ghosts – Jestress's Forgotten Books and Stories

Posted on October 19, 2025 by TracyC

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!

Posted on September 27, 2025September 28, 2025 by TracyC

The Shadow Guests

The Shadow Guests by Joan Aiken, 1980.

When Cosmo’s mother and brother mysteriously disappear, Cosmo’s father sends him to live with eccentric cousin Eunice in England, who is a mathematician educated at Cambridge and who now lives in Oxford. Cosmo’s father plans he will join Cosmo in England later, after he’s finished wrapping up the family’s business in Australia.

After Eunice picks up Cosmo at the airport, she tells him that she’s arranged for him to attend a small boarding school. Cosmo has never been to any kind of school before because his family lived too far outside of town. He and his brother always had their lessons together at home. Cosmo isn’t sure he’s going to like living with all these strangers at school, but Eunice says that she arranged for him to be a boarder rather than a day pupil so he would make friends faster. Eunice lives at the old Curtoys mill house, and Cosmo joins her there on weekends.

However, most of the other students at school don’t seem particularly friendly, and one of the teachers seems oddly confrontational about Cosmo’s father. He knows that Cosmo’s father, Richard Curtoys, was once a well-known cancer researcher in London, and he doesn’t know why he gave it all up and moved his family to the middle of nowhere in the Australian Bush. Cosmo doesn’t know what to say because he was very young when his family moved to Australia, and he doesn’t really know why they moved.

On his next weekend with Cousin Eunice, he asks her about it and whether or not the family’s sudden move to England had anything to do with what happened to his mother and brother. Eunice admits that it did. Cosmo’s father hadn’t wanted to explain and had left it up to Eunice to decide how much to tell Cosmo, but Eunice believes that it’s better for people to know everything than not know anything. Eunice reveals to Cosmo that their family has been under a curse for generations.

The Curse

The curse apparently started with the Roman invasion of Britain. Their family seems to have Roman roots, and one of their ancestors was apparently a Roman soldier. When the Romans took over Britain, they wanted to convert the inhabitants to the Roman religion, which was still pagan at that time. According to the legend passed down in their family, their ancestor was one of a group of soldiers who were ordered to destroy a pagan British temple. The son of one of the priestesses at the temple tried to resist them, and Cosmo’s ancestor killed him. The boy’s mother then killed herself out of grief. The boy’s grandmother, who was also a priestess, placed a curse on Cosmo’s family: in every generation, the eldest son of the family would die in battle, and his mother would die of grief.

Since then, Eunice says, the curse seems to have come true. She can list generations of their family where the eldest son has died in battle, including Cosmo’s father’s generation. Cosmo’s father was the youngest son of his family, and his elder brother, Frank, died young in battle. After Frank’s death, when Richard was only 10 years old, his mother died of grief, just like in the curse. Richard claimed that the curse was all nonsense when he was an adult, and he refused to tell his wife about it when they got married. However, Eunice had been friends with his wife before she met Richard, and she didn’t think it was fair to keep the secret from her, now that they had two sons of their own. Eunice admits that she told Cosmo’s mother everything, and that the story seriously upset her. It was Cosmo’s mother who insisted on moving to Australia, hoping to get as far away from the curse and any potential war as possible.

When Eunice explains this, some of the things about Cosmo’s family begin to make sense to him. Eunice admits that it seems like the elder brothers of the family resent the younger ones, who are safe from the curse, and Cosmo realizes that he sensed that his brother seemed to be hard on him or resent him, indicating that he probably had some sense that he had an ordeal or possible early death to face that Cosmo would be spared. Yet, younger brothers in the family are not entirely spared from the curse. It’s true that they live to carry on the family line, but each of them is also destined to lose their first son, and shortly afterward, to lose their wife to grief at their son’s death. Cosmo considers that maybe, when he’s grown up, he’ll just adopt a child to get around the problem.

He somewhat compares the family curse to a form of cancer. Some families are more genetically prone to particular types of cancers than others, and the way that members of those families survive is if, somehow, a genetic mutation is introduced to the family line, something that makes those individuals different from the ones before. It’s an indication that, maybe, this curse might not afflict their family forever. If someone, like Cosmo, can figure out how to be different from earlier generations of his family, and not pass on the cursed element to the next generation, there might be an end to the curse. Figuring out how to do that is going to be difficult, though.

Eunice says that his mother tried to evade the curse by running away, but apparently, it didn’t work. Nobody knows exactly what happened to Cosmo’s mother and brother, only that their car was found abandoned, and that they appeared to go off into the Australian desert on foot. Searchers have found no sign of them since, and because it’s such a harsh environment, people don’t think it’s likely that they’re still alive. Nobody knows why they went off into the desert, except maybe either the curse drew them there or they were trying to escape from it. Eunice’s housekeeper, who also knows about the curse, talks about it with Cosmo, and Cosmo asks her whether she thinks it’s possible to break the curse. Like Cosmo, she thinks it might be a case of gradual changes, members of the family doing things differently from earlier generations. Unlike Eunice, she thinks that maybe what Cosmo’s mother and brother did was one such change, and it’s difficult to tell what effect it has had yet.

Cosmo remembers a strange old man who visited them once in Australia. He thinks the man was probably a sorcerer or something because he told them things about their futures. He’s not sure what the man said to his mother, except that it seemed to upset her, and she was never the same afterward. Eunice suspects that the man may have told her that it’s impossible to run away from heredity and destiny. The man told his brother something about there being many different types of battles, which might indicate that staying away from wars would not be sufficient to save him from his destiny. The old man didn’t clarify that statement, but it’s true that people also fight internal and emotional battles every day, no matter where they are. Was this the battle Cosmo’s brother lost or could lose, and has it actually claimed his life already?

Cosmo had always thought his brother and mother were braver than he was, but now, he comes to question that. They had tried to run from their apparent destinies, and maybe the running caused them to go missing, and maybe even to die. When Cosmo’s father writes to him about the family curse, he explains that he has come to believe that the curse is a self-fulling prophecy, that it only comes true because people expect it to. Perhaps Cosmo’s mother and brother would have been fine if they hadn’t tried so hard to outrun their curse, putting themselves into a dangerous situation.

Of course, Cosmo realizes that it’s easier for Cosmo and his father to put aside their fear than it was for Cosmo’s mother and brother. Being the direct subject of an existential curse is certainly much more terrifying than just being part of a family that has a curse that may kill people around you. These thoughts cause Cosmo to consider the nature of fear and how people can be afraid of many different things and how the nature of a person’s fears make a difference in how they are affected by them. What one person can face with courage may be the undoing of another.

The Ghosts

Meanwhile, the other kids at school have become deliberately hostile to Cosmo. They accuse him of being stuck up and lying to them about Australia, and they start saying that Cosmo has probably never even been to Australia. Cosmo knows that all of the things that they say about him are untrue and unfair, but there isn’t much he can say to refute it. It seems to be a form of hazing at the school. He thinks about how petty and childish the other kids are and how they have no concept about the serious issues that are hanging over Cosmo. In a way, though, Cosmo discovers that he’s actually more comfortable brooding over the curse than he is thinking about the obnoxious kids at school. There is a kind of comfort in knowing your life fits a pattern, even if it’s a disturbing and unpleasant one. He also thinks about what the old man told him, that one day, he would have three friends. Because of the way kids at school act, Cosmo can’t image having any friends there at all, but that prediction comes true as well.

Cosmo gradually discovers that the mill house where his aunt lives is haunted. Eunice tells him about a phantom coach and horses that are supposed to appear at night, and Cosmo begins seeing a boy who calls himself Con. Con first appears to him as a little boy, about 4 years old, but each time Cosmo sees him, he gets a little older. He also eats Cosmo’s candy bars from his room. Eventually, Con speaks to Cosmo as a young man. He admits that he took the candy because eating someone else’s food forms a relationship between the two of them. Con explains to Cosmo that his father was a free Roman soldier, but his mother is a slave woman, so Con himself is a slave. The only way he can win his freedom is to play in the gladiatorial games, and he needs Cosmo’s help to practice. At night, Cosmo practices Roman style fighting with Con, but it is gradually revealed that Con does not expect to survive his upcoming fight. When Con speaks to Cosmo more about his family, it is revealed that Con is a member of Cosmo’s family from the distant past. He is the eldest son in his generation, and he knows about the family curse. Because of the curse, he expects to die fighting. Cosmo tries to explain to Con that he doesn’t need to believe in the curse.

Whether that helps Con or not isn’t apparent because Cosmo has to spend the next weekend at school and doesn’t see Con again. The next ghost he sees is a boy called Sim. Sim has been living at a monastery in the Middle Ages, getting an education, but his father has pledged him to his uncle to go fight in the Crusades. Sim is worried because he doesn’t know anything about fighting and thinks that he’ll be killed. He asks Cosmo if he can help him learn to fight. Again, Cosmo doesn’t know much about fighting, but he tries his best to help Sim. He doesn’t really see why Sim has to be obligated to go to war if he’s no good at it and doesn’t want to go, but he does notice that Sim’s eyesight is poor, and what he really needs are glasses.

Then, some of the hauntings at the mill house turn frightening. Cosmo is almost killed in multiple, inexplicable accidents. It seems like a poltergeist is out to get him. One of the boys who’s been giving Cosmo a hard time at school is also visiting the mill house and witnesses some of these accidents one weekend because his father works with Eunice. Not only do the boys learn to get along better after getting to know each other, but Cosmo starts realizes that the boy, Moley, actually has some problems of his own. He has an unhappy home life because of his stepmother. Moley also has a weak heart that keeps him from participating in certain school activities. Knowing this makes Cosmo feel more sympathetic toward him. Moley also comes to realize that something mysterious and threatening is happening to Cosmo, and he witnesses a ghost that Cosmo doesn’t see: a stern old woman in black. Moley has the sense that this old woman is responsible for the accidents happening to Cosmo, although he doesn’t seem to recognize that she is a ghost at first. It seems like Cosmo has now become the target of his family’s curse, which shouldn’t happen because he isn’t the eldest son. Has Cosmo become the target of the curse or some other supernatural force that now sees him as a threat?

My Reaction and Spoilers

I enjoyed the story, although I feel a little conflicted about the ending. The story is somewhat open-ended. We know that Cosmo survives his ordeals. Part of me wonders if the curse may have actually saved his life, after a fashion. If his bother was fated to die and Cosmo was fated to survive, then the forces trying to kill Cosmo were destined to fail. But, that’s just conjecture. These questions are never really answered. In the end, Cosmo doesn’t know if anything he’s done has changed the nature of the curse or if it actually can be changed. He still doesn’t know what might be in store for his future wife and children or if he will actually have a future wife and children. The only way to know is to live his life as best he can and deal with whatever comes along the way.

There are two things that I can see that he gains from his ordeals: closure about his mother and brother and a glimpse at what various other relatives have done in the past to change their fate (or if they did anything). I think there are some indications, based on Cosmo’s encounters with family ghosts, that what his father believes about the curse is probably true, but the story leaves that up to the imaginations of the readers. If you like speculative books, you might enjoy this one.

Metaphysics

Although Eunice is a mathematician, she’s also interested in metaphysics. She and Cosmo have discussions about the nature of time and reality and the possibility of other dimensions or other realities, which have a bearing on whether or not we interpret the ghosts that Cosmo sees as ghosts or not. In some ways they seem like ghosts, but in others, they might be people who have not yet died but who have crossed over in time.

