers
I remember reading this book as a kid, although I had forgotten many of the details. I remembered Captain Scalawag stealing/scamming people out of valuables and then hiding them, but I had forgotten that the basis of his scheme was convincing people to donate to support the Confederacy during the Civil War. That was surprising because the story is set in California, and the concept of supporting the Confederacy is never appealing to me. I think I forgot that part because, as a kid, the important idea is that Captain Scalawag was a conman with a hidden treasure, and that’s all I cared to remember.
I remember finding it spooky that Pete was seeing things through the eyes of a dying/dead boy. Pete in the story does worry about getting stuck in Zeb’s body in the past, knowing that Zeb doesn’t have much time left to live. However, Zeb is trying to tell Pete something that he realized that indicates what Captain Scalawag did with the treasures he took from the townspeople. Zeb tried to tell people before he died, but because he was severely ill and delirious, nobody understood what he was really trying to say. It turns out that the treasures have been in the barn the entire time, but Captain Scalawag changed their appearance, so the townspeople have overlooked them the entire time. It’s a case of hiding in plain sight.
Pete’s confrontations with the local bully add a subplot to the story. Danny apologizes to Pete about joining in Duffy’s prank against him, and Danny admits that Duffy scares him, too. Eventually, Pete has to fight Duffy physically, but Duffy doesn’t know that Pete took judo lessons in the city, so he’s not as defenseless as Duffy thinks. During the course of their fight, Pete also saves Duffy from being bitten by a snake, so Duffy has to admit that he has some gratitude toward Pete. He’s also impressed by Pete’s fighting techniques. The two of them end up working out a compromise with each other, with Pete agreeing to teach Duffy some judo and Duffy agreeing to teach him some of the knowledge he has from living in the country, like how to kill a snake. (Pete warned Duffy about the snake, but Duffy is the one who killed it.) Because they were fighting out behind the barn, Duffy is also on hand when Pete has his final revelation from Zeb, so he gets to be part of the discovery of the treasure, along with Pete and Danny.
I wasn’t happy when Bob laughed off the kids’ snipe hunt prank against Pete at first. I don’t like pranks, and I think it should be more understandable that some people just don’t want to be part of them, especially when Bob has directly seen the aftermath of the prank. He did redeem himself a little for me when he realizes that the prank could have had much more serious consequences and that, as a responsible adult, he really should point that out to the boys involved. The potentially serious consequences of pranks is part of the reason why I don’t like them. There’s just too much potential with many of them to go horribly wrong. The way Bob seems to be looking at the snipe hunt is like it’s some kind of local initiation stunt for newcomers, although he doesn’t exactly use those words to describe it. However, the idea of it being a kind of initiation doesn’t really redeem it for me. Fraternity initiations and hazing often go wrong, and that’s why universities often crack down on them.
As I recall, this book was the first place I heard about the concept of a snipe hunt. Years later, I was on a church retreat in college, and someone joked about taking someone else on a snipe hunt. I’ll admit that I was briefly gleeful about knowing what that was when the other person didn’t. I almost did go along with it, but I just didn’t have the heart to let someone else in for a prank like that. I would have felt bad if something happened to that person in the woods at night, and I figured they would at least be upset. Since the person did seem worried and asked directly what a snipe hunt is, I told them, so I spoiled the joke before it really happened. I think I made the right decision, though.
The Ghost of Dibble Hollow by May Nickerson Wallace, 1965.
Elisha Nathanael Dibble Allen, called Pug, is excited to be spending the summer at the old family house called Dibble Hollow that his mother inherited! The summer starts out awkwardly when he gets on the wrong side of old Mr. Smith because his dog, Ricky, chases Mr. Smith’s chickens. When people find out that his family are Dibbles and that they’ll be staying in Dibble Hollow, Pug and his sister Helen learn that the locals in the area are afraid of Dibble Hollow. There are rumors that the house is haunted.
Pug thinks that the house is charming. It was built in 1730, and Pug immediately claims a room for himself with a picture of a boy in old-fashioned clothes who looks a lot like him. It does seem odd, though, that Ricky is afraid to enter that room, no matter how much Pug tries to persuade him.
Then, it seems like the family won’t be able to stay at the house after all because the well is dry, and they can’t get water. Pug is upset about having to leave the house and abandon their summer plans, but things change during the night, when Pug meets the ghost who haunts his room. The ghost is Miles Dibble, the older brother of Nathanael, Pug’s grandfather. Miles died young and still haunts the room that he once shared with Nathanael.
The ghostly Miles explains to Pug that he’s been responsible for the rumors that Dibble Hollow is haunted. He does things to scare strangers away from the house. However, he really wants his relatives to stay at Dibble Hollow, so he explains to Pug that there is actually a second well at Dibble Hollow, and it is connected to the house with pipes, but Pug’s grandfather’s eldest brother, Ezra, turned off the water on purpose to fool people into thinking that there was no water at the house, so he could have the house all to himself. Miles explains to Pug how to find the right pipe in the basement and turn the water back on.
The next morning, Pug follows Miles’s instructions and finds the pipe so the plumber can turn the water back on. His family is amazed how he knew where to look, but Pug is vague about how he knew. He can’t tell them about Miles because Miles tells him that only boys under the age of 15 in the Dibble family can see him, and also one other person who is special to Miles, although Miles doesn’t explain who that is.
Pug is happy that his family will be able to stay at Dibble Hollow for the summer, but he also begins hearing about a feud between the Smith family and the Dibble family. People are unsure exactly how the feud started. The plumber, Mr. Potter, says that there are only a few people who really knew the beginning of it. One of them is Miles, who has been dead for more than 50 years at that point. Another is Eb Smith, who was once Miles’s best friend, and is now the elderly Mr. Smith who was angry that Ricky chased his chickens. Pug is interested in being friends with Eb Smith’s granddaughter, Priscilla, but he thinks that he needs to understand the feud between their families before he can do that.
Since Eb Smith doesn’t want to talk to the Dibbles, Pug and Helen go to see Miss Fanny Woodman, the other person Mr. Potter says would know what happened to start the feud. Miss Woodman explains that the feud started when she was 13 years old, after both the Dibble and Smith families made a lot of money at a fair by winning some prizes and selling livestock. The elder boys in the Dibble and Smith families were supposed to take the money home, but they paid Eb and Miles to do it for them because they wanted to stay longer at the fair. However, Eb thought some suspicious men were following them home, thinking that the younger boys would be easier to rob. To evade the thieves, the two younger boys split up. Eb was supposed to lead the thieves on a wild goose chase while Miles got the money safely home. Eb did manage to lose their followers, but Miles never turned up with the money. The Smiths suspected Miles of running away with the money, but the Dibbles suspected the Smiths of having done something to Miles to get all the money for themselves.
At first, Eb didn’t think the Miles stole the money. He thought maybe Miles was playing some kind of trick on him because the two of them had a rivalry over Miss Woodman. Both boys had a crush on her when they were all kids. Miles was a teaser and a prankster, so it would have been in character for him to pull a trick. However, nobody ever saw the thieves who were supposedly following the boys, and the more Eb thought about it over the years, the more he became convinced that Miles was the one who thought he saw them and was the one who suggested that the two of them split up. Nobody ever found Miles’s body, so there was no proof that he ever died. His family eventually decided that’s what must have happened, so they had a memorial service for him and put a marker for him in the local cemetery, but the Smiths still suspected that Miles just stole the money and ran away.
Eb’s feelings for Miles turned to bitterness when he came to believe that Miles took advantage of their friendship to steal from him and his family, and those feelings only got worse when he suffered a series of misfortunes in his life. Eb’s wife died young, leaving him to raise their son alone. Then, his son and his wife also died, leaving him to care for his granddaughter Priscilla alone. Eb has been struggling for money to help raise Priscilla, and the money that his family lost would have made a difference to him. In fact, it still would make a difference to Eb because he’s in danger of losing his family’s old home because he can’t pay the mortgage. Miss Woodman doesn’t believe that Miles was a thief, but without the town knowing what really happened to Miles, it would be difficult to prove that to Eb Smith.