This isn’t confirmed, though, and during Cosmo’s ghost experiences, someone from the past is attempting to kill him. (Spoilers) At first, I thought that the old woman attempting to kill Cosmo was the old priestess who originally put the curse on his family and who was trying to stop Cosmo from helping the ghosts who came to him to survive and thwart the curse. That isn’t the case, though. What Cosmo discovers is that various ancestors have tried different ways of thwarting the curse themselves. So far, none of them have been successful (and I’ll have more to say about that), but Cosmo discovers that one ancestress and her son actually became evil sorcerers themselves. The old lady is a sorceress, and she believes a prophecy that her son will die in a fight with Cosmo, so both she and her son are traveling through time and actively trying to kill Cosmo to save the son from the family curse.

During his struggles with this unholy duo, Cosmo is very close to being killed, and he has a near-death experience. He sees a beautiful, peaceful place, with Con and Sim and his mother and brother. He wants to join them all there, but they tell him that it’s not his time, and they will wait for him there until it is. This seems to represent a vision of Heaven and to confirm the supernatural nature of the story and that Cosmo’s mother and brother are also both dead.

Destiny and Curses (Lots of Spoilers)

I already said that, in the end, we don’t know if anything that Cosmo has seen, done, or experienced has broken the curse or changed his future or his family’s future. What we do see through Cosmo’s experiences are two things: that different generations of the family have tried to thwart the curse in different ways and that (although the story doesn’t explicitly spell this out) there may have been reasons other than the curse itself for what happened to the sons who died, including what Cosmo’s father said about belief in the curse itself causing it to come true.

Con tried to practice his fighting skills in an effort to win his battle, but unlike Cosmo, he never seemed to seriously consider that maybe he didn’t need to fight that battle at all. We’re not sure exactly how many generations removed he was from the original curse (maybe one or two, possibly more?), but it seems that enough time has gone by to convince him that the curse is real and that he should believe in it. Did his belief that he was going to his destiny and going to die in the upcoming fight cause him to actually seek out that fight and also to lose it?

When Sim comes to Cosmo, Cosmo tries to talk to him about just choosing not to fight, but Sim explains that isn’t an option for him. His father arranged it with his uncle, and Sim has no power to refuse to go. The choice not to fight isn’t open to Sim, but Cosmo also realizes that, beyond simply not being a skilled fighter, Sim is also at a disadvantage because he has bad eyesight. So, was Sim’s death almost arranged by his family because they had already concluded that it was his fate to die in battle, never teaching him to actually fight and overlooking his eyesight? If they had left Sim in the monastery, where he was studying, maybe nothing bad would have happened to him.

After Cosmo recovers from his near death at the hands of the sorceress and her son, who was an 18th century member of the Hellfire Club, he learns their fate from Eunice. Both the evil mother and her son died at the same time in the river where they nearly drowned Cosmo, indicating that they accidentally got themselves killed in their attempt to kill him. The prophecy that said the son would die while fighting Cosmo was actually a self-fulfilling prophecy. If they simply hadn’t believed it and had ignored Cosmo, he would have never met them at all, living in a completely different time and having no way to magically travel through time on his own. It’s only because they sought him out and actually started the fight that both of them died, which lends credence to what Cosmo’s father says about believing in the curse causes it to happen.

Before the end of the story, Cosmo’s father tells him that searchers have finally found his mother’s and brother’s bodies in the desert, confirming his vision of them in Heaven. We still don’t know exactly why they went off into the desert to die. Were they trying to flee the curse in a panic, so they weren’t thinking about how this decision could lead to their deaths? If they had simply chosen not to believe in the curse and had continued living in London instead of trying to wildly flee, losing the battle with their own emotions, perhaps they would have both lived normal lives and not died early … maybe.

There’s no real way to prove exactly what happened to Cosmo’s mother and brother. We never hear what happened to them from their point of view, and what decisions they made because of it. Both Cosmo’s father and Eunice says that they shouldn’t blame them for how they attempted to deal with something beyond themselves because they did the best they knew how at the time, even if no one else understands. This leads me to consider that maybe the real curse of the family is: bad decisions. Whenever the curse seems to arise again, each generation has to decide how they will handle it: run or fight, believe or not believe, etc. Each time, they’ve made the wrong choice for their circumstances.

In a way, Eunice bears some responsibility for what happened to Cosmo’s mother and brother, although no one blames her for her role in the situation. Cosmo’s father, having concluded that belief in the curse causes it to come true, had decided not to tell his wife or kids about the curse, so they would never have to grapple with whether they believed it or not. But, apparently, he never explained that logic to Eunice because she spoiled it by telling Cosmo’s mother and shocking her into taking a course of action that led to her and her elder son dying. Would the situation have been different if she had said nothing or if she had said something but said it at a different time from the one she actually chose? Eunice says that she thought Cosmo’s father should have explained the situation before he got married. Maybe that would have changed things or maybe it wouldn’t, but if she felt that strongly that this was the right thing to do, she could have brought up the subject earlier. Maybe she should have talked to both of Cosmo’s parents before their marriage to either get everything out in the open or at least understand why she should keep the secret. Either Eunice didn’t do that or she weakened in her resolve to keep the secret, and she inadvertently set the curse cycle in motion again.

The supernatural nature of this story and its ghosts suggests that the curse is probably real on some level and not just a series of bad luck incidents and unfortunate mistakes that the family makes. The hopeful outlook, the one that Eunice’s housekeeper believes, is that, little by little, with each passing generation, the family changes. Each generation is a little different from the last. Cosmo’s brother was apparently the first not to die in a conventional battle or a physical fight. He died trying to avoid fighting. With him, it seems to have been some kind of internal battle. This may be true of later generations, or maybe this is the first step in shattering the pattern of the curse. Possibly, all that Cosmo has seen will grant him the ability to make better choices, teach this children how to break old patterns, or do something drastically different that nobody else has done before. It’s hard to say, but realizing that it’s hard to say what might happen or what could have happened is a major part of the story.

Thinking about the curse and all of the ways the family could break it and all of the ways they’ve failed to break it so far shows the unpredictable nature of the choices people make in life. Each generation apparently did something they thought was for the best, whether they were embracing fate, fighting fate, or running from fate. The story leaves open the possibility that fate (or the curse) will always find them in some form, no matter what they do. If they don’t actively go to war, they may face their battles in another way, like internal or emotional battles. Who’s to say whether a different sort of internal battle might have taken Cosmo’s brother in London, even if the family said nothing about the curse to him or his mother? As a teenager, he might have had a battle with drugs or depression and lost. He might have gotten a disease and lost that battle. Life has a lot of maybes, and none of us can foresee every possible struggle or disaster.

Another maybe is that maybe the important point isn’t whether or not the curse exists or whether or not they can save all the potential victims but what each of them chooses to do with the life they have while they have it. Cosmo and his father will keep on living. His father will return to his important cancer research, and Cosmo will have decisions to make about his own life. He may or may not decide to have kids, he may or may not tell his future wife or fiance about the curse, and he may or may not try to adopt a child rather than have a biological one. In fact, unless the curse guarantees that sons will be born in the family, we don’t know for sure whether Cosmo might have all daughters. Really, anything is possible. What his future children’s struggles might be or what the real risks to them could be are a distant unknown right now in Cosmo’s life. In the end, he will have to trust them to a certain extent to make the right choices or at least the best choices that they know how when their battles come to them, in whatever form they take. We all have battles of our own to face and risks we take, no matter who we are, and nothing in life is guaranteed for any of us.

There is one last thing that did surprise me. In all of the ways it seems people in Cosmo’s family tried to end or thwart the curse, did nobody think of maybe some form of apology or atonement? The curse stems from an ancient offense someone in their family committed. Perhaps, if they found a way to say they were sorry, it would do something to end the vengeance against them, but it seems like nobody even suggests it. Heck, the evil sorceress lady and her son acquired the ability to use magic and travel through time, but because they were evil and stupid, they went after Cosmo, who was probably their greatest ally, instead of looking further back in time for the real source of their problems. Couldn’t they have gone and faced the priestess lady and either stopped her from creating her curse or stopped their ancestor from killing her grandson? There are a lot of maybes to this whole situation, but I’m honestly surprised that they didn’t think of that one.

School Troubles

Some of the school experiences in the story may have been based on the author’s own education. Joan Aiken was home schooled until she was 12 years old, and then, she was sent to the Wychwood School in Oxford, a boarding and day school. It’s possible that she also encountered difficulties adjusting to being at school with other children and the hazing and bullying that can occur in that type of environment. In the story, Eunice sees value in learning how to get along with other people, although Cosmo questions the value of learning to get along with people as awful as the kids at his school.

He gradually begins to learn more about the relationships of kids at school by observing them as an outsider. Some of the awful ways of treating him are considered some kind of hazing or initiation, and he’s expected to undergo it with some degree of grace before they will grant him acceptance. It’s all pretty idiotic and immature. Cosmo realizes it, although he knows he can’t show much reaction, or it will make things much worse. It’s the sort of thing I hated when I was a student myself. I admit that I was shy and socially awkward, and I didn’t get along well with many other kids because I just couldn’t stand this sort of thing.

Over 30 years later, I haven’t really changed my mind about that. I get that being around other people can open your eyes to human nature and how to deal with your fellow flawed human beings, but I see the same problem in this story as I do in real life: allowing this system of hazing encourages the personal entitlement of particular students, and it also is detrimental to the mental health of people who struggle to deal with them. I think schools do better at this now than they did when I was a kid, when it seemed like almost 100% of the personal development, learning, and personal responsibility was put on the shoulders of everyone else who has to deal with this type of person. I think I have much, much less patience for this kind of thing now than I used to due to overexposure early in life, which does call into question whether what I learned from that experience was really beneficial or not. On the whole, I actually do think that I benefited from exposure to other people, in spite of all the stresses and mental health issues along the way. Part of the issue is, when you’re part of a group of people, you have to put up with the worst parts of that group to spend time with the better parts of the group. If you avoid society too much, you don’t meet the better parts. Learning social skills and human understanding also requires time and practice, which is what Cosmo learns in the story.

People who bully and cause problems can be considered in the learning phase of developing social skills themselves. It’s just that there do have to be rules about how much of their bad behavior can be allowed while they learn. They can’t be allowed to sabotage other people’s social development for the sake of their own because that only leads to their personal entitlement at someone else’s expense. If they are spared consequences for their actions, they never learn anything, either, never improving or showing signs of development, just putting more needless stress on other people and never seeming to understand or care why. I’ve seen far too many examples of this in real life.

I actually enjoyed the way the school in the book handled some of these conflicts. The headmaster is a psychologist, and although some of the things he does seem a little unfair, he actually discusses his reasons for doing this with Cosmo. He understands how his students think and feel, and he knows how to give consequences for actions that not only enforce the school’s rules and better treatment for bullied children but also which affect their relationships with each other more positively.

At first, Cosmo is angry when he’s punished along with some of the other kids who have been bullying him for a prank he tried to discourage them from committing. However, the headmaster apologizes to him for that, saying that he knows those other kids have been giving him a hard time, treating him like he thinks he’s better than they are. One of the other teachers says that Cosmo has been targeted because he’s one of the bright students, and some of the members of his family have a more prestigious reputation than Cosmo realizes. By giving Cosmo the same punishment as the other boys, while the other boys are made to acknowledge that it’s unjust and that Cosmo doesn’t deserve it as much as they do, the headmaster is showing the other boys that they don’t have reason to think that Cosmo is being treated better than they are, ending some of their resentment against him. He also knows that the boys can now accept Cosmo as being one of them, united in resentment against the headmaster for being harsh and unfair. The headmaster is willing to take their resentment against him because, as an adult faculty member, he doesn’t need to be one of “them”, as in one of the students or their “friend” or “pal.” He’s apart from them anyway in terms of age and status, and part of his role is guiding their actions and relationships with each other. In a way, Cosmo admires the logic and the tactic, even though it means enduring the punishment, and it does improve the way the the other boys treat him.

Posted on September 24, 2025 by TracyC · 3 Comments

Among the Ghosts

Among the Ghosts by Amber Benson, 2010.

Noleen-Anne Maypother’s mother died shortly after she was born, while holding her for the first time, so her life started with her first encounter with death. Since then, Noh has been raised by her widowed father with some help from her two aunts. Noh doesn’t realize it, but there’s usually one child in her family in each generation who has unusual talents, and in this generation, it’s her.

One summer, her naturalist father is going to study newts in the Appalachian Mountains, so he sends her to stay with one of her aunts. However, when she arrives, she finds out that her aunt has gone on a trip to the beach with her cousins because she wasn’t expecting Noh to arrive. Unsure of what to do at first, Noh realizes that she can just go to her other aunt, Aunt Sarah, who teaches English at a boarding school. Noh is supposed to attend this boarding school this coming fall anyway, so she decides that she can just go to the school early.

By the time Noh arrives at the school, her father and Aunt Sarah have realized what happened, and Aunt Sarah is expecting Noh to arrive. From the very beginning, this school is strange, though. Noh likes the school, but she has an odd encounter with a strange old lady when she tries to take a shortcut through a cemetery, and the woman gives her something that looks like an evil eye.

Later, when Noh is exploring the school, she meets a friendly girl called Nelly. Nelly chats with her, but Noh feels uneasy around her, for some reason. Although Noh doesn’t realize it right away, the reason is because Nelly is dead. Nelly is part of a group of ghosts who inhabit the damaged West Wing of the school, where no students live now.

Each of the ghost children who “live” there now died at the school at varying points in the past. Nelly died from an allergic reaction to a bee sting, which was ironic because she always wanted to be an entomologist. Trina died falling from a horse, although that doesn’t keep her from being friendly and nosing into other people’s business. She likes to follow living students around and listen to their gossip. Henry is an older ghost, having died at the school at the age of 13, about 50 years earlier. He is lonely for his parents and his old life, even though he has the other ghosts for company, and he sometimes broods over the letters he got from home before he died. Thomas is older still. He’s been dead for about 80 years, and he likes watching the school’s cook make pies in the kitchen.

At dinner that night, Noh tries to ask about Nelly because she notices that she is the only child among the faculty. The adults tell Noh that there are no other students at the school yet and that they’ll arrive in the fall. Someone suggests to Noh that maybe she saw a ghost, and Noh starts to wonder. When she returns to the West Wing to investigate, she meet Henry. Noh is startled at this confirmation that there are ghost children at the school, and Henry is startled that a living person can actually see him. There are plenty of ghosts around the school, but Henry has never met a living person who can see ghosts before.

While the two of them are talking, something strange happens. A bright light appears, and Henry goes into it, disappearing. Noh doesn’t understand what happened or what it means. However, when she meets Trina later, she learns that other ghosts around the school have vanished, and Trina is worried. It seems to have something to do with the strange parades of ants that have been moving across the school, carrying something white with them.

Strange things have been happening at this school for generations. Noh learns that it’s a place that attracts people with unusual abilities, and it has been home to bizarre experiments and a shape-shifting monster that wants badly to eat “something big” as well as home to various ghosts. There are secret passages and hidden rooms and faculty who seem to know much more than they want to tell about the mysterious things that happen there. Noh must learn the school’s secrets to help her new ghost friends!

My Reaction

I enjoyed this creepy story. I think it was well-written and fun to read, although I also did feel like Noh figured out some things unnaturally quickly at the end. In the end, readers are given enough answers that the plot makes sense, and we can get a general pictures of what’s been happening at this school, but there are some things that appear intentionally open-ended. It felt to me like the author was setting up this story to be the first in a series, but as far as I can tell, it doesn’t have a sequel.

The story combines many elements of classic scary stories – spooky boarding school, ghosts, weird teachers with secret knowledge, secret passages and hidden rooms, girl with apparent psychic abilities that she doesn’t fully understand, secrets buried in the past, a bizarre invention that appears to have been made by some kind of mad scientist and has an unknown purpose, and a lurking monster that wants to eat someone. Although the story has plenty of creepy elements, they’re softened by humor along the way. There is a monster referred to as the “nasty thing that refuses to be named”, which appears periodically throughout the story to remind us that it once ate “something big”, that what it ate was “really big”, that it wants to eat “something big” again, that it can tell that readers don’t like it but that it doesn’t care what you think, etc. By the end of the story, we are told what the monster actually is, but it’s still on the loose, leaving it open to Noh and the ghost kids trying to hunt it down again later.

The author, Amber Benson, is also an actress, known for her role on Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

Posted on October 8, 2024October 11, 2024 by TracyC · 1 Comment

Moondial

Moondial by Helen Cresswell, 1987.

Araminta Kane, called Minty, has always had the ability to sense things that others can’t. For as long as she can remember, she has had the ability to sense and even see spirits. She doesn’t talk about it much because this happens to her routinely. When she does mention it, her mother assumes that it’s imagination or a trick of the light. Minty becomes more aware of her ability after her father dies, and she is still able to hear his voice from time to time.

She has been learning to cope with her father’s death and the changes to her life since it happened. She and her mother have been getting along pretty well, but her mother has to work long hours. It’s bad enough that Minty has to be alone so much on weekends, but her mother wonders what she will do during her school holidays. Minty’s mother decides to send Minty to stay with her godmother, Mrs. Bowyer, in the village of Belton, for the summer. Mrs. Bowyer is an elderly lady who lives in an old, stone cottage, which is near the old manor known as Belton House. Belton House once belonged to Lord Brownlow, but it is now owned by the National Trust (UK organization that focuses on preservation and protection of historic sites) and operates as a tourist attraction, open to the public. Mrs. Bowyer used to work for the Brownlow family as a domestic servant, and now, she sometimes helps out in the gift shop at Belton House.

Minty is happy about spending the summer with Mrs. Bowyer, who they call Aunt Mary, because she has heard about Belton House, and she would like to see it. She knows that there is a hidden tunnel on the property, and the idea of exploring it sounds intriguing. However, she wonders if that will be enough to keep her occupied all summer, and she does worry about whether her mother will be all right without her. She knows that her mother is still mourning her father and that she sometimes cries at night. Minty’s mother reassures her that she will be fine and that they’ll be too busy working to be sad and lonely. She also reassures Minty that she won’t be bored while she’s in Belton. When she stayed with Aunt Mary as a child, she always had the feeling that Belton was unusual somehow, that unseen things were happening beneath the surface. Minty asks her if she means ghosts, that the village is haunted. Her mother isn’t quite sure because she never actually saw any ghosts or anything of the kind.

Aunt Mary is happy to have Minty stay with her, and she says that Minty can help her in the shop at Belton House. She says that things at Belton House aren’t like they were in the old days, when the Brownlows lived there, and she remarks that they would turn over in their graves if they saw all the tourists and school groups tramping through their house and grounds. Before her mother leaves Belton, they explore the nearby churchyard together. Even though it’s July, Minty feels a strange gust of cold air. She senses that there is something strange about it, she plans to return later and examine the area more closely.

Minty has a strange sense that time doesn’t work in quite the same way in Aunt Mary’s village that it does elsewhere. She thinks it makes sense that time would stand still in the old graveyard because everyone there is dead, but Aunt Mary herself seems to move as if she’s in a different time as well. Aunt Mary is puzzled even about basic pieces of modern technology, not understanding even what Minty’s headphones are for.

While Minty is with Aunt Mary, she gets word that her mother has been in a car accident and is in the hospital. Minty is terrified of losing her mother as well as her father. A nice man named John Benson from her mother’s office is helping to arrange things, and Aunt Mary urges Minty to try not to think about it or worry too much, but Minty can’t help it. When Minty feels like she needs to get out of the house and go for a walk, Aunt Mary suggests that she go explore Belton House and meet Mr. World, the groundskeeper, who likes children.

When Minty meets World, he asks her if she’s there to meet the children. At first, Minty doesn’t know who he’s talking about, since she just saw a tour group of other children leaving the grounds. She asks if there are any children currently living in the old house, but World isn’t talking about living children. World tells her that there are children who haunt the place. He says that they’re trapped and need someone to free them, and he thinks that Minty will be “the one to turn the key” and set them free. This isn’t exactly reassuring talk for Minty’s current situation, but she has the feeling that what World says is true and that she’s just been given a kind of invitation that she can’t refuse.

In the gardens of the manor, Minty finds a mysterious sundial that has the power to take her back in time. The very first time she encounters it, it gives her a strange feeling, and for some reason, she keeps thinking of it as a “moondial” instead of sundial. Suddenly, Minty finds herself back in the Victorian era with a boy named Tom. Tom is an orphan from London who works at the manor house, and the adults there abuse him. Minty tries to intervene, but none of the adults can see or hear her, and she suddenly finds herself back in her own time, uncertain of what made her travel through time and what brought her back to the present.

Later, when Minty visits the old house again, she has another encounter with the sundial/moondial and finds herself visiting the grounds of the manor at night. This time, she meets a girl from the past called Sarah. Sarah sings little rhymes (old, traditional ones – Poor Mary (sometimes called Poor Jenny or Poor Sally, and sometimes she’s weeping for a lost sweetheart and sometimes for a playmate) and Girls and Boys Come Out to Play (listen on YouTube). Minty watches as a frightening adult dressed in black hurries her back into the house, calling her a “little devil.”

When Minty visits Tom’s time again, she learns that Tom has also seen Sarah. He seems to also have the ability to travel through time, and when he sees Sarah, it’s also at night. Tom still thinks that both Minty and Sarah are ghosts. Minty doesn’t know why this is happening, but she senses that she needs to help Tom and Sarah.

When Minty visits the hospital, she isn’t sure what to say to her mother, who is still in a coma, so she decides that she will make recorded tapes about her time-traveling adventures that she can play for her mother, along with some music. The doctor approves of Minty make tapes for her mother to listen to, but Minty tells him that what she has to say is private, and she makes him promise that he and the nurses won’t listen to them while they’re playing. The doctor promises that there won’t be anyone in the room, and they won’t listen to the tapes themselves.

Then, Aunt Mary has a visit from a strange woman called Miss Raven, who says that she’s an author investigating the ghosts at the manor house. Aunt Mary even accepts Miss Raven as a lodger at her house. However, Minty has a strange feeling that Miss Raven is not to be trusted. Miss Raven tries to get Minty to admit that she has seen ghosts. She watches Minty closely and tries to get Aunt Mary to limit Minty’s freedom to go places by herself. World also shares Minty’s suspicions of Miss Raven. He tells her that Miss Raven is probably after the children, and it’s up to Minty to save them. She doesn’t know how to do that, but she’s determined to try.

The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive. There is also a BBC miniseries based on the book. It’s available on DVD through Amazon, and you can sometimes see it or clips of it on YouTube. There is also a similar (although not identical) story by the same author called Stonestruck, which involves child evacuees from London during WWII.

My Reaction and Spoilers

I read Stonestruck first, and I read Moondial specifically because another reviewer mentioned the similarities between the two stories. It seems like the author wanted to revisit the themes of Moondial in a somewhat different setting and with some twists when she wrote Stonestruck. The two stories aren’t identical, but there are similar themes of captive children or children’s spirits trapped across time. The time travel in this book centers around the mysterious sundial/moondial, while Stonestruck has ghostly children playing a game, and capturing other children.