Pug knows that he has access to a source of information that nobody else does – he’s the only one who can talk to Miles himself about what happened! When Pug sees Miles again, Miles confirms what Miss Woodman said. He says that the thieves followed him instead of Eb that night. Miles tried to get away from them by crossing an old bridge, but he fell into the river and was killed. The thieves were alarmed that he was dead, so after searching him for the money, they pushed his body into the river again and got out of town as fast as they could. Miles says that a man called Mr. Miller later found his body down river and had him buried, but Mr. Miller didn’t know the boy’s identity, so he couldn’t notify his family. Instead, Mr. Miller buried Miles under the name of his own son, who died at sea as a cabin boy and whose body was never recovered. Mr. Miller felt that giving the nameless boy his son’s name and a resting place among his family was a kindness to the drowned boy and a fitting memorial to his own son, who was unable to return to rest with his family. People in the town where the Millers lived and live today know the story about the nameless boy buried with the Millers and Miles’s tombstone recounts it, but so far, nobody has made the connection between that nameless boy and Miles. (Except for one other person, who can’t explain how he knows where Miles is buried for the same reason why Pug can’t tell his family how he knew where the water pipe was.)
Pug asks Miles what happened to the money, and Miles says that he successfully managed to hide it from the thieves before he fell in the river. The problem is that he’s not exactly sure where he hid it. He knows he put it in a tree, but it was night, he was confused and in a hurry, his sense of direction was never good, and then, he died a sudden death. He’s been looking for the tree where he hid the money ever since, but he still can’t find it. He just knows that it’s somewhere around the old Smith place, Twin Maples … where Dibbles aren’t really welcome these days. Miles needs Pug’s help to find that hidden money and repair the relationship between the Smiths and the Dibbles!
The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive.
My Reaction and Some Spoilers
Part of the theme of the story is about old grudges. Miss Woodman and Priscilla, among others, tell Eb Smith that the grudge that he’s been holding against Miles and the other Dibbles is only hurting him and that it’s time to let it go, but at the same time, they also understand why he has trouble letting the issue go. The money that Miles was carrying when he disappeared would make a major difference to Eb Smith because he’s been struggling for years to take care of his old family home and his orphaned granddaughter. With the mortgage coming due, the holder of the mortgage, Mr. Pratt, is planning for foreclose and have Eb Smith sent to a retirement home, but that would leave Priscilla without a home. Mr. Pratt says he and his wife would take Priscilla in as a nanny for their four children, but that’s a nightmare job! The Pratts have had trouble keeping a nanny because the children are so badly behaved. Priscilla would be little more than a captive domestic slave to the Pratts. With that much depending on the lost money that would secure the Smiths’ home and future, it’s understandable why Eb Smith has trouble letting the matter go.
Eb doesn’t know that Miles is definitely dead and that he died the night of the fair, when they were chased by thieves. If Miles’s body had been identified and returned to his family shortly after his death, Eb would have accepted years ago that Miles was just the unfortunate victim of the thieves. He would have mourned the loss of his friend and reconciled himself to the loss of the money as something that couldn’t be helped. It was not knowing the truth for years that caused Eb to doubt his old friend and convince himself that Miles was the one responsible for the loss of the money. The restoration of the money is key to helping the Smiths and settling the feud, but knowing the real truth of Miles’s death is also important. As long as Eb doesn’t know the truth, his family’s suspicions, his own suspicions and imagination, and the rumors of the local people are all that Eb has had to fill in the space of what he doesn’t know.
The inability of people to communicate with each other hampers the truth. Pug’s attempts to help the Smiths are hampered because he can’t let Eb Smith know that he’s helping at first. If he did, Eb Smith’s pride and the grudge he holds would probably cause him to refuse the help, even if it hurt him and his granddaughter. Miles refuses to say at first who else besides Pug can see him as a ghost, but Miles later learns that (spoiler) it’s the man who found his body and buried him. Gideon Miller is now a very old man, and he only saw Miles’s ghost once when he was seriously ill, about a year after he buried Miles. That’s the only way that Mr. Miller knows his name and that he is the boy he buried. However, Mr. Miller can’t go to Miles’s family or the Smiths and tell them the truth about Miles because he knows nobody would be likely to believe him. Everyone would just think that he was hallucinating. Mr. Miller and Pug can talk to each other about it because they’ve both experienced Miles and can understand each other’s experiences, but neither of them can convincingly tell anyone else. Pug can’t tell his sister or Priscilla about the things he’s doing to try to help the Smiths, so they think he isn’t really doing much, if anything, although Helen is suspicious that Pug knows things he shouldn’t know and seems to have a hidden source of information. Fortunately, Pug eventually finds a way to show his parents that the unidentified boy buried with the Miller family is Miles.
When Pug has problems with the eldest Pratt boy, Ernie, his father talks to him about grudges and expectations, bringing the story back around to the main theme. People have prejudices against the Dibbles because of what they’ve suspected for years about Miles and the missing money. Pug’s father points out that, while the Pratts definitely have some negative traits, people’s habits of expecting the worst of them just because their family has that reputation, can turn into a self-fulfilling prophecy. If people have the sense that nobody expects anything good about them, they won’t even try to do better. Pug and Ernie do end up getting into a fight, but once they’ve got their feelings out and impressed each other with their fighting ability, they make up and become friends. Ernie helps Pug to understand Mr. Pratt better. Mr. Pratt actually thinks he would be helping Eb Smith by sending him to the county old folks’ home because he genuinely thinks Eb Smith can’t manage his house by himself. It’s not just a ploy to get the property and make a personal profit.
When the truth is revealed and the money found, the adults in the story are mature enough to admit that they were wrong about things, and I thought that was a really good example to present to kids. Eb Smith apologizes to the Dibbles, particularly Pug, about how he treated them when they were only trying to help. He also expresses regret that he came to doubt his best friend, not understanding that something truly tragic happened to him all those years ago. Mr. Pratt, rather than being upset that he won’t get the Smiths’ property after all, is actually relieved that things have worked out well for the Smiths. He tells Mr. Smith that he didn’t mean to make things hard on him, that he really did think that what he was doing was best for him and Priscilla, but Ernie has been talking to him about their situation, and he’s changed his mind.
The time period of the story is dated. Miles’s tombstone and an old diary of his that Pug finds date the year of Miles’s death to 1900. Since he’s been dead for more than 50 years or almost 60 years, the story is set c. 1960, just a few years before the book was published.
Anna is traveling alone by train to stay with Mr. and Mrs. Pegg for the summer. Anna lives with Mrs. Preston, who she calls her auntie, but the truth is that Anna is a foster child. She knows that her mother and grandmother are dead. Anna feels different from other children and has trouble relating to them. Anna often feels like an outsider around other people. She also suffers from asthma, which gets worse when she is stressed, and it’s been interfering with her going to school. Her vacation in the countryside with the Peggs is meant to help improve her health, but her health problems are partly based on her inner turmoil, which accompanies her to the countryside.
The Peggs are nice. Mrs. Pegg tries to get Anna to be friendly with a local girl, Sandra, but it doesn’t go well. Anna takes offense that Sandra cheats at cards, and she calls Sandra a pig. Sandra insults Anna by saying that she looks like “what she is.” Although the vague insult is probably because Sandra couldn’t think of anything better at the time, it stings because Anna really doesn’t think much of herself, and she constantly worries that it shows on the outside.
Anna is happiest when she’s left to wander and explore by herself and try not to think about all the things that bother her. As Anna explores the area alone, she finds a large, old house that intrigues her. She has the odd feeling like the house has been waiting for her and an odd sense of familiarity with it. Mr. and Mrs. Pegg say that’s the old Marsh house and that nobody lives there now, although they’ve heard that someone has bought it. Anna likes to imagine that the house belongs to her and that the family that will move into it belong to her, too. She thinks she sees a blonde girl in one of the windows, getting her hair brushed.
Then, one evening, she meets a pretty blonde girl with a little boat. The two of them hide and listen to the girl’s parents talk, and they begin to develop a kind of odd friendship. The two girls continue to meet in the evenings in the blonde girl’s boat. The blonde girl, who calls herself Marnie, says that she wants to keep their friendship a secret, and she would rather that they get to know each other slowly, only asking one question about each other in turn. For some odd reason, though, when Anna is with Marnie, she has trouble recalling details of her present life, and anytime she stops to focus on the present, Marnie suddenly disappears, although Marnie claims that Anna is the one who suddenly disappears.
Marnie and Anna explore the countryside together, gathering mushrooms, and talking a little to each other about their lives. Anna admits to Marnie what she can’t bring herself to tell anyone else, the reasons why she’s been so upset. She fears that her foster family doesn’t really love her. She thinks they kind of do, but she has recently learned that they’ve been receiving payments from the local council for her support. Since she found out about the money they’re receiving for her, she’s felt a sense of betrayal and abandonment. She used to think they felt like she was their own child, but now, she thinks that they’re mostly just being paid to care for her.