There are features of both books that I like, so it’s difficult to choose a favorite between the two of them. I like the features of the child evacuee and the ghostly game from Stonestruck. This one has a truly haunting ending with a frightening scene on a Halloween night in the past. The ending of Stonestruck is a little more open-ended than the ending of Moondial. You can read my review of Stonestruck for more about how that ends, but it’s less definite what happens to the captive children or captive children’s spirits in that book. In this one, we do find out what happens to them. There are hints of Tom’s fate all the way through the story, but Minty doesn’t recognize it immediately, partly because “Tom” is actually a nickname rather than his real name. He later explains to her that kitchen boys are always called “Tom” no matter what their real names are.

Time is important to the story, and Minty realizes that the key to the time travel is that the supposed “sundial” is actually a “moondial.” Sarah refers to it as a “moondial” when they see her because Sarah typically only comes out at night because her face is disfigured by a birthmark and people think it’s a sign of the devil. Since Sarah almost never sees the sundial when the sun is out, it’s a “moondial” to her. The superstition about birthmarks is historical. However, I though that what the characters say about measuring time was interesting.

At one point, World gives Minty a book about sundials to study, and he explains that “clock time is mean time. Sundial time is what they call apparent time …” and the only exact time is star time. Minty takes that to mean that the moondial measures true time. You can measure time by the stars, using Polaris and the Big Dipper, and measuring time that way is based on a 24-hour clock rather than standard 12-hour clocks. Measuring time based on the Earth’s rotation, relative to fixed stars, is called sidereal time. What World says about clocks being based on “mean time”, meaning the “the sun’s average (mean) rate for the year” is true. Sundials measure “how the sun travels across the sky“, but the movement isn’t completely regular, which is why our clocks use the average movement rate. Because of the variations in the sun’s movement from the average or mean calculations, you can’t accurately set a clock or watch by a sundial, unless you know how to calculate for the variations. That’s what World means about sundials showing apparent time. Measuring time by the positions of the stars in the sky creates a “day” that is just slightly shorter than the standard 24-hour day that we measure on clocks. However, star time isn’t the only true way of measuring time. Stars appear to move with the rotation of the Earth, which is pretty accurate, but we now also have the concept of atomic clocks. Even those aren’t 100% accurate, though. There doesn’t seem to be a 100% infallible accurate way of measuring time, but atomic clocks are only off by about 1 second every 100 million years. They’re about as close to full accuracy as we are able to get. The book doesn’t go into all of the scientific details of measuring time because it’s a fantasy story, but I thought that working some real concepts of measuring time into the story was fascinating.

The book also works in the concept of the mottos that are traditionally carved on sundials, like the ones that say they only count the sunny hours. However, some sundials have deeper inscriptions, and the concept of inscriptions on sundials explaining time travel appears in some other fantasy books, like The Time Garden. In this book, Minty considers inscriptions like, “For the Night Cometh – cutting off all Power of Passing of Time” and “Light and Shadow by turns, but always Love.” Both of these inscriptions give her clues to how the moondial works and what she needs to do to help the distressed spirits of the past children, who are trapped in time. Tom and Sarah are both lonely and unloved children where and when they are. When Minty reunites them with the spirit of Tom’s sister, Dorrie, who he is separated from in life, the three spirits are able to be the love and company they each need. There are two carved figures on the sundial, Chronos and Eros – Chronos representing time and Eros representing love. Love transcends time.

Miss Raven is the villain of the story, even though we don’t really meet her until later in the book. Miss Raven may possibly be a witch, and she uses cats to spy on Minty. The details about how and why Miss Raven became a witch are never clarified. She also seems to have originated from Sarah’s time and was once her governess, although that isn’t really clarified, either. Did she turn evil because of her resentment of Sarah, or was she always like that? We also don’t really know why she’s after the children or the children’s souls. At the end, she seems to have vanished, perhaps banished by something Minty did on a fateful Halloween of the past in her final travel through time, although Aunt Mary thinks that she has departed in a normal way. There are things that aren’t fully explained by the end of the story, although we do learn what happened to Tom, and Minty knows that Tom’s spirit is now free and happy with the spirit of his sister and another lonely girl who badly needed friends.

The Halloween scene in the final time travel is really chilling, and it’s especially spooky in the miniseries version of the book.

Posted on October 21, 2023 by TracyC

The Time of the Ghost

The Time of the Ghost by Diana Wynne Jones, 1981.

This isn’t a very long book, but it packs a lot in! This is both a time travel story and a supernatural ghost story, but with the odd twist that we don’t initially know who the “ghost” is, and she isn’t really dead. She’s trying to save her own life.

In the beginning, although this book is from the first person perspective, we don’t know quite who the narrator is. Even the narrator isn’t quite sure who she is or what has happened. Her last memory is that there was some sort of accident, and her mind doesn’t seem to be working right. Now, she seems to be walking through the countryside, but she can’t remember what happened earlier that day or even what she had for lunch. When she looks down to see what she’s wearing that day, she realizes in a panic that she can’t see herself. She has become a ghost!

It takes her some time to get her panicked thoughts together, but she gradually begins to recognize the countryside. She is surprised that she can look over a hedge, thinking that it was something she had always wanted to do before, and she must have grown. There is a small hut nearby, and she recalls that there is an old rag doll called Monigan inside. Exploring further, she finds herself at a school and locates a classroom she recognizes. To her surprise, she discovers that it’s a Latin class full of boys, and although she has no body, she is sure that she’s a girl, so this can’t be her class. However, she does recognize the teacher as someone familiar but also intimidating.

Leaving the classroom, she continues exploring the school, and she finds people she is sure are her family. She remembers that the woman is called Phyllis, and Phyllis is her mother. There are also girls called Imogen, Fenella, and Charlotte. The ghost thinks that these are her sisters and that her name is Sally because Phyllis seems to call her Sally, although nobody really seems to see her. Sometimes, people just seem to have a sense that someone is there, and the dog, Oliver, seems to know she’s there. Pieces of information click in the ghost’s mind. This family’s last name is Melford. The teacher in the Latin class is her father. Sally is short for Selina. Charlotte is called Cart as a nickname.

The ghost finds herself angry and hating her family. She wonders if she could have died in the accident she vaguely remembers and if she came back to get some sort of revenge on her family, but the idea horrifies her, and she’s sure that she wouldn’t have thought of it in other circumstances.

The ghost watches as Fenella goes to the little hut and pretends to worship the doll Monigan and call her forth, like the doll is some kind of oracle. The ghost remembers that Cart was the one who started this game a year before and that she always thought that it was a boring game. Cart started the game because the four sisters had been fighting over the doll or playing with it too roughly one day, and they had each grabbed an arm or leg and pulled the doll apart. Cart had felt guilty about that, so she sewed the doll back together (badly, because she’s bad at sewing), and she turned the doll into a kind of oracle that the girls would worship to make it up to the doll that she had been ruined. Now, the doll is moldy and mildewy from being left in the little hut for a year. Only little Fenella still plays this game, although the doll has never actually done anything magical when they’ve called on her.

Gradually, the ghost begins putting the pieces of her memories together. Her parents manage a boarding school for boys. The girls help out with chores at the school, but they’re mostly expected to stay out of the way. Although they attend a different school themselves, it feels like they never get a break from school because they live at one. They never even get summers off because there are summer courses for disabled children at the boarding school.

Sally the ghost listens to her sisters complaining about her in her absence. They resent her for being overly sweet and a perfectionist and for defending their parents when the other girls criticize them. Sally is angry with them for the things they say behind her back and for their constant bickering and drama. Imogen gets melodramatic and picks at her sisters because she’s worried about not achieving the music career she really wants. Cart keeps trying to shut Imogen down because she feels overwhelmed by sentiment and emotions, and admittedly, Imogen’s emotions are frequently overwhelming. This dynamic between Imogen trying to express her overwhelming emotions and Cart trying to shut her down is a large part of the quarreling between the girls. Fenella, the youngest of the sisters, is just being a silly little girl, and she is rather fed up with her older sisters. At one point, Sally finds a poem that Fenella wrote that explains her relationship with her sisters:

“I have three ugly sisters
They really should be misters
They shout and scream and play the piano
I can never do anything I want.”

It’s a pretty accurate description of what goes on in their house. All of the girls are loud and argumentative, and a large part of the tension in their house comes from the inability of any of them to do what they want to do. Sally notices some pictures on the walls and remembers their father (whom the girls only refer to as “Himself”, never as “father” or “dad”) yelling at them and calling them “bitches” for stealing art supplies from the school for drawing and painting. Imogen’s drama about her music career is because she’s not allowed to use the music room at the school for practicing, and she thinks that she’ll never get a chance to develop her abilities. The parents pay more attention to the students at the school than they do to their own daughters, even forgetting to leave the girls any supper sometimes. The girls’ home life is not happy, and that’s why they’re not happy with each other. The two oldest girls especially are not happy with their parents because of their neglect.

As Sally listens to her sisters talking about her, Cart and Imogen admit that they’re both jealous of Sally because she gets to be somewhere else that will be important to her future career. Sally wishes that they would say where she’s supposed to be because she can’t remember. She finds a few unfinished rough drafts of letters that she wrote to her parents, trying to tell them that life at the school didn’t have much to offer her and that she was going away, but Sally can’t imagine where she would have gone. One of the letters even says that her life is in danger, but from what?

There is a bright spot in the girls’ lives, and that’s a secret friendship they’ve developed with some of the boys at school. The boys visit them in the kitchen after dinner, and they have coffee together. As ghostly Sally watches one of these visits, the boys ask the girls what happened to Sally, which ghostly Sally is (literally) dying to hear. Sally’s sisters explain that Sally’s disappearance is part of a Plan the girls have.

It’s obvious that the girls’ parents neglect them. While Sally has always been defending their parents to the other girls, the other girls want to prove to her that their parents would never notice if something awful happened to one of them. A lot of the strange things that Sally has witnessed them doing that day are part of this Plan. Fenella has been going around the entire day with big knots tied in her hair, and their parents haven’t noticed. Fenella says that if they continue to not notice, she’ll act like she’s fallen seriously ill. Sally’s sisters say that Sally has gone to stay with a friend named Audrey Chambers, but their parents don’t know and still haven’t noticed that she’s even gone.

The sisters and the boys decide to try holding a seance for fun, and ghostly Sally uses this as an opportunity to communicate with them. Although she has some difficulty and misspells her message, she manages to convince Imogen that she’s the one communicating and that she’s dead. Imogen gets hysterical, but the others calm her down by phoning her friend’s house and confirming that Sally is there and that she’s fine. Ghostly Sally can’t understand it. She’s sure that she’s really Sally, but how can that be if Sally is definitely at her friend’s house?

Ghostly Sally seeks out living Sally, and to her surprise, she finds her, although she feels disconnected from this girl. She also learns that this Sally has been secretly doing things with a boy from the school, Julian, performing nighttime rituals with the doll, Monigan. Although ghostly Sally remembers having been friends with Julian, seeing him from outside herself makes her realize that Julian is actually sinister and disturbed. In her spirit form, she also realizes that their rituals with Monigan have stirred up something genuinely supernatural, apart from herself.

As things become more clear to her, the ghost begins to think that she was wrong about being Sally. She is still sure that she is one of the four sisters, neglected at her parents’ school, but she doesn’t think that she’s Sally after all, and that’s why she had no knowledge of Sally’s secret rituals with Julian and couldn’t remember where Sally was or what she was thinking. She also realizes that everything she has seen happened when she was younger. Somehow, after her accident, her spirit went back into the past, seeing things that she and her sisters used to do.

As the “ghost” wakes up in the hospital in the present day, she also realizes that she is not actually dead. She’s been having an out-of-body experience. Worse, her “accident” wasn’t really an accident. Someone tried to kill her. Julian, also older now in the present day, shoved her out of his car while they were driving somewhere. He was deliberately trying to kill her! Something that happened during that time in the past, during the time with the Monigan rituals and the girls’ Plan to confront their parents over their neglect led up to this attempted murder.

The “ghost” still can’t remember everything that happened in the seven years since then, leading up to the attempted murder, and she’s still confused about who she really is. She only senses that Monigan tried to kill her through Julian. Although the girls once thought that Monigan was just a game, Monigan is actually a real, evil spirit. Seven years ago, Monigan told them that it would claim a life, and now, Monigan is trying to do so. Can the “ghost” regain her memories and figure out what to do in time to save her life before the next attempt?

The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive (multiple copies).

My Reaction

Earlier, I covered The Headless Cupid, in which children play at being witches and doing magical rituals that are clearly nonsense, but this book has children who are coerced by some ancient supernatural spirit into doing “real” occult rituals. The children’s rituals involve blood and cruelty to animals, which I didn’t like when I was reading the story. We don’t fully get to know what Monigan actually is, although there are indications that Monigan might be some kind of ancient goddess that craves sacrifices, especially human sacrifices. Monigan seems to remember receiving sacrifices before, in the distant past. Although Cart thinks that she invented Monigan, that Monigan is just a doll they tore, and that all of their rituals are just playacting, the “ghost” realizes that they were all being manipulated by the spirit called Monigan into thinking that. Monigan took advantage of the neglected children and their mentally ill friend for its own purposes. I think Monigan was based on Morrigan from Irish mythology. We are told in the story that this British boarding school is built on a site that has been inhabited from ancient times, and the girls’ father is obsessed with the archaeology of the area, which may also be responsible for stirring up this ancient spirit.

The intriguing part of this story is first that the readers aren’t sure whether or not the “ghost” is actually dead, and then, the readers as well as the ghost have to determine the ghost’s true identity. At first, the “ghost” thinks that she knows who she is, but then, she thinks that she was wrong. (Or was she?) Even when she is awake in the present day, her mind is still confused, and even two of her sisters, while they know that Julian’s attempt to kill her was part of Monigan’s curse, find it difficult to remember everything that happened when all of this started. The “ghost” has to go through the events of the past, with Monigan working against her all the time, to figure out what set off this threat against her before she runs out of time. She knows that Monigan plans to kill her before the day is over, and she doesn’t have much time left to break this curse or prevent it from happening in the first place. The “ghost” isn’t sure at first that she can change the past, but she gradually manages to get through to the other children and figure out a solution with the help of her sisters.

I found the parents in the story not just neglectful but actually cruel and infuriating. The father keeps calling his daughters “bitches” when he gets angry at them. When the girls appeal to their mother about how they’re not being fed and have to keep begging food from the school’s kitchen, the mother shuts her eyes and tells them to stop bothering the cook. The cook is also revealed to be stealing food from the kitchen herself, which may be the reason why both the girls and the students have little to eat, but when the girls tell their mother about it, their mother doesn’t want to hear about it. She just doesn’t want to go to the bother of finding another cook. I’m amazed that the girls haven’t actually died at some point before this or that social services hasn’t gotten involved. The girls do attend a different school from the one their parents manage, so they would have the opportunity to get help and attention from an outside source.

At one point, Fenella openly tells her mother that she’s neglecting them while she only pays attention to the boys at the school, and her mother says that girls can look after themselves while boys can’t. It’s like her mother looks at the girls like some people look at pet cats when they just let them roam and hunt for their own food. I don’t even approve of people neglecting their cats, like they don’t even have pets so much as a nodding acquaintance with feral animals. Even in the present day, when our “ghost” lies in a hospital bed after a murder attempt, their mother doesn’t come to see her because she’s too busy helping the boys at the school to pack their trunks. The father is openly hostile to his daughters, and the mother doesn’t seem to have any feeling or concern for them at all.

The concept of the book was interesting, but it’s not one that I would care to read again because I found it dark and frustrating, although it does end well. Things do improve for the girls in the past after their father discovers their weird rituals and sends them off to their grandmother’s house, angrily declaring that he never wants to see any of them again. The father’s rejection of them is actually a blessing. At their grandmother’s house, they get regular food and the attention that they desperately need. The mother partly redeems herself at the end of the book by coming to see her daughter after all, saying that she felt obligated to get the boys all packed but now that’s done, so she is free to stay with her daughter until she’s fully recovered. The girl does recover, and she begins reconciling herself to her past traumas, both the supernatural ones and the ones resulting from her parents’ neglect and her tumultuous relationship with her sisters.

One thing that the “ghost” accomplishes is that she gets a look at her past and herself as they really are, viewing herself and everything that happened from a neutral position as the “ghost.” Seeing herself from the position of a third person, she discovers that she doesn’t like the things she’s done or the person she’s been during these last several years. That’s why she has felt so disconnected from herself and her memories and why she couldn’t even recognize herself or the things she did in the past. The “ghost” is so upset with herself and ashamed of her life choices that she wonders if she’s really worth saving from Monigan. Fortunately, her sisters truly love her and know that she’s worth saving. Their bad choices and poor behavior to each other have been largely the result of their parents’ neglect, a trauma they all share and understand. Although the ghost doesn’t remember everything at first, the other sisters know that, after they went to live with their grandmother and received the attention and care they really needed, they all improved and their relationships with each other improved. They’ve been trying to move on from their past ever since, and they need to settle the matter about Monigan once and for all to truly be free to go forward in their lives. One of the sisters knows exactly what kind of sacrifice will finally appease Monigan and save her sister’s life.

Monigan wants something perfect as a sacrifice, but our “ghost” isn’t a perfect person. Nobody is perfect, and our “ghost” has become truly aware of her flaws and the nature of her troubled past through her out-of-body experiences. However, things can be perfect in someone’s imagination, and one of the sisters has a more powerful imagination than the others. Someone has a dream that is perfect, at least in her mind. When she gives Monigan that dream, she not only frees her sister from Monigan but herself from something that her future self has realized that she doesn’t really want. Both she and her sister have been clinging to things that were harmful to both of them, making them into the kind of people neither of them really wanted to be. It was their insecurity from their parents’ neglect that made them cling to things that they thought would make them special and distinct. Once they are free from these harmful influences, not only does Monigan stop trying to take their lives, but they are truly free for the first time to become something better. Monigan does claim one life at the end of the story, but in that case, it’s only justice.

Posted on October 16, 2023 by TracyC · 1 Comment

Down a Dark Hall

Down a Dark Hall by Lois Duncan, 1974.

Fourteen-year-old Kathryn Gordy, called Kit, is going to boarding school for the first time. She doesn’t really want to attend the Blackwood School for Girls, but her widowed mother has remarried, and she and Kit’s new stepfather, Dan, will be going on an extended honeymoon in Europe. Kit tried to persuade her mother to take her with them on the trip to Europe, but Dan is firm that she can’t come on their honeymoon trip. The Blackwood School has a good reputation, and graduation from the school would guarantee Kit entrance to a good college. At first, Kit thought it might not be so bad if her best friend, Tracy, could attend the school, too, but although Tracy applied to Blackwood, she wasn’t accepted there. Kit hates the idea of going there alone. Worse still, when her mother and Dan take her to the school, it’s an imposing, castle-like mansion that gives Kit the creeps. Her mother and Dan think it looks impressive, but just the sight of the building gives Kit a terrible sense of evil. Even though she doesn’t want to stay, her mother and Dan insist.

Because her mother and Dan have to leave on their trip, Kit has arrived at the school a day early, before classes will start. Madame Duret, the headmistress of the school, welcomes them and explains a little about the school’s history. The school is fairly new. Before it was a school, the mansion was the private home of a man called Brewer, who died about ten years ago. Because few people would want a house that size outside of town, the building was vacant for some time before the Blackwood School moved in, and there are some ghost stories and urban legends about it in the area. Kit’s mother and Dan laugh it off.

Madame Duret gives them a tour of the school and mentions her art collection. She says that she enjoys collecting lesser-known works by famous artists. The dorm rooms are incredibly luxurious. Each student will have a room to herself with a private bath and a canopied bed with velvet draperies. Art is important to Madame Duret, and she says that she wants the surroundings to inspire her students. When it comes time for Kit’s mother to say goodbye to her, her mother asks her if she thinks she could be happy at the school. If Kit really feels like there’s something wrong with the place, her mother is willing to delay her trip and make other arrangements. Shrugging off her earlier misgivings, Kit tells her mother that she will be fine, and her mother and Dan leave.

The school still bothers Kit, but she feels like she has to try to do well there for her mother’s sake. She knows that things have been hard for her since her father died several years before. Although nobody believes her, Kit remembers seeing her father’s ghost in her room the night he died in a car accident while he was on a business trip. Her mother has managed since then, but she wasn’t really happy until she met Dan, and Kit appreciates that her mother needs adult companionship. Still, Kit senses that this school is very strange, and there are things wrong it it. She can’t figure out why her friend, Tracy, was rejected by the school. The canopied bed is luxurious but kind of creepy because it reminds her of a scary story. Then, she notices that the bedroom doors have locks on the outside of the doors but not the inside.

At dinner that evening, Kit meets Professor Farley, who is a teacher at the school, and Madame Duret’s son, Jules. Professor Farley teaches math and science, and Jules, who has only recently gotten his degree, will teach music, giving the students piano lesssons. Madame Duret herself teaches languages and literature, and apart from these three, there are no other teachers at the school. Professor Farley says that he is the one who convinced Madame Duret to open a school in the United States, having seen her success at her school in England. A young cook named Natalie also works at the school, but strangely, Natalie says that Madame Duret doesn’t want her to speak to the students much.

When the other students begin arriving, Kit realizes that there aren’t going to be many students at this school, either. In fact, there are only three other students besides Kit: Sandy, Lynda, and Ruth. All of the girls also seem to be somewhat removed from their families. Sandy is an orphan who lives with her grandparents, who don’t drive, so they didn’t even drop her off at the school. Lynda and Ruth have both been to boarding schools before, and they were dropped off by a chauffeur. They say that Blackwood isn’t like their old school. Kit still wonders why Tracy wasn’t accepted to the school when there are so few students. Kit realizes that she herself isn’t a top student, and the other three students at this school are quite different from each other. However, Professor Farley says that there are other qualifications besides grades, and all of the girls at this school have the qualities they were looking for. Madame Duret refuses to discuss test results at all.

Kit does her best to settle into the school. Everyone acts nice to each other, and the classes are like having private tutors because there are so few students. However, Kit is still nervous and having strange dreams. She never remembers what she’s been dreaming about, but she dreads these strange dreams, so she has trouble getting to sleep. The only way she can get to sleep is to exhaust herself by reading and writing letters late at night until she is exhausted.

One night, while Kit is writing a letter to Tracy late at night, she hears a scream that is choked off suddenly. Although Kit is afraid, she feels like she has to investigate and find out if there is someone in trouble. She thinks the scream came from Sandy’s room. When Kit tries to check on Sandy, Sandy doesn’t answer, and she has trouble getting into Sandy’s room. Kit feels like there is someone in Sandy’s room, and the room is weirdly cold. When Kit finally gets the light on, Sandy is a little disoriented. She doesn’t remember screaming, but she remembers a strange dream about a young woman in old-fashioned clothing, who was watching her. Sandy tells Kit that she’s had strange dreams like this before, although not about this particular woman. When her parents were killed in a plane accident, Sandy sensed the accident when it happened, and she saw her parents in a dream, not unlike the apparent dream that Kit had about her father when he died. The next day, Kit talks to Lynda and Ruth and learns that they have also been having strange dreams that they have trouble remembering.