It seems like, all her life, Anna has been abandoned by the people who were supposed to live her the most. She doesn’t really remember her parents at all. She knows that her father abandoned her and her mother when she was small and that her mother remarried but died shortly after that. Anna’s mother had left her with her grandmother while she went away on her honeymoon, but then, she and her new husband were both killed in a car crash, so they never returned for her. Anna remembers a little about her grandmother, who took care of her after her mother died, but then, her grandmother also got sick and died. Anna tells Marnie that she hates them all for going away and leaving her. Marnie points out that dying wasn’t their fault, but Anna says that, before her grandmother went to the hospital, she promised to return soon. She broke her promise by dying. Ever since, Anna has had the feeling that she can’t trust anybody because people leave and break promises. Her feelings of not being able to trust people are at the root of her difficulties in forming friendships and confiding her true feelings to her foster family. Marnie hugs Anna and tells her that she really loves her and that they’ll be friends forever, and for the first time in a long time, Anna feels happy and feels like she can believe Marnie.
At first, Anna envies Marnie’s privileged life in the big house. Marnie’s father is wealthy, and her mother is beautiful, and it seems like Marnie has everything she could want. Anna even gets to attend one of the parties Marnie’s parents hold at the house when Marnie convinces them to let her in as a little beggar gypsy girl (the book’s description) selling sea lavender for luck. (There is minor alcohol use at this point because the people at the party give Anna a little glass of wine. People are also smoking at the party.) However, when Marnie explains a little more about what her parents are like and what really happens in her house, Anna comes to see that Marnie isn’t fortunate at all. Her parents are rarely home because her father is often away, in the navy, and her mother likes to spend most of her time in London. Marnie doesn’t exactly say what her mother does in London, but the implication seems to be that she spends a lot of time partying and hob-nobbing with high society. While they’re away, Marnie is looked after by her nurse, who can be abusive when she’s angry with Marnie, and sometimes she and the maids threaten to lock Marnie in the old windmill nearby, knowing that she’s afraid of the place. Anna thinks that’s horribly cruel, and she says that no adult in her life has ever hurt her or tried to frighten her on purpose. Marnie doesn’t think of herself as being so unfortunate because this is the only life she’s ever known, but Anna knows that not everybody treats children like that. Her heart goes out to Marnie, and she declares that she loves Marnie, too.
Anna’s relationship with Marnie teaches her how to open up to other people and trust them, but that trust is shaken after a frightening experience at the old windmill. Marnie’s distant cousin Edward, who seems to be the only person in her life who truly looks out for her, is also a bit strict and teasing with her when it comes to the things that she’s afraid of. He thinks that fears should be confronted, so he convinces her that she should be brave and get over her fear of the windmill. In an effort to face her fears, Marnie tries to go inside the windmill alone and climb up the ladder to the loft. However, once she’s up there, she becomes too afraid of the ladder to climb down again. Anna also climbs up and tries to comfort Marnie, but no matter what she says, Marnie is too scared to climb back down. The girls fall asleep in the windmill, and when Anna wakes up, Marnie is suddenly gone. Anna is angry at Marnie for leaving without telling her when both of them had been frightened. Once again, she feels betrayed and abandoned by someone she thought she could trust.
Then, during a storm, Anna sees Marnie gesturing to her from a window of the Marsh house. Marnie calls out to her that she’s sorry about leaving her and that she can’t come out because she’s locked in and is being sent away the next day. She just wants Anna to know that she loves her. Anna, seeing that Marnie didn’t mean to hurt her, forgives her and says she still loves her, too. To Anna’s shock, though, when she tries to look inside the windows of the Marsh house, the place looks empty and abandoned. Confused and upset, Anna stumbles and falls into the water nearby, nearly drowning, but she is rescued by a local man.
After that experience, Anna is ill and sad because she realizes that Marnie is gone from her life. When she recovers, though, she goes to look at the Marsh house again and encounters the children of the new owners, the Lindseys. Anna feels a surprising sense of connection to them, and they to her. As they get to know each other and become friends, one of the Lindsey children, Scilla, reveals that she’s found a diary in the house that tells her about Marnie’s life. At first, she thought Anna was Marnie when they met. Anna is shocked because she’s been starting to think that Marnie was only an imaginary friend of hers. When Anna and Priscilla read the diary, they learn more about the history of the Marsh house and Marnie. The diary is old and refers to the First World War as an event that is currently happening, bringing into question who and what Marnie really was when Anna was becoming her friend. Mrs. Lindsey says that they can ask their family friend, the elderly Gillie about Marnie. Learning about Marnie’s past awakens some of Anna’s memories and reveals some things about Anna’s own past. Understanding who and what Marnie was helps Anna to understand that her birth family, who seemed to have abandoned her, actually loved her. Accepting Marnie’s love helps Anna to understand and accept the love of her foster parents and new friends.
The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive. This book has also been made into a Studio Ghibli movie of the same name, although they changed the location of the story from England to Japan. Changing the location of the story changes some of the historical details, but the essential parts of the story are the same as well as the lessons Anna learns from her experiences.
My Reaction and Spoilers
Probably, most people today are familiar with this story because of the Studio Ghibli movie. The movie is pretty faithful to the original book, although changing the setting from England to Japan changes some of the details. It kept the general sense of Anna’s family’s history, her personal connection with Marnie, and the lessons that Anna learns about love, trust, forgiveness, and connecting with other people. In both the book and the movie, Anna comes to realize that the feeling of being “outside” or “inside” relationships with other people is largely a reflection of how the person feels inside themselves. Anna is troubled because she has long-term trauma and inner turmoil that needs to be resolved. Finding out the truth about Marnie and her own past, especially now that she’s old enough to understand the situation, helps to resolve Anna’s feelings.
This is one of those stories where it’s difficult to talk about the book in detail without spoilers, so from this point on there are going to be some major spoilers.
Who is Marnie Really?
Readers will probably get the sense that there’s something odd about Marnie pretty quickly. There are a few odd time discrepancies when Anna’s with Marnie. Marnie vanishes at odd moments, especially when Anna tries to remember details of her present life in Marnie’s presence. For some reason, it takes a lot of effort for Anna to remember her present life when she’s with Marnie, and when she tries to focus on the present day, Marnie disappears.
Why do I keep talking about the “present”? Because this is a time slip story. It’s not immediately obvious to Anna that, when she’s with Marnie, she’s in a different time period because they’re spending time in the countryside with no signs of modern technology or the absence of modern technology, like television or radio, to give away the time periods. Marnie never goes into the Peggs’ household, and the only time Anna goes into the Marsh house with Marnie is during a party, where everyone is dressed up. There are a couple of minor clues, like Marnie referring to what Anna’s wearing as boys’ clothes because she’s wearing pants instead of a dress or skirt, but other than that, there are few references that would clarify the time period for Anna. Anna’s difficulty of thinking of or being in two different time periods at once also keeps her from making the connection.
After Marnie leaves and Anna knows that she is gone, Anna partly concludes that she was only an imaginary friend of hers, but the diary makes it clear that Marnie was a real person. It also adds some details that confirm Anna’s experiences with her and add some extra information that Marnie didn’t discuss with Anna that clarifies when she really lived in the Marsh house.
The truth is that Marnie was Anna’s grandmother, who is now deceased. The Marsh house was familiar to Anna because it was her home with Marnie during her earliest years. The things that Gillie has to say about Marnie help to fill in the blanks and connect Marnie’s story to Anna’s.
As a child herself, Marnie really was the poor little rich girl whose wealthy parents neglected her and frequently left her alone with an abusive nurse. Marnie was somewhat isolated as a child and, like Anna, was frequently happiest exploring the countryside or going out alone in her boat. The only person she felt that she could confide in was her distant cousin, Edward, who was older and tried to look after her, although he was also stern and not as emotionally understanding as he probably should have been. The summer that Anna experiences with Marnie was the summer when Marnie’s life changed forever, partly because of the windmill incident.
Marnie really did go into the windmill by herself in an effort to conquer her fear, and she did get trapped there because she was afraid to come down. Her nurse and the maids, unable to find her and not knowing where she went, finally called for a search party for the missing girl, but it was Edward who figured out where she was. He found her in the mill, unconscious, either passed out from fright or having fallen asleep from exhaustion, and carried her down the ladder himself, which is why Marnie was gone when Anna woke up. Edward didn’t see Anna there, probably because she had either shifted back to her own time while the girls were asleep or because not everybody is able to see Anna when she’s caught between times. The fact that the nurse had no idea where Marnie was exposes her neglect of Marnie, and when Marnie tells Edward about how the nurse and maids made her afraid of the windmill by threatening to lock her in there and how her nurse has given her abusive punishments, he makes sure that the nurse is fired. The reason why Marnie called out to Anna that she was being sent away was that, when the nurse was discharged, her family decided that it would be best for her to go to boarding school instead. Marnie’s father, who was in the navy during WWI/The Great War, was killed during the war, not very long after that party that Anna attended as the little beggar girl, and after boarding school, Marnie married Edward. They moved somewhere else, and they had a daughter of her own.