These dreams seem to be the one thing that all four of the Blackwood girls have in common, and all of them find them disturbing. When Kit has morning piano lessons, she feels strangely tired and her fingers are sore, as if she’s been playing the piano for hours already. Kit tries to talk to Jules about the strange things that have been happening and her own sense of unease. He tries to give her reasonable explanations, but from the way he speaks, Kit has the uneasy feeling like he knows something that he’s not telling. Jules tells Kit that he’s had some strange dreams himself, but he thinks it’s just the atmosphere of the strange old house. Kit asks him if he’s still having the dreams, and he says he is, but he also likes the house and thinks that it’s just a matter of getting used to the place.

Strange things continue to happen at the school. Lynda wakes up from a nap and suddenly draws an incredibly realistic portrait of Kit when she’s never even taken art classes or done any drawing before. Then, someone steals the portrait out of Kit’s room. Letters and post cards from Kit’s mother and Tracy reveal that they haven’t received any of the letters that she’s been writing to them. Sandy tells Kit that she has a sense that Blackwood School is evil, just like Kit felt when she first arrived.

Ruth is the one who realizes that all of the girls have ESP. Sandy and Kit both experienced ESP when they saw visions of their dead parents. Ruth admits that her excellent grades are only partly due to her naturally high IQ. She can also sense the contents of books without reading them and read the minds of people giving her tests, so she can give them exactly the answers they’re looking for. Lynda isn’t as bright as the other girls, but Ruth has been friends with her for a long time and has discovered that Lynda has memories of herself in a past life, when she lived in Victorian England. Ruth realizes that the girls’ psychic abilities are the reason why the four of them, and only the four of them, were chosen to be students at Blackwood School. The school has a dark purpose beyond providing an education, and these four isolated girls are there to fulfill that purpose.

The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive. It was also made into a movie in 2018.

My Reaction and Spoilers

I read this book because it was mentioned as a book a character was reading in another children’s book, The Shimmering Ghost of Riversend, and because it occurred to me that it would fit the Dark Academia genre that’s been popular in the last few years. The reason why this book was mentioned in the other story is that both books involve ghosts who have the ability to act through other people and help them to do things that the living people couldn’t do by themselves. I have a tolerance limit on scary stories, but I felt like I had to read this one because it was mentioned in the other book, and I was curious about it. I’m not sure that I want to see the movie because trailers of the movie make it look even darker than the book, but the book didn’t go beyond my tolerance limits.

In Down a Dark Hall, Madame Duret has psychic abilities of her own and is using girls with psychic abilities to channel the spirits of famous dead people so they can complete works that they were unable to complete in life. Lynda draws and paints pictures that she shouldn’t be able to produce because she has no natural talent for art or training in it. She also begins signing her pictures with the initials TC because she is actually channeling the spirit and abilities of Thomas Cole. Sandy begins writing sonnets without having any prior interest and ability in poetry before because she is channeling Emily Bronte. Ruth finds herself making mathematical notes that are really too advanced for her and barely within her understanding. She’s not sure who she’s been channeling because the scientific and mathematical principles she’s been receiving have little personality attached to them. The reason why Kit’s fingers are always sore and she’s so tired every morning is that she’s been channeling Schubert and other musicians, playing piano music at night. There is one night when multiple musicians fight to control her and get their music out.

The girls are not channeling these spirits through any will or conscious effort of their own. Each of these episodes occurs either while the girls are asleep or just after they wake up from having been asleep. Madame Duret isn’t just facilitating this possession for the sake of art, literature, and scholarship, but also out of greed. She is known for having an impressive collection of works of little-known works of art from famous artists, but what no one else knows is that those works were not produced within the artists’ lifetimes. She has performed this same trick of using the psychic abilities of students to channel the spirits of dead artists to produce new works before, and she artificially ages these works so no one knows that they are new instead of previously-undiscovered works.

Being possessed by the spirits of the dead is disturbing enough, but the girls of Blackwood School also come to realize that the psychic bonds between them and these famous spirits are getting stronger over time. If they don’t find a way to escape Blackwood School soon, they will become permanent. Records in Madame Duret’s office reveal that some of her previous students died from their experiences, and others lost their minds and ended up in mental institutions. No one could stand this type of channeling over the long term and keep their sanity intact, and the spirits themselves don’t seem to have much or any concern for the well-being of the girls channeling them. They seem to have so many ideas that they want to get out that they push the girls harder and harder to produce them. Some of the spirits are gentler and more personable than others, but some regard the girls simply as tools to be used. They can even get violent when the girls resist them or when different spirits interrupt each other’s work. This is a very creepy book, and the girls have some close calls, but fortunately, it has a good ending. I like atmospheric books, but I don’t like books that are overly dark, and I was relieved that all the girls survived. I would have found it hard to take if children died during the course of the story.

Although I knew before reading the book that the story involved ghosts and possession, I initially thought that the isolation each girl has from family and friends was part of the reason why these particular girls were chosen for the school. Before I found out that each girl has psychic abilities, I noticed that none of them are in a position where they are very closely watched by their relatives. Kit’s mother and stepfather are going to be traveling through Europe, so they won’t be trying to visit the school anytime soon, and it would make sense if they didn’t hear from Kit for a while. Sandy is an orphan whose grandparents can’t travel easily, so they won’t be coming to check on her every weekend. Lynda’s mother is an actress who now lives in Italy, so again, there is a separation by great physical distance. Ruth’s parents are busy professionals with doctorates. None of the girls is likely to have any visitors while she’s at school or anybody who would be overly concerned about not hearing from them for a while. At first, I thought that could have been part of the reason why Tracy was rejected as a student, because she has both parents living, and those parents would be in more of a position to check on her and more likely to go to the school themselves if they didn’t hear from her. However, it turns out that her rejection is really because she isn’t psychic, like Kit. The chosen students’ relative isolation from family is just icing on the cake to their psychic abilities and plays into the plot as a reason why nobody outside the school realizes all the weird things that are going on.

I thought that the build-up of the sinister atmosphere at the school was great! Kit has a blatant sense of evil when she first arrives, which feels at first like we’re just being told that the place is evil, but there are also a lot of little details that support it. First, the place is overly luxurious for a boarding school, especially one with so few students to support it. Kit is quick to spot that the girls’ doors can only lock from the outside, which is chilling, although Jules says that’s just to keep people from going into their rooms when they’re not there themselves. However, someone does enter Kit’s locked room to take the portrait of her that Lynda drew, indicating that the girls’ rooms are not safe from anyone and that it’s possible for them to be locked in and unable to get out.

There are also hints from the beginning of the book that Madame Duret and Professor Farley are sinister. Blackwood is actually Madame Duret’s third school that we know about. She had one in France, one in England, and now, one in the US. For some reason, she tends to move countries, which seems odd for someone building a reputation as an elite educator. Boarding schools often have an air of tradition, and their reputations rest on long-term success, which is built over time. Moving around is actually a warning sign, at least to me, that Madame Duret doesn’t want to stay places long enough for people to figure out what she’s really been doing at her schools. Even Jules admits that he doesn’t know things about his mother because he has spent most of his life at other boarding schools himself, not at her schools, so the two of them have mostly been living apart. However, he does know about the possessions of the girls because he has the recordings of the music Kit plays at night. It’s just that he doesn’t fully realize the harm being done to the girls until the end of the book or the harm his mother has already done to previous students.

The old mansion the school is in has a sinister history. The former owner, Mr. Brewer, lost his wife and children, including a baby, in a fire at the house, mostly due to smoke inhalation because the fire didn’t damage the building too badly. After that, he lived as a recluse, and he would act like his family was still alive, buying things for them in town. He could have just lost his mind from grief, but there are indications that his family still haunted the house as ghosts. Locals started telling ghost stories about the place after a plumber heard a baby crying in the house.

Recent reprintings of this book have been updated to include the concepts of laptops, cell phones, and emails, which were not in use when the book was first written. The explanation for why the girls can’t use their laptops to email anybody or get outside help is that there is no Wi-Fi or Internet access at the school. They can write reports on their laptops, but they can’t do much else. Their cell phones don’t get signals, so they can’t call or text anyone.

The version of the book that I used for the cover image is one of the new, revised books with modern technology, and it also has an interview with the author, Lois Duncan, in the back, in which she talks about the inspiration behind the story, her own beliefs about ghosts and psychic abilities, and how she was impacted by the murder of her own daughter, which she earlier documented in a book called Who Killed My Daughter?, in which she consulted psychics for insight into her daughter’s death because the police seemed unable to make progress in the case. Her daughter’s murder happened in 1989, years after Down a Dark Hall was written. Lois Duncan wrote many suspense books for children and young adults, but after her daughter’s death, she gave up writing suspense because it was too upsetting for her to write about girls in danger. She started writing picture books instead. Duncan had already passed away by the time one of the suspects in the case confessed more than 30 years after the murder.

Posted on October 13, 2023 by TracyC

Behind the Attic Wall

Behind the Attic Wall by Sylvia Cassedy, 1983.

This story is told as a flashback, so we know that things get better for the main character, but she is still haunted by her past experiences.

Twelve-year-old Maggie is an orphan who has been bounced around between foster homes and boarding schools because of her bad behavior. Her bad behavior is because she feels neglected and unloved. She eventually comes to live with her great aunts and an uncle in an old house that used to be a boarding school. Maggie has memories of the house where she once lived with her parents before they died, but no place she’s been since has seemed home-like.

When she first arrives, her eccentric Uncle Morris picks her up at the station. Uncle Morris has a sense of humor, which is both charming and also gets on Maggie’s nerves. When she gets a look at the institutional-looking old house where her great aunts and uncle live, she is physically ill. She has lived in various boarding schools and is horrified at the idea of living in another. Her last boarding school expelled her, and the headmistress called her a “disgrace.” Maggie had hoped that, for once, living with relatives might mean living in a real home.

Her two aunts, Harriet and Lillian, remind her of the headmistresses at boarding schools, although their rules are different from most headmistresses. They lecture her about health and nutrition and worry about her being undernourished. They give her old-fashioned, hand-me-down clothes to wear that Maggie assumes are the uniforms of this old school. One of her aunts gives her a baby doll, but Maggie tells her that she doesn’t like dolls and doesn’t play with them. She doesn’t have any dolls, and if she ever had any before in her life, she doesn’t remember. Her aunt thinks her rejection of this gift is horrible. Her aunts don’t seem to understand much about children, and they are both horrified when Maggie dumps out her glass of milk because they gave her warm milk instead of cold. However, her Uncle Morris is amused and tells her that she might be the “right one” after all. Maggie isn’t sure what he means by that.

After her aunt leaves her alone in her new room, Maggie plays with the doll a little, imagining that she’s explaining it to a group of girls who have never seen a doll. A game that Maggie often plays with herself is to mentally explain common things to a group of imaginary girls who don’t know what any of them are. Then, she goes exploring the rest of the old house. Because this building is so obviously an old school, she keeps expecting that she will eventually encounter other students, but there are no students. Maggie is the only child in the old house.

Maggie finds her aunts’ rooms and tries on their curlers, a necklace, and a fancy pair of shoes. She gets in trouble with her aunts for doing that, and that’s the moment when Maggie understands that there really are no other children around to see her get in trouble. At first, her aunts think that maybe agreeing to accept Maggie was a mistake and that they can’t handle her. However, they decide to keep her, at least for the present.

They explain to Maggie that the building where they live did use to be a boarding school for girls. It was founded by some ancestors of their, whose portraits hang in the parlor. Maggie is amazed at the idea of ancestors because she barely even remembers having parents and has little concept of her extended family. The old school closed after some kind of disaster, and it reopened in a new location down the road. Now, the new school is a private day school for both boys and girls, catering mostly to wealthy families, who can afford the fees. Maggie is horrified when she finds out that she will be attending this school because she knows that a poor orphan like her in her shabby, hand-me-down clothes is going to be an oddity among the wealthy private school students.

On her first day at the school, Maggie has a panic attack while imagining going through the routine of her teacher telling the whole class about her unfortunate history and the tragic deaths of her parents in a car accident when she was little and asking the other students to be patient and charitable to her. She’s experienced this before, and she knows that, while the other students start off treating her charitably, they soon get tired of being charitable and start picking on her. Maggie tries to run away from the class, and that earns her a reputation as a weirdo right off the bat. The other kids immediately start treating her like a weirdo and calling her the usual nasty names, and Maggie’s only relief is that, this time, they didn’t go through the false kindness phase first.

Uncle Morris doesn’t live at the old school with the aunts, but he lives nearby and sometimes comes to visit. He continues to spout his witty nonsense and plays weird practical jokes that make no sense. Maggie starts to understand that her uncle’s form of teasing isn’t meant to be mean, unlike the kids at school, but none of it really makes any sense to her. His jokes are pointless, and he doesn’t respond to anything, even Maggie’s emotions, in a normal way, turning everything into some kind of bizarre joke.

Then, Maggie starts to hear voices in the house. She can’t tell where the voices are coming from, but she knows they’re not her aunts, and her aunts never seem to hear them. They talk about random things, like tea, roses, a lost umbrella, and a dog. Maggie asks her aunts who’s talking, but her aunts say no one is. They think that it’s just Maggie’s imagination because she’s highly strung, but Maggie knows that she’s not imagining it. Her Uncle Morris also seems to hear the voices because he reacts to them at one point, but when Maggie tries to ask him about it, he dodges the question and makes another of his nonsense jokes.

One day, while her aunts are out of the house, the voices call to Maggie and ask her to join them. Maggie searches for the source of the voices, and behind the wall in the attic, she discovers a small room with a pair of mysterious dolls who are alive. They walk and talk. At first, Maggie thinks this must be some kind of trick, but it isn’t. She tries to ask the dolls what they are, but they speak in nonsense jokes in response to serious questions, like Uncle Morris.

Maggie is unnerved by the dolls at first, and she throws a fit about how stupid their pretend tea party is, kicking the dolls aside in fear because she can’t understand them and is afraid of what they might do to her. The dolls simply conclude that they must have been wrong and that Maggie isn’t the right one and stop talking to her. Maggie tells them that she doesn’t care and doesn’t want to be the right one, but actually, she can’t stop thinking about the dolls. She wonders what they mean about the “right one” and what kind of person would be the right one. She also feels guilty about damaging the dolls when she kicked them, so she returns to the attic to fix them. When she starts to fix them, the dolls begin speaking to her again.

The dolls become Maggie’s friends, giving her the love she so desperately needs. Maggie also feels needed by someone else for the first time in her life, enjoying the feeling of taking care of the dolls, sort of the way she took care of the girls in her imagination. However, the dolls have a spooky origin, and when Maggie realizes the truth about the dolls, it changes her life forever.

The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive (multiple copies).

My Reaction and Spoilers

About Maggie

I wasn’t sure if I was going to like this one or not because, while I like sort of atmospheric spooky themes, I have limits on how many scary and sad themes I can take. It did help that the book is divided into sections, each with a prologue about Maggie in the present day as she looks back on this strange period in her life. The prologues explain how Maggie is now in a happier home with people she has come to think of as her parents and younger children that she has also come to love as little sisters. The other kids are fascinated by the stories that she tells about her time with her aunts at the old boarding school, and Maggie enjoys explaining things to them, like she used to do to the imaginary girls, only she speaks more politely to the real girls. Since her time with her aunts, she has learned to get along better with people, and this ghost story is about how she learned how to build connections with people.

The book makes it clear that Maggie’s bad behavior is because she has been lonely, neglected, and mistreated since her parents’ deaths. She has been in various foster homes and boarding schools, but the people who were her caretakers didn’t really love her or have any patience with her. The other children in her boarding schools used her as a target for teasing and bullying, causing Maggie to look at everyone new she meets with suspicion, waiting for them to turn on her, even if they acted nice at first. The adults don’t really build a relationship with Maggie and just expect Maggie to be perfectly behaved, regardless of her provocation. Maggie remembers having spoken to psychologists before, who had her draw pictures of her feelings and family, but they never really solve anything for Maggie. Maggie still feels neglected and unloved, and when the adults at each place she’s been get tired of her, they just ship her off to somewhere else, where the process continues. Maggie’s bad behavior is like shooting herself in the foot, sabotaging possible friendships and relationships, but it becomes more understanding when you realize that this is the only pattern of relationships she knows. Children and adults have both mistreated her, so she doesn’t have any knowledge of healthy and loving relationships to draw on to know how people are supposed to treat each other.

That’s been Maggie’s life for as long as she remembers. The only clothes she has are old, worn pieces of various school uniforms from the various boarding schools where she’s been, and she has no toys or personal possessions except for a pack of cards that she uses to play solitaire, a game that one of her former boarding school roommates taught her. It’s the only game Maggie knows how to play other than imaginary games.

Maggie’s aunts and even her Uncle Morris aren’t particularly good for her. Her aunts have no patience or understanding for her. The aunts do care about Maggie. Maggie does become better fed and healthier because the aunts are concerned about her health, but they don’t understand how to take care of her emotional health. They also have some selfish motives in their care of Maggie, wanting to show off her improvement to their health society because they want to prove their health theories. Uncle Morris is quietly supportive of Maggie, but I found him rather trying because, when Maggie tries to speak to him seriously and sincerely, he just makes jokes and never really addresses her feelings or the realities of her situation. Admittedly, it’s partly because he knows the truth about the dolls but can’t admit it. Still, constant jokes aren’t what Maggie really needs, and his jokes and nonsense wear on her. The dolls also speak nonsense, but they give Maggie the opportunity to learn valuable lessons about how to get long with others and build relationships with them.

How to Build Relationships

One of the first lessons that Maggie learns is that, while other people have done things to hurt her, she also does things that hurt other people’s feelings. Before she can begin to develop relationships, she has to learn to control herself, to not treat other people in hurtful ways, and to apologize and do things to repair damage she’s done. She can’t begin to build a relationship with the dolls until she repairs the damage she did the first time she met them. Maggie is actually amazed that she was able to do it because she has never fixed anything in her life. She is unaccustomed to the idea that she can make things better when things have gone wrong or when she’s done something wrong. Most of her past problems have just ended in failure and with her being sent away.

Maggie also learns that building relationships with other people means caring about their needs, and Maggie likes the feeling of being needed by someone. Acting out the tea parties with an empty tea pot and wooden pieces of bread and watering the fake roses on the wallpaper is still ridiculous, but she does it all anyway because the dolls need her to do it. She gives them presents, too, the first presents that she’s ever given anybody. One of the girls at Maggie’s school, Barbara, sees Maggie making a present for one of the dolls and gives Maggie a little paper umbrella for a doll. Maggie learns that it’s possible for people to bond over shared interests.

What Are the Dolls Really?

However, there is a dark side to this story. There are hints all along about what the dolls really are. The man doll, Timothy John, is always reading a torn scrap of a newspaper about a fire, but he can never finish the story because most of it is missing. Every day is Wednesday for them, and they say that is the day they arrived in that room. When they show Maggie their best Sunday clothes, which they never wear because every day is Wednesday to them, Maggie is surprise to see that the clothes are burned. The dolls also speak of a third person who is supposed to join their doll household at some point, but they say that it can’t be Maggie because she’s supposed to be their visitor.

The truth is that the dolls are the ghosts of her ancestors, the ones who founded the school. They were killed in a fire in the 1800s, along with their dog, who is now a little china dog in their attic room. The story in the little newspaper scrap is about them, and the fire is the reason why the school had to be moved to another building. Maggie doesn’t realize the truth until she runs away after an argument with her aunts because she didn’t come to the party of their society and finds their grave stones. It’s the anniversary of their deaths, and she meets Uncle Morris at their graves. The only time Uncle Morris doesn’t make jokes is when he explains to Maggie how they died.

After the aunts catch her in the attic with the dolls and Maggie finds out who and what they are, the dolls stop moving and talking to her. Maggie tries moving them herself, acting out their tea party, and talking for them. Maggie is afraid that the dolls have now died forever, but there is the third person the doll spoke of to consider. The third person is Uncle Morris. It occurred to me that the story leaves it a little ambiguous about whether the dolls were really the ghosts of the ancestors or if Maggie’s own lonely imagination, inspired by Uncle Morris’s nonsense and bits of family history made her feel like they did. However, the ending of the story indicates that Maggie didn’t imagine any of it because her Uncle Morris dies of a heart attack and becomes a doll in the attic with the other dolls. When Uncle Morris joins the other dolls, the other dolls come to life again. However, it could still be the imaginings of a lonely and grieving child.

Maggie’s aunts decide that they simply can’t handle Maggie, so they are the ones who arrange for her to go to her new family. It was the best thing that they could have done for Maggie. The new family is the family that Maggie really needs, and they want to keep her permanently. She never tells her new sisters the truth about the dolls. Maggie misses being with the dolls, who are also her family, but the idea that they are still alive and that Uncle Morris is keeping the other two in the attic company so they won’t be lonely without her makes her feel better. It’s a bittersweet story.

One of the things that bothers me about ghost stories is that it’s sad to think about how the people got killed. I like stories that are kind of mysterious, but behind the ghost story, there is real tragedy. I feel really bad for Maggie’s ancestors and their poor dog, although they don’t seem to mind their condition too much. On the other hand, maybe some of their nonsense talk is to cover up the sad parts, so they can forget the tragedy and pretend like they’re still living their normal lives and make it so they don’t have to answer Maggie’s uncomfortable questions. Maybe that’s even where Uncle Morris learned that trick.

There are times when the dolls seem to have some memory of the past and what happened to them, but they’re kind of caught in a sense of timeless, so it’s hard to tell how much they really remember. If they really are ghost dolls and not just dolls who are alive in Maggie’s imagination, there’s no explanation about why they are dolls. Did they have dolls made of themselves while they were alive that they came to inhabit after death? Is it because they’re now playing at a life they’re no longer living? The story doesn’t say. Uncle Morris seems to know more than he tells, and he may have known somehow that he would also become a doll after his death. If he met the dolls himself when he was young, he may have made a conscious decision that he would join them one day. However, we don’t know for sure how much he knows or how or why the other dolls know to expect him after his death. Poor Maggie’s life has been about loss since the death of her parents. She lost them and her first home and every home she’s had since then. The idea that people she loves stay alive in the dolls could still be her imagination. The story indicates it’s all really happening, but readers can still decide for themselves.

Posted on October 14, 2022October 14, 2022 by TracyC

Haunting at Black Water Cove

Haunting at Black Water Cove by Norma Lehr, 2000.

Kathy is spending some time with her mother at the lake while her mother takes care of a friend’s lodge there. Kathy’s great-grandmother and her brother used to live in the area, and her mother used to visit the lake regularly as a little girl. Soon after she arrives, Kathy meets a new friend, Drew, a boy who lives with his older brother and is self-conscious about his asthma. While the two of them are by the lake, Kathy thinks that she keeps seeing a raft that nobody else can spot. Later, she sees the ghost of a young girl in a ragged dress with a blue aura around her.

Drew writes a small local newsletter, and when Kathy accompanies him to interview an elderly woman, she learns that years ago, her great-granduncle, Duncan, was involved in the disappearance of the woman’s older sister. Ruby Faye’s body was never found, but people believe that she must be dead, assuming that she must have drowned in the lake. They believed that Duncan must have somehow caused Ruby Faye to drown because he was with her at the time. Although Duncan had a reputation as being a bit of a hooligan, Kathy can’t believe that he would have harmed the girl, named Ruby Faye, or let her drown in the lake if he could have prevented it. Duncan himself lost the ability to speak because of whatever happened that day, so he could never explain to anyone what really happened, but it must have been something terrible to send him into such a shocked state. About a year later, Duncan died young of an illness without regaining the ability to speak.