Unfortunately, Marnie’s life and family were plagued with problems, some of their own making and some beyond their control. When Anna and her new friends, the Lindsey children, try to ask Gilly who was responsible for how things turned out for Marnie, she says that the answer is complicated. The older a person gets, the more they realize that there are many factors involved in how a person’s life turns out, and it’s difficult to point to any one thing as a cause.
Marnie’s parents obviously neglected her, and although Edward really did love her, he wasn’t very understanding about emotional needs. Marnie herself, although she wanted to be a better parent to her daughter than her parents had been to her, didn’t really know how because she didn’t have good parental role models to follow and hadn’t been brought up to understand her own emotional needs, let alone how to care for the emotional needs of a child. She hadn’t fully matured emotionally by the time she became a mother, and outside events complicated her relationship with her daughter, Esme. Esme was young during WWII, and she was sent away to the United States as a child evacuee to escape the threat of bombing. Although Marnie sent Esme away for safety, they were separated for a period of years when Esme was very young. When Esme came back, she didn’t feel much connection to Marnie. She felt abandoned for being sent away from her mother and accused Marnie of never really acting like her mother because she wasn’t there for her, physically or emotionally. Marnie tried to repair her relationship with Esme, but as soon as Esme was out of school, she ran away and got married to Anna’s father.
We never learn who Anna’s father was. He is probably still alive somewhere, but Gillie describes him as having been too young and immature for the role of a husband and father. It wasn’t long before he and Esme divorced, and he was out of Anna’s life forever. The story seems to imply that he might have been from Spain because he has a darker complexion than Marnie or Esme and because he liked the Spanish sound of the name Marianna, the name that Esme originally gave to Anna as a baby and which came from Marnie’s mother. (We are told that Anna was unaware that her legal name is still Marianna and that Anna is a nickname that her foster family gave her.) Because her marriage failed when Anna was only a baby, Esme turned Anna over to Marnie almost immediately, so Marnie really was the one who was raising Anna the entire time. Esme tried to get her life straightened out, and the man she married next seems to have been a nice person. The family might have managed to get themselves back together as a family after that, but Esme and her new husband tragically died in a car accident on their honeymoon. Marnie genuinely loved Anna and tried to continue caring for her, but her own health was failing, and the shock of Esme’s sudden death made it worse. Marnie desperately wanted to recover and return to Anna at the Marsh house, but she really couldn’t help dying. When Anna fully comes to understand all of this, she manages to forgive her mother and grandmother for leaving her, knowing that they loved her and that leaving her the way they did wasn’t what they wanted.
Anna’s new sense of inner peace and acceptance of her family’s love for her, flawed as they all were, helps Anna understand and accept her foster family’s love. She and her foster mother also have a heart-to-heart talk about the payments they’ve been receiving to help support Anna. Mrs. Preston says that she hadn’t wanted to talk to Anna about the payments because she hadn’t wanted Anna to feel self-conscious about them or to think that the Prestons didn’t want to support her themselves, although the money has helped with Anna’s expenses. Mrs. Preston admits that she’s tried to avoid mentioning things that would make Anna seem more separate from the Preston family or less than fully hers, and she had noticed that Anna was uncomfortable when she was younger and Mrs. Preston tried to tell her what she knew about her mother and grandmother. Anna had been uncomfortable hearing about them because she was angry with them for their seeming abandonment of her, but Mrs. Preston hadn’t understood and was too uncomfortable herself to probe Anna’s feelings deeper, although she now sees that it’s better to be open about things, even when they’re uncomfortable. Anna’s relationship with her “auntie” improves because of their new understanding of each other, their feelings, and Anna’s past. I think Anna also sees that Mrs. Preston has treated her much better than Marnie’s own parents ever treated her, which shows that being blood relations isn’t always a guarantee of a close and loving relationship or the best treatment. Although, realizing that she originally did come from a family who loved her as best they could and that her grandmother really was her first real friend helps give Anna the basis she needs to establish loving relationships with other people.
What is Marnie Really?
As I said, this is a time slip story. Anna apparently really does go back in time, speak to Marnie as a living person in her time, and interact with other people at the party when Marnie pretends that she’s a little gypsy beggar girl (the book’s description) selling sea lavender. The beggar girl incident also appears in Marnie’s diary. Marnie doesn’t refer to Anna by name, but it seems to indicate that Marnie actually experienced the incident with Anna and that it wasn’t just a dream.
Although, I have seen other reviewers suggest that Anna could have been dreaming or imagining some of these things as the presence of the house awakens Anna’s memories of living there with Marnie and stories that Marnie might have told her about her childhood. Yet, the fact that Scilla saw Anna once looking up at the house and seeing Marnie in the window while none of her siblings could see Anna at that time suggests that something supernatural was happening and that only certain people can see Anna when she’s caught between time periods.
So, does that mean that Marnie was a ghost or that Anna was a type of ghost when she was slipping between time periods? It’s a possible explanation, and I think one of the characters makes that comparison. We don’t have an exact explanation for how the time slips happen except that Marnie and Anna have a strong emotional connection to each other and to the Marsh house. Marnie’s death and Anna’s unresolved feelings create a need for the two of them to meet again, almost for the first time, and come to understand each other.
I think the movie version somewhat implies Marnie deliberately reaching out across time to reconnect with her granddaughter and assure her of her love, but in the book, it seems as though Marnie is unaware that they are actually family. Marnie just loves Anna as Anna, not trying to justify their family’s circumstances but just being herself as she was when she was young and letting Anna see the person she really was. Just as Anna couldn’t climb down the ladder for Marnie, only trying to help her do it herself, Marnie can’t do all the emotional understanding for Anna. Her presence just helps Anna to come to a new understanding of her and their shared past.
In beginning, Anna was angry that her teachers accused her of “not even trying” at school or at getting along with others, but the truth is that she was missing some important pieces of information and understanding to make the efforts she needs to make. Marnie’s life turned out the way it did partly because she was also missing some understanding about emotions, relationships, and what it takes to be a good parent. We don’t know why Marnie’s mother was the way she was. Perhaps she was similarly raised by neglectful parents and distracting herself from her own past traumas in those constant parties she gives and attends. As Gillie says, it’s hard to know exactly where these things start when you begin to look at the bigger picture. However, Anna’s new understanding indicates that her life is likely to turn out better than the previous generations of her family. In an odd way, it seems she both needed both her connection to them and a kind of separation from them to get there and break their cycle.
#124 The Pumpkin Head Mystery by Gertrude Chandler Warner, 2010.
The Aldens are getting ready for Halloween, and they go to the Beckett farm to get some pumpkins. Mr. Beckett has been having trouble this year because he broke his leg. He’s been letting a hired assistant, Bessie, handle the pumpkin patch, but she is short-tempered and not very good with customers. Mr. Beckett fired her once before, but he had to take her back this year because he was desperate for help.
Mr. and Mrs. Beckett’s daughter, Sally, has been trying to persuade them to sell their farm and come live near her and her children in Florida. She thinks they’re getting too old to manage the farm by themselves and that this recent injury of Mr. Beckett’s proves it. The Becketts say that they don’t want to give up their farm and that they’re not ready to retire. Then, one of the farm hands, Jason, says that Mr. Beckett broke his leg while chasing a pumpkin-headed ghost, but Mr. Beckett denies that it exists.
Later, someone trashes the pumpkin patch and smashes a lot of pumpkins, and for some reason, Bessie faints. The real estate developer who is pressuring the Becketts to sell their farm, Dave Bolger, shows up again and tries to persuade the Becketts to sell. Sally thinks her parents should take the offer, but they still refuse. The Aldens help clean up the pumpkin patch in time for the next hayride, so the Becketts won’t have to cancel it, and Sally tells them that the farm is haunted and that the stories Jason has been telling about the pumpkin-headed ghost are true.
A glowing pumpkin has been seen floating through the fields at night, seemingly with no body underneath it. When it appears, they hear scary voices, telling them to leave the farm and leave the spirits in peace. Mr. Beckett did injure his leg while trying to chase after it on his horse. The Aldens think this sounds scary, and they ask Sally if the farm was always haunted. Sally admits it wasn’t, but she is serious that she thinks her parents should sell the place and move closer to her and her family.
The Aldens want to help the Becketts, and they start doing some seasonal work at the farm, making flyers for their hayrides and dressing up in costumes as part of the spooky attractions. Then, someone steals the scarecrow that Benny made from the Aldens’ house, and a new pumpkin-headed ghost appears on the farm!
Are there actually any ghosts, or is someone pulling a trick on the Becketts? Is it one of the people trying to pressure the Becketts to sell the farm or someone else, for a different reason?
My Reaction
I enjoyed this spooky mystery! The author did a good job of making multiple characters look like good suspects for playing ghost on the farm. Mr. Bolger and Sally both want the Becketts to sell the farm, and scaring farm workers and visitors away from the farm would add pressure to the Becketts. Bessie isn’t very good at her job, but the Aldens discover that she needs money because her husband is sick. Could she have been paid to commit some sabotage on the farm or could she be trying to get back at the Becketts for firing her last season? Jason has worked on the Becketts’ farm for years and seems to love the place, but he’s been arguing with Mr. Beckett about the way he runs the farm. Maybe Jason wants the farm for himself! There are some good possibilities for suspects.
There were some clues that I thought were obvious, like the connection between the disappearance of Benny’s pumpkin-headed scarecrow and the sudden appearance of a new pumpkin-headed ghost on the farm, but child readers may find the mystery more challenging. Even though I thought some parts were obvious, because there were several suspects, each of which seems to be doing something sneaky that they want to cover up, I wasn’t sure whether some of them might be working together or not.
The book has the right amount of spookiness for a Halloween story without being too scary for kids. In some ways, like with all Scooby-Doo style pseudo-ghost stories, I thought that it was a little silly for the plot to frighten people away from the farm to succeed. My reasoning is that, since this story is set in the Halloween season and some parts of the farm are deliberately set up as haunted attractions with people running around in costumes, I would think most farm workers and visitors would just attribute the pumpkin-headed ghost to either a Halloween prank or just part of the act at a spooky attraction.
One of the possible motives that they never discuss in the story is that the ghost act could be a publicity stunt to draw more visitors to the park. While the premise of the story is that people are being scared away, in reality, there are a lot of curiosity-seekers who would want to go to a supposedly haunted attraction to see what all the fuss is about. Publicity isn’t the real motive of the fake ghost, but I’m just saying that it could have been a real possibility that was overlooked. There are a lot of places, like hotels and restaurants in historic buildings, that capitalize on any potential ghost stories to attract curious thrill-seekers.
Something I appreciated is that the real estate developer is Dave Bolger, which is a homage to Ray Bolger, who played the role of The Scarecrow in the 1939 movie of The Wizard of Oz. Is that a hint? I’ve decided not to spoil the solution of the mystery!
#21 The Secret of the Haunted Mirror by M. V. Carey, 1974.
Mrs. Darnley has collected mirrors for years, and she has some pretty impressive ones in her collection. Her strangest mirror by far is the goblin mirror that her friend in another country, the Republic of Ruffino sent to her. There is a legend surrounding the mirror that says it was once owned by magician who used it to communicate with goblins under the earth. Supposedly, the magician went inside the mirror himself and now haunts it.
A man called Sr. Santora has been pestering Mrs. Darnley to sell the mirror to him, claiming he’s a descendant of the magician who created it. He insists that the legends about the mirror are true and that terrible things have happened to previous owners of the mirror. Mrs. Darnley didn’t believe these stories at first, but now, she and her grandchildren have seen this ghost in the mirror and heard unearthly laughter in the night. That isn’t the only strange phenomenon they’ve experienced. Someone tries to steal the mirror from Mrs. Darnley’s house, and Mrs. Darnley, not knowing what to do, asks the Three Investigators to find out what the mirror’s secret really is.
The Three Investigators are pretty sure from the beginning that someone is faking the ghost, although they don’t know exactly how. At first, they think that Sr. Santora hired the man who tried to steal the mirror, but when they follow the attempted thief, Pete sees him attack Sr. Santora!
Jupiter spends a stormy night at Mrs. Darnley’s house and has an encounter with the “ghost” that reveals how the haunting was accomplished and reveals connections to another magician who once owned Mrs. Darnley’s house and to the president of the Republic of Ruffino. It seems that the mirror contains secrets that aren’t entirely magical. There are two competing forces trying possess these secrets.
When Mrs. Darnley’s grandson is kidnapped, the kidnapper demands that she turn over the mirror in an abandoned warehouse. The Three Investigators must hurry to find the kidnapped grandson, discover which side in this power struggle is responsible for the kidnapping, and what the real secret of the mirror is before it’s too late!
The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive (multiple copies).
My Reaction
The part I enjoyed the most about this mystery was the creepy legend and haunting of the mirror. One of the features of the Three Investigators books that I like is that they have some spooky mysteries in the pseudo-ghost story fashion of Scooby-Doo, and some of their supposed ghosts and supernatural creatures are much more original than in other series. The idea of a haunted goblin mirror and Jupiter’s encounter with it on a spooky, stormy night are delicious to a Scooby-Doo style mystery fan!
There are echoes of the first Three Investigators book in this one because there are secrets to Mrs. Darnley’s house that she doesn’t fully understand, and the haunting is based on magic tricks. There is some political intrigue to the story, too. The Republic of Ruffino isn’t a real place, so readers find out about its circumstances along with the Three Investigators. There is also a secret room and a clever hiding place for something in the solution to the mystery.
Meg Mackintosh and The Mystery at Camp Creepy by Lucinda Landon, 1987.
Meg Mackintosh is at a summer camp in Maine! The camp is called Camp Crescent, but it soon gets the name Camp Creepy because there’s a ghost story about the camp. The story says that an old man named Stuart once lived in the building that the camp uses for a boathouse and that he still haunts the camp. When people start hearing strange noises at night, the campers start thinking maybe the ghost story is true.
To celebrate the Fourth of July, the camp decides to hold a treasure hunt with puzzles for the campers to solve. Everyone is excited about the treasure hunt, but Meg is especially excited because she’s solved treasure hunts before. However, in her excitement to start the treasure hunt, she accidentally drops the first clue on the camp fire, and much of it burns.
Everyone is angry with Meg for messing up the treasure hunt because they’re supposed to solve it before nightfall to enjoy the prize. Although they don’t know what the prize is supposed to be, they’re told that it won’t be any good if they find it too late. While the others go on a hike, Meg fakes a stomach ache because she just can’t face the other campers again.
At the camp’s infirmary, Meg meets two other campers who are staying behind. Russell has a bad case of poison ivy, and Tina has been dealing with homesickness. They ask to see what’s left of the first clue, and Meg shows them. Something in the clue reminds Meg of something she saw at camp earlier, and the three of them begin thinking that they might be able to solve the after all. If they can just get past that first burned clue, they can continue the treasure hunt like normal.
Can the three of them manage to solve the treasure hunt and save the prize for all the other campers? Will they meet Stuart’s ghost along the way?
The Book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive (multiple copies).
My Reaction
I always enjoy treasure hunt stories, and like other Meg Mackintosh mysteries, this story gives readers the opportunity to figure out the clues and puzzles along with Meg. The information readers need is in the pictures of the story.
Most of the focus of the story is on the treasure hunt, and the ghost is kind of a side plot. Maybe the ghost would seem a little spookier to young readers, but I have to admit that I found it difficult to think of anybody named Stuart as sounding very sinister. The legend of Stuart doesn’t even seem to carry any consequences for people who see him other than it just being spooky, so I didn’t think the story was that creepy.
Camp Ghost-Away by Judy Delton, illustrated by Alan Tiegreen, 1988.
The Pee-Wee Scouts sell powered sugar donuts door-to-door in their neighborhood to raise money for their trip to camp, and there is a special badge for the scout who sells the most. The kids all brag about how much they’re going to sell, each claiming that they can sell the most. Rachel teases Sonny because his over-protective mother will probably go with him while he’s going door-to-door. She calls him a “mama’s boy”, and he calls her “stuck up.” (There is some truth to both of these insults, but they’re still nasty, and no adult comments on it.) Molly and Mary Beth decide to do their selling together because they’re best friends.
In the end, Rachel and Sonny are the biggest sellers, each of them selling more than 100 boxes, in spite of Rachel’s teasing about his mother’s involvement and Rachel’s mother’s objection that donuts aren’t very healthy. However, there are some objections about how fair that is when Rachel and Sonny reveal the secrets of their success. Sonny’s mother sold 80 of his boxes at her workplace, and some kids object that it isn’t fair because Sonny didn’t sell them himself. He gets more teasing about being a “baby” and having his mother do things for him, but Mrs. Peters, the scout leader, says that it’s fair for a mother to sell on their behalf because the most important thing is the money they raise for camp.
Similarly, Rachel explains that her family went to a family wedding, and she sold most of her boxes to her relatives. Her family seems to have money, and her aunt and grandmother each bought 20 boxes. Jealously, Molly says that her relatives will get fat if they eat that many donuts. Rachel says that they won’t because they plan to donate the donuts to hungry people. Again, Mrs. Peters doesn’t say anything about the insults the children trade, just saying that the money they raised is important because they will now be able to afford to go to camp.
The camp is called Camp Hide-Away, and Mrs. Peters gives the children information about the camp and what to pack. They will go to camp next weekend, and Lisa’s mother will come with them on the trip. Rachel brags about how she has two swimsuits to bring, while the other kids only have one each, and she also shows off her new gold bracelet.
When they get to camp and Rachel discovers that they will be sleeping in tents, she isn’t so sure she wants to go camping after all. She doesn’t like bugs, and she worries about bears. The other kids call her “sissy” and “scaredy cat.” Mrs. Peters assures them that it will all be fine, and she has her large dog with them.
That night, they hear a strange sound, which sounds like the moaning of a ghost. The kids debate about whether it’s a ghost or some kind of wild animal. Either prospect is terrifying. When it starts talking, they’re sure it’s a ghost, but Mrs. Peters’s dog saves the day!
My Reaction and Spoilers
I’ve commented before that the kids in this book series do a lot of name-calling. In a way, it’s realistic for young children, but it’s also really annoying. Sonny inevitably gets called “sissy”, “baby”, and/or “mama’s boy” in every book I’ve read. It also bothers me that no adult ever tells the kids not to talk like that. The kids in the story are only six years old, so this kind of name-calling could be considered realistic, but adults telling kids not to talk like that is also realistic. I feel bad for Sonny because he often gets picked on in these books, and I think it’s unfair. Maybe his mother is a little over-protective, compared to the other parents, but at the same time, these kids are only six years old. Things like having a mom who walks to a six-year-old to school and doesn’t want a six-year-old to go door-to-door, selling things to strangers all by himself, are not outrageous. Even Rachel admits that she heard her mother saying that the kids were rather young to be away from home overnight for an entire weekend, and I think that’s true. There is some trouble with homesickness in the story, and I’m not surprised.
Like other books in this series, there are also multiple parts to the story, almost like short stories put together. The first part of this book is about selling the donuts to raise money for camp, and the second part is about their camping trip, although that part also has some smaller episodes. The highlight of the book is the spooky noise that the kids hear at night and think is a ghost. It is pretty quickly revealed that it’s just a couple of the scouts playing a prank on the others. The prank gets foiled by Mrs. Peters’s dog and the pranksters crashing into things because they have sheets over their heads.
There’s also a third part of the story, where Molly has more trouble with camp activities than the other kids. She can’t swim or row as well as they can, and when they look for interesting things, like rocks and wild flowers, on their hike, all she finds is poison ivy. But, she isn’t the only one having problems. Rachel doesn’t like bugs and the camping food, and Sonny gets homesick. Sonny’s mother comes to pick him up because he’s so upset. The other kids tease him again, but the truth is that other kids are also homesick and cry at night. Even Lisa cries, even though her mother is there on the trip. Molly realizes that she is the only one who isn’t homesick. Although she doesn’t get the badges for the standard camp activities, Molly does get one for not being homesick and another for finding Mary Beth’s lost ring. I was surprised that Rachel’s bracelet wasn’t the thing that got lost since she made a big deal of introducing it, but it was Mary Beth’s ring that got lost instead.
Although I often think that the adults don’t explain much to the children in this series, Mrs. Peters does tell the children that homesickness is natural. I think she could have given them a little more advice about it and defended Sonny from the teasing more, though.
#23 The Mystery of the Invisible Dog by M. V. Carey, 1975.
Shortly after Christmas, a frightened man, Fenton Prentiss, calls the Three Investigators to his apartment to help him. Mr. Prentiss is an elderly art collector, and he says that he is being haunted. Things in his apartment get moved around when he’s not there, and he can tell that someone has been reading the mail in his desk. Sometimes, he even sees a shadowy figure when he is home, although he’s never gotten a good look at it before it disappears. He swears that it can’t be another person because he’s the only one who has a key to his apartment. He is also sure that there are no secret passages in his apartment building and that there’s no way for any living person to enter his apartment without being seen by someone. Mr. Prentiss could just be imagining the haunting, but Jupiter is intrigued, and if the boys don’t have a mystery to work on during the holidays, they know that Jupiter’s aunt will just assign them a bunch of chores.
They tell Mr. Prentiss that they need to talk over the assignment together before they accept his job, but Jupiter’s mind is made up when he also sees a shadowy figure that he initially mistakes for Pete just before they leave the apartment. However, Pete is not in the room where Jupiter saw the shadow. Did Jupiter just see Mr. Prentiss’s mysterious ghost?
When the boys get outside the apartment, they hear a loud bang and running feet and see a man in a ski mask running away. Pete tries to follow, and the police stop him, thinking that he might have something to do with a burglary that has just taken place. Fortunately, Mr. Prentiss speaks up for Pete, saying that the boys only just left his apartment and couldn’t have anything to do with what the police are talking about. The police think that the suspect who ran away could have gone into a nearby church, but he seems to have vanished. Mr. Earl, the janitor and caretaker of the church swears that he was in the church the whole time and no one came in, although the housekeeper at the rectory, Mrs. O’Riley, says that Mr. Earl is practically deaf and wouldn’t have heard anybody.
The place that was burgled turns out to belong to a deceased artist friend of Mr. Prentiss. His friend’s death is part of the reason why Mr. Prentiss is so on edge because it was very upsetting to him. The artist’s brother, Charles, hadn’t finished clearing out his brother’s house when it was robbed. He tells the boys that his brother was a sculptor, and his best piece was based on a legend of a ghostly, demonic hound from Eastern Europe. This is the sculpture that was stolen. It’s a bitter blow to Mr. Prentiss because the artist made this sculpture especially for him.
Jupiter believes Mr. Prentiss that someone has been sneaking into his apartment, so he sets a trap that will cause the intruder’s hands to be stained. Mr. Prentiss leaves for a while with the boys, and when they return, his nosy landlady’s hands are stained, indicating that she has been the intruder. Mr. Prentiss confronts her, and she admits that she had a spare key made for his door. The landlady has a long-term habit of spying on her tenants. Mr. Prentiss confiscates her spare key and thinks that his problem is over, but really, it’s just beginning.
Having seen the shadow in Mr. Prentiss’s apartment himself, Jupiter knows that the mysterious shadowy figure was not the landlady. For Jupiter to have mistaken the shadowy figure for Pete, he knows that the person is male and of similar size to Pete. Jupiter is not surprised when Mr. Prentiss calls them up to say that he’s seen the shadow again. The landlady was undoubtedly snooping, but there must also be a second intruder. At first, Jupiter thinks that he knows who the second intruder must be because there is another person in the apartment building who vaguely resembles Pete and who also seems to know about things that Mr. Prentiss owns when he’s supposedly never been in Mr. Prentiss’s apartment before. However, this person is accounted for when the intruder makes another appearance. Jupiter investigates the nearby church when he sees a light there, and he has a frightening encounter with a figure that Mrs. O’Reilly believes is the ghost of the former pastor.
Mr. Prentiss soon gets a ransom demand from the person who stole the sculpture. Then, strange misfortunes start to befall Mr. Prentiss’s neighbors. Some of these misfortunes look like accidents while others are direct attacks. Someone is apparently attacked by the thief, someone else is poisoned, someone’s apartment catches fire, and someone else’s car is sabotaged, and people are ending up in the hospital. It seems like someone who is close to these people is responsible for sneaking around Mr. Prentiss’s apartment, stealing the valuable sculpture, and harming the neighbors, but who is doing these things and why?
The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive (multiple copies).
My Reaction and Some Spoilers
I enjoyed this mystery because it has many different facets. First, there is a wonderful cast of eccentric characters. All of Mr. Prentiss’s neighbors/suspects are eccentrics. There’s the nosy, sneaking landlady and a guy who takes care of stray cats. Mrs. O’Reilly at the church believes that the church is haunted by the ghost of a former pastor, adding another haunting figure to the mystery. Another resident of the apartment house works nights at the local market and is saving up money so he can go to India and find a guru to help teach him the secrets to life. His father wanted him to be a dentist, but instead, he wants to study meditation so he can see through life’s illusions and be truly awake, achieving the ultimate level of consciousness. It’s ironic because he’s so tired from working nights that he often falls asleep while meditating. The mystery somewhat resembles a classic old dark house mystery in the sense that it takes place in a contained area with a very definite set of suspects who are also either victims or potential victims.
Second, I enjoyed the layers of the mystery. We have a mysterious intruder (or intruders), the theft of a valuable sculpture, a possible haunted church, and a series of mysterious accidents or attacks on residents of the building. Are these things all connected or are some of them unconnected incidents that confuse the issue? Readers have the feeling that there are at least some connections, but it’s not clear for most of the story what the connections are and who’s responsible for what. On the one hand, books with several different mysterious happenings can feel a little cluttered and confusing to readers, but on the other, figuring out which of these incidents are connected to the main issues provide clues to the identity of the real villain.
There is a surprising supernatural element to the story that the Three Investigators discover when they consult a parapsychologist at a university. There was a strong interest in parapsychology during the 1970s and 1980s, which is why the subject of psychic abilities and people who study it appears in children’s books and tv shows around this time period. (Spoiler) It seems that the guy who is studying meditation has some psychic ability, and the things he experiences while meditating aren’t just him falling asleep and dreaming, although it seems like that at first. Because he really wants to get away from his boring life and dead end job when he meditates, he’s actually been using a kind of astral projection without being fully aware that’s what he’s doing. The characters realize this because he knows things that he shouldn’t really have any way of knowing from places where he shouldn’t have been and how he can sometimes appear in certain places when he’s actually somewhere else. Some of the strange things that people see around the apartment building at due to his astral projection, possibly including the ghost in the church, although part of that is left unclear at the end. However, there is a real thief and villain in the story who is unrelated to the psychic phenomena, and incidents that harm people in the building are related to the thief’s attempts to keep people away from the hiding place of the stolen sculpture. I thought both the psychic angle and the solution to the theft were clever, and I kept guessing all the way through the book who was responsible for what.
#4 The Mystery of the Green Ghost by Robert Arthur, 1965.
Bob and Pete are looking at an old, abandoned house that’s in the process of being torn down when they hear an unearthly scream from the house! There are stories that the old house is haunted, and the boys run away, only to be stopped by a group of local men, who ask them what’s going on. When the boys explain, the men talk about calling the police or going inside the house to investigate. The men decide to just go in and have a look around themselves, in case someone’s hurt and needs help right away. They tell the boys that they can leave because they will handle the situation, but the boys decide that they can’t leave without having a look themselves.
As they take a look around inside, they see the remains of the ornate wall paper and impressive features of the once-rich house, and the men talk about Mathias Green, who used to live in the house. At first, the searchers can’t find anything, but then, they spot a greenish figure on the stairs. Thinking that there’s some prankster in the house, the searchers go upstairs to confront the person, but they can’t find whoever it was. The boys suggest that they have a look at the dust on the floor and try to follow the person’s footprints, but the only footprints the searchers can find are their own. Could they have seen a ghost?
The searchers do notify the police about what they’ve seen in the house, but the police don’t take it too seriously … at first. However, they soon begin receiving other reports from various people around the city who claim to have seen a greenish, ghostly figure. Even then, the police might not have take the reports too seriously, except that a couple of officers on patrol witness a greenish, ghostly figure in the cemetery … at the burial site of Mathias Green, who died falling down the stairs in his house, 50 years before.
While Bob and Pete were at the house, Bob had his tape recorder with him, and he plays the recording of the scream they heard for their friend and fellow investigator, Jupiter. Jupiter is willing to believe it could be the scream of Mathias Green’s ghost, and the boys review the information they know about Mathias Green. Mathias Green was once the skipper of the ship, and he sailed to China. For reasons that nobody fully understands, he had to leave China suddenly, and the rumors were that Mathias’s wife was a Chinese princess and that Chinese nobles had a grudge against Mathias. Mathias brought his wife back to the United States with him, and they built their house in Rocky Beach after Mathias had a fight with his sister-in-law, and they moved away from San Francisco. They had some Chinese servants, but when Mathias was later found dead, apparently from an accidental fall down the stairs, the servants and his wife disappeared. People assumed that they left for fear that they would be blamed for Mathias’s death, and Mathias’s sister-in-law inherited the house. Recently, Mathias’s niece decided to sell the house to a developer, who is planning to tear it down and build more modern houses.
Local newspapers have picked up the stories about the green ghost and its apparent connection to the old Green mansion, and some of them have implied that the ghost is looking for a new place to haunt now that its house is being torn down. The Three Investigators have access to more information than most people because Bob’s father is one of the reporters covering the ghost incidents. The police chief tells them, off the record, that he witnessed the ghost himself, in the cemetery, and it looked like it disappeared by sinking down into Mathias’s grave. Then, the police chief learns that the workmen tearing down the house have discovered a hidden room. Bob’s father and the boys are allowed to come with him to see what the room contains.
The discovery is a shock. The hidden room contains an ornate coffin, holding the skeleton of Mathias’s Chinese bride, dressed in elaborate robes and with an unusual necklace of gray pearls, called ghost pearls. The story is that the reason why Mathias and his bride had to suddenly flee China was that Mathias reportedly stole the pearl necklace to give to his bride. When she died in Rocky Beach, he couldn’t bear to be parted from her, so he “buried” her secretly in his house, along with the necklace.
The discovery of Mathias’s wife’s hidden burial chamber doesn’t lay the ghost to rest, though. Bob and Pete get a phone call from Mathias’s niece, Lydia, asking them to visit her at the vineyard where she lives, to talk about what they witnessed at the house. She says that the ghost has actually appeared at her vineyard! Jupiter is not invited to the vineyard because he didn’t witness the appearance of the ghost with the others, but he couldn’t go anyway because he’s temporarily in charge of his uncle’s salvage yard while his uncle is out of town. He tells Bob and Pete to go ahead and meet with Lydia and let him know what they learn.
At the vineyard, Bob and Pete meet Lydia’s distant cousin, Harold, and Lydia’s great-nephew, Charles, who is actually the great-grandson of Mathias Green and the real heir to Mathias’s estate. Charles, who is called Chang, grew up in China, and they explain that he is descended from Mathias’s first wife, who died of an illness in China. After the death of his first wife, Mathias put his young son into an American missionary school in China and left him there as a boarding student. When he married his second wife and had to flee China, he left his son behind. His descendants remained in China since then, until it became unsafe for Americans or people of American descent in China. Then, Charles, who is an orphan and part Chinese (hence his nickname of Chang), was sent to live with Lydia in the United States. Until that point, he knew very little about his ancestors and his relatives in America. Technically, Mathias’s estate should have come to Chang’s side of the family when Mathias died, but they were living in China at that time and were not in touch with the rest of the family. Lydia says that Chang should even technically own the vineyard that she and Harold have built with the family’s money, but Chang doesn’t want to take it from them, so Lydia says that she is leaving it to Chang in her will. Chang is satisfied with this arrangement, but the family has debts, and if they don’t resolve them, they might lose the vineyard entirely.
Lydia believes that the green ghost is Mathias’s ghost, and he is haunting them because he’s angry with her for selling his old house to be torn down. The ghost has been scaring away workers at the vineyard, and if they can’t get the harvest processed, they won’t be able to keep the vineyard. However, Chang doesn’t believe that his great-grandfather would want to hurt his own family. Chang might be willing to believe that the ghost is an evil spirit, masquerading as his great-grandfather. That’s not the only possibility, though. There could be a human being with a motive for wanting to ruin the vineyard. Then again, there is the question of who really owns the ghost pearl necklace. If Mathias’s family owns the necklace, they could sell it to cover their debts, but it might really belong to the family of Mathias’s Chinese wife. Her family is more difficult to trace, but one person has stepped forward, claiming to be her heir. Then, someone attacks Harold and steals the necklace from him. Was the necklace always the ghost’s target, from the beginning? Meanwhile, back in Rocky Beach, Jupiter has a revelation. There was a dog present when Bob and Pete were searching the Green mansion with the men, and the dog … didn’t do anything. That might be the most important clue of all!
The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive (multiple copies, including some in other languages).
My Reaction and Some Spoilers
I enjoyed the mystery and the reference to Sherlock Holmes about the dog that did nothing in the nighttime. In this story, Jupiter takes the dog’s non-reaction as a sign that there was no supernatural presence in the house because animals are supposed to react to the presence of ghosts. There is definitely a human behind all the spooky happenings, and I was partly right about who it was. However, the author threw in a complication by inserting another mysterious villain who kind of usurped the original plotter’s plot for his own purposes and partly distracts the characters from the original villain for part of the story.
This added villain is a mysterious old man from China who claims that he’s 107 years old and that he wants the pearls because drinking dissolved ghost pearls is the key to immortality. This mysterious old man is wealthy, and he has bought up the family’s debts, meaning that he will get control of the vineyard, if they can’t pay their debts. However, he’s not really interested in the vineyard for its own sake. He just wants those pearls. Although he does some criminal things in the story, nothing much seems to happen to him at the end, and he works out a deal with Lydia, so she can keep the vineyard. It’s left open whether or not he truly ended up with the pearls or whether the pearls actually have properties for preserving someone’s life, but it seems that he truly believes it, and he has no other motivations for his part in the story.
This almost Fu Manchu style character, who uses hypnosis to control people, adds an element of exoticism to the story that I thought wasn’t really necessary. I liked the ghost mystery well enough with its original villain and without him, and I felt like the introduction of the extra villain sent the plot a little off the rails, but he does allow the story to end on a somewhat creepy and ambiguous note. We don’t entirely know who he is, and we never really find out what happens to him. We don’t know if he’s really as old as he says he is or if he continues much further in his quest to live forever. He just disappears after getting what he can of the pearls, presumably to go hunting for more elsewhere.
As far as I’ve been able to determine, the ghost pearls aren’t real, and the legend about them prolonging people’s lives isn’t real. However, there are legends and superstitions from around the world about pearls being associated with wisdom and longevity and having healing powers. Pearls can be dissolved in an acidic liquid and drunk by a human, as in the famous story about Cleopatra drinking a pearl in vinegar, which was supposed to be an aphrodisiac.
Getting back to the mystery, though, I did like the Scooby-Doo-like mystery, and I was satisfied by the original plot, and the villain’s methods and motives. I was looking at that character with suspicion for a number of reasons. Perhaps, if the part about the pearl necklace, the ancient man who drinks pearls, and Mathias’s bizarre room with his dead wife weren’t in the story, the solution would be too obvious, but overall, I enjoyed it. I also appreciated how Jupiter worked out some of the details of the first haunting by visiting the house and studying the scene while his friends were at the vineyard. He comes to some conclusions about how that first haunting occurred that Bob and Pete didn’t think about, and his solution also provides a reasonable answer to the question of why that group of men happened to show up outside the house on the evening the haunting happened, to witness it.
Lady Margaret’s Ghost by Elizabeth McDavid Jones, 2009.
This book is one of the mystery stories published to accompany the American Girl series of historical books. The main character of this book, Felicity Merriman, lives in Colonial era Williamsburg, Virginia, around the beginning of the American Revolution.
Felicity’s mother is going on a trip to visit a relative, along with Felicity’s younger siblings. As the oldest girl in the family, Felicity will be in charge of the household while her mother is gone and her father and his apprentice, Ben, are working in the store her father owns. It’s a big responsibility and an honor that Felicity’s mother considers her capable of managing the household, but because Felicity is still young and some household tasks involve heavy work that is difficult for her to do alone, her mother has hired a temporary cook, Mrs. Hewitt, to help her. Because Felicity is known as a daydreamer who doesn’t always pay attention to what she should be doing, her mother reminds her to focus on the task at hand while she’s minding the house, although she has faith in Felicity and is sure that she will do a good job.
Soon after her mother leaves, a crate arrives at the house for Felicity’s father, along with a letter. The letter explains that a cousin of Felicity’s father has died and that the crate contains some family heirlooms that his cousin left to him. These heirlooms once belonged to a common ancestor of theirs, Sir Edward Merriman, a wealthy nobleman and the first member of their family to live in the colonies, more than 100 years earlier. Felicity’s father didn’t know his cousin well because they never lived very close, and his cousin was much older, but he does know the history of the heirlooms. The heirlooms include a lady’s silver vanity set and a silver cup and rattle for baby. The story is that Sir Edward’s wife, Lady Margaret, owned the vanity set, and the rattle and cup were for their infant son. Unfortunately, the baby was stillborn, and Lady Margaret died shortly after the birth. After her death, her husband and the household servants believed that she still haunted the house. The haunting may have been part of the reason why Sir Edward decided to leave his home in England and go to America, but even though he later remarried and had other children, he could never bring himself to part from the things that belonged to his first wife and child. Even before Felicity’s father tells her about the ghost story, Felicity gets a strange feeling from the vanity set, and she wonders if the objects could be haunted.
However, Felicity soon has to turn her attention to household issues. Mrs. Hewitt, the temporary cook arrives, and she is a brusque and unpleasant woman. She is rude and condescending to Felicity when they are working in the kitchen together. Because Mrs. Hewitt is so rude, Felicity is nervous and makes mistakes, making her look like more of a fool to Mrs. Hewitt. They can’t easily replace her because cooks are in demand right now because this is Publick Times in Williamsburg, and there are many visitors to the city. Everyone is busy tending to them. Mrs. Hewitt was the best they could find available. Felicity’s father does speak to her about her rudeness to Felicity. After that, Mrs. Hewitt is sullen and resentful, and she is even more pleased whenever she sees Felicity doing something wrong.
There is also an exciting event taking place. Felicity has entered her horse, Penny, in a horse race at the fair in town! Ben, her father’s apprentice, will ride her. The day of the race, Penny seems to be doing well, but then, she suddenly develops a problem during the race. When Felicity and Ben check her out to see what was wrong, they discover that someone put burrs under Penny’s saddle! Worse still, the wounds caused by the burrs become infected. Felicity is very upset and worried about Penny, and she wonders who would have hurt her horse. There were a couple of men looking at her before the race. There was also a boy named Dawson and a girl called Anne.
Dawson turns out to be a runaway, but he also has some knowledge of horses. Although Felicity is a little suspicious of him at first, Dawson helps to heal Penny’s wounds. He also says that he saw Anne gathering burrs, but it was probably on behalf of someone else.
When Felicity realizes that her treasured coral necklace, which her mother also wore as a girl, has disappeared, Felicity questions whether she carelessly lost it or if someone has stolen it. Felicity has been doubting herself and her ability to manage the household because of all the mistakes she has made since her mother left, and the clasp of the necklace was a little loose. This could just be another disastrous mistake, but it is suspicious that Anne seemed so friendly to her at the race and then ran away from her later. Anne also literally bumped into Felicity at the race. Could she have taken the necklace? Dawson seems to think so, but then again, can Felicity really trust everything he says?
Felicity still gets an odd feeling from Lady Margaret’s heirlooms, and she thinks that she sees something white moving around at night. At first, she thinks that it could be Lady Margaret’s ghost, but then, strange things begin happening around the house. Things disappear, and Felicity worries that maybe she carelessly mislaid them. Then, her necklace unexpectedly turns up, and Lady Margaret’s vanity set vanishes! Are these strange things part of the haunting of Lady Margaret or the work of a thief? If it’s a human thief, is it the work of the runaway Dawson, mysterious Anne, unpleasant Mrs. Hewitt, or the mysterious person who arranged for Penny to be hurt?
The book ends with a section of historical information about Colonial era Williamsburg. The story is set during Publick Times, which was when court was in session in Williamsburg. People would gather in Williamsburg during Publick Times to see the trials in court and attend a public fair in Market Square. The fair offered various kinds of entertainment, games, and races, like the horse race in the story.
My Reaction
The story leaves it a little ambiguous at the end about whether Lady Margaret’s ghost exists, but if she does, she is not harmful and has nothing to do with the thefts in the story or what happened to Penny at the horse race. As the section of historical information explains, there are many new visitors in Williamsburg during Publick Times. This was a good setting for the story because there are many strangers to the city with unknown pasts and motives, and crowds at the fair might harbor thieves.
Part of the story and part of the section of historical information in the back focuses on the subject of orphans. Both Dawson and Anne are orphans, and neither of them is really being cared for. Dawson admits that he used to steal to support himself after his father died, but he is seriously looking for work. Anne technically has a guardian, but her guardian is abusive and uses her as a servant rather than taking care of her.
When the thefts occur and mysterious things start happening around the Merriman house, both Dawson and Anne look like the best suspects, but there are also possible adult suspects. Even after Felicity realizes Anne’s situation, she isn’t entirely sure which of the men at the fair that day is Anne’s guardian. Mrs. Hewitt also looks suspicious because she is so unpleasant and seems to be trying to make trouble for Felicity. I though the book did a good job of supplying an array of suspects to consider. The solution to the mystery was one of the possibilities I thought was most likely, but there were enough other possibilities to make the story interesting.
Jestress's Forgotten Books and Stories 