Before Ruby Faye died, the water in the cove had been clear, and the place was called Sunny Bay. Since then, the water turned dark and cloudy, giving Black Water Cove its new name. Kathy is sure that the ghost girl she’s been seeing is Ruby Faye, and she thinks the girl’s spirit is trying to tell her the truth behind her mysterious disappearance.

The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive.

My Reaction and Spoilers:

I enjoyed this spooky book for the mystery it poses about the disappearance of a young girl many years before. Because Kathy has been seeing her ghost, readers know that she must have died, but there is still the mystery of how it happened and what left Duncan so traumatized. I love mystery stories, and this story was also interesting for me because it turns out that the secret of Ruby Faye’s disappearance relates to a real historical event. Duncan and Kathy’s other relatives lived in the area during the famous 1906 earthquake that struck Northern California. Ruby Faye disappeared the day after it happened.

Spoilers

Ruby Faye and Duncan had been in love. Duncan had a raft that Ruby Faye helped him build, and when she disappeared, most people assumed that he had been goofing off on the raft and caused her to drown. In fact, Ruby Faye did not drown at all; she died from a fall. When Kathy goes to the spot by the lake where Duncan had left his raft years ago, she sees their spirits act out what happened that day.

Like Drew, Duncan had a handicap that made him self-conscious: one of his legs was shorter than the other, and he couldn’t walk without a crutch. On the day after the earthquake, he and Ruby Faye were playing by the lake. She was making a garland of flowers. She decided to go up the nearby mountainside and get some more flowers. Duncan warned her not to go because the place was dangerous, but she just laughed it off. Shortly after she left Duncan, he heard her scream for help. Duncan tried to go to her, but his crutch had fallen off the raft, and he couldn’t find it. He tried to get up the mountainside anyway, but he couldn’t manage it. There was no one else around to help. While Duncan didn’t cause the accident that befell Ruby Faye, Duncan’s guilt and helpless anger at not being able to save Ruby Faye robbed him of his ability to speak.

Kathy ventures up the mountainside herself to see where Ruby Faye went when she screamed and disappeared, and just as Ruby Faye did herself, falls into an open mine shaft. The earthquake opened it up the day before Ruby Faye went there in 1906, but no one thought to look for her there because they were sure she had fallen in the lake. Kathy manages to hang on until her dog alerts people to her danger, and they come to help her. Drew is the first person to see Kathy’s dog, but like Duncan, he is unable to save Kathy himself because he gets upset and brings on an asthma attack. However, he manages to get help from his brother and Kathy’s mother. After Kathy tells Ruby Faye’s sister what really happened, the water in the bay clears, and Kathy sees the spirits of Ruby Faye and Duncan, happily floating together on their raft.

Posted on March 6, 2022August 6, 2023 by TracyC

Something Upstairs

Something Upstairs by Avi, 1988.

This story begins with a famous quote:

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to relive it.
Santayana

It’s an appropriate quote for the story, which is about memory and a repeated wrong that has led to a seemingly endless cycle of violence. The story is framed as having been told to the author by the boy who actually had this frightening adventure.

Kenny Huldorf is unhappy when his parents decide to move the family from California to Rhode Island. Kenny was happy in California, the weather was much better there, and the streets and buildings in Rhode Island all seem small and old. The house they move into is called the Daniel Stillwell House, and it was built in 1789. Right from the beginning, the house gives Kenny a strange feeling, like there’s something or someone there when there shouldn’t be anyone or anything.

Kenny starts to feel better when his parents give him the big, renovated room with the private bathroom in the attic of the house. He likes that room, but there are two smaller rooms off the attic that haven’t been renovated, and they give Kenny a strange feeling. His parents think they were probably old servants’ quarters. One of them has a stain on the floor that makes Kenny think of death, and even more frightening, Kenny gets an odd sense that, somehow, it’s a death he may be responsible for. For a time, Kenny tries to tell himself that it’s nothing but an old stain and occupies himself with unpacking and getting settled. Since school hasn’t started yet, Kenny gets bored and does some exploring of the area. He starts wondering about the history of the town and the house.

Then, one night, Kenny hears a strange sound from the room with the stain. When he goes to investigate, he sees a pair of ghostly, glowing hands reaching up out of the stain on the floor. The hands pull the rest of the ghostly person out of the floor, and Kenny can see that it’s the figure of a boy. When the boy tries to reach out to him, Kenny reacts defensively, and the ghost boy seems frightened and vanishes. The next day, Kenny asks his parents if they believe in ghosts. His father says he doesn’t but that Providence is a very old town and a lot of things have happened there over the years. His mother later says that she doesn’t really believe in ghosts either, but she believes that places have memories. Kenny’s parents conclusions seem to be that Kenny is sensing the general history of the town, but Kenny feels that it’s something more specific than that, that the ghost he saw is a specific person from a specific incident in the history of the house.

The family was given a scrapbook with a list of former owners of their historic home, so Kenny decides to do some research about the past owners and see if he can learn more about where the ghost came from and who it is. When he arrives at the local Historical Library, Kenny is surprised to find out that someone there is expecting him. He is directed to the office of an historian named Pardon Willinghast. Willinghast tells Kenny that he keeps track of the owners of historic homes, which is how he and others at the library recognized his last name, and he expected that someone from the Huldorf family might come to ask about the house. Kenny gives him the list of past owners and asks what Willinghast can tell him about them. Willinghast looks at the list of names and says that there probably won’t be much about them in the library but that he’ll do some research and see what he can find. Kenny also gets the idea to have the local pharmacy test a sample of wood from the stained floor to find out what the stain is.

The next time Kenny sees the ghost, he tries to talk to the ghost boy and ask him who he is. The ghost has trouble talking but manages to communicate one word: “slave.” The pharmacy tells Kenny that the stain on the wood is human blood. They can tell that the stain is more than 100 years old, which is why they haven’t reported it to the police, like they’d have to with a recent blood stain. When Kenny talks to Willinghast again, he wants to know about people who lived in his house over 100 years ago who might have owned slaves, which limits the scope of his investigation to the first three families who owned the house. Willinghast is oddly vague in his reply, and when the subject of abolitionists comes up, he makes vague references to “agitators” and people who want to “rush history.” When Kenny tries to ask him about a murder that may have occurred in the house, Willinghast becomes agitated himself and tries to discourage Kenny from inquiring further. He says that if a slave was murdered, it probably wouldn’t even have been reported in a newspaper because it wouldn’t have been considered important.

However, now that Kenny understands that a young slave was murdered in his house and is still haunting it, he can’t leave the situation alone. He continues trying to communicate with the ghost boy, and the ghost gradually finds it easier to talk to him. He says that his name is Caleb and indicates that he is tied to the stain on the floor. He can’t seem to move very far from it. He says that he’s a memory of what happened there. He is aware that he was murdered, but he doesn’t know who did it because he was killed in his sleep. He senses that he was killed by someone who wanted to keep him a slave because he and other black people were trying to free themselves from slavery. Kenny asks Caleb if there’s anything he can do to help him, and Caleb asks him to find his murderer. Kenny asks how he can do that when the murder happened so long ago.

Then, the attic changes, and Kenny finds himself back in the past, in Caleb’s time. Kenny looks out the window and sees a strange man in a black cape watching the house. As he explores the town, he witnesses a public argument about slavery and someone asks him to deliver a note. The next morning, Kenny is back in his own bed, in his own time. When Kenny talks to the ghost again, he describes what he saw in the past, and Caleb recognizes these events and people as being part of the circumstances that led to his death. He has trouble believing that Kenny really cares about what happened to him so long ago. He says that white people have broken their promises to him before, but Kenny insists that he does care and that he wants to not only solve his murder but prevent it so Caleb can finally be free from haunting that room.

However, that’s going to be even more difficult than Kenny thinks. On his next trip into the past, he discovers who their true enemy is: Pardon Willinghast. Willinghast isn’t just an historian. Almost like Caleb, Willinghast is memory, a piece of the past that keeps coming back to haunt the people who live in Caleb’s old house and who have tried to help Caleb before. Willinghast has figured out that if someone from the future comes to the past and they lose something they’ve carried with them or if they get hurt or change themselves in some way, they can get stuck in the past, seeming like ghosts to the people there. (Or, so he says.) He has used this knowledge before against other people who have tried to help Caleb, blackmailing them into helping him instead. Now, he has the lucky key chain that Kenny always carries with him. Until Kenny gets this key chain back, he’s stuck in the past, and Willinghast won’t return it until Kenny does what he wants. In fact, he implies that Kenny is already doing what he wants, leaving Kenny to wonder if he’s accidentally leading Caleb into a trap while trying to help him escape from one.

Kenny set out to help Caleb, but he’s in danger of becoming a part of the same cycle of murder that has been repeated over and over for almost 200 years. As Kenny tries to help Caleb, he knows he’s being manipulated by Willinghast into playing a role in a very old story, but since he doesn’t have a copy of the script, he struggles to figure out what has to change to break the cycle. Can he find a way to break cycle and escape without either himself or Caleb losing their lives?

Th book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive (multiple copies).

My Reaction and Spoilers

This is a book that I remembered from when I was a kid, but strangely, I’m sure that I never heard the end of it back then. I’m having trouble remembering exactly why I never heard the end. I think it might have been one that a teacher was reading aloud, and maybe I was absent the day she finished it. Either that, or I started reading it myself and chickened out before the end because I was spooked.

This book poses a kind of “gun-to-your-head” type of decision, forcing both Kenny and the readers to consider what they would do if they were forced to make a choice between two horrible options. In this case, Kenny is put into the position of being pressured into committing a murder or being trapped forever in the past. Willinghast committed the original murder, and he tells Kenny that the only way he’ll return his keychain to him and let him go home is if he shoots Caleb himself this time. Willinghast is confident that he can force Kenny to do what he wants because he’s done the same to others before him. Other past owners of the house have tried to help Caleb before, but Willinghast has manipulated each of them into betraying Caleb and shooting him instead. These are the betrayals that Caleb referred to earlier. Willinghast claims that each of these people has lost their memory of what they’ve done when they return to their own time, so Kenny won’t have to worry about feeling guilty about killing Caleb. But, if Kenny gives in, he knows that Caleb will remain a ghost, and someday, someone else will also be in Kenny’s position, another pawn in Willinghast’s sick game of endlessly repeated murder. As long as Willinghast gets his way, not only is Caleb going to be his perpetual murder victim, but every person who tries to help will continue to be victimized and forced to participate in his bloody crime.

There is also a deeper theme to this story. Violence begets violence, and hate begins hate. Murder, revenge, hatred, and yes, also slavery and racism, are part of violent cycles that draw other people into them long after the original deed was done. People are haunted by the past in many ways … especially those who feel like they’ve got something to prove about it. It’s a theme that’s been very much on people’s minds in the early 21st century, and there are many, like Kenny, who are unwilling to be pulled into going along with violence, murder, racism, and everything that goes with it just to save some past people’s public images or some modern people’s egos.

Willinghast has correctly realized that the reason why he’s able to come back is because he’s a part of Caleb’s memory as his original murderer. Every time Caleb’s ghost tries to solve his murder and change the past, Willinghast gets reawakened to interfere. In his role posing as the historian, he rewrites the accounts of Caleb’s death in the archives to trick the people trying to help him. He’s not about truth but manipulation, much like the pseudo-historians who resurface to tell “their truth” when certain controversial topics come up. He has a vested interest in lying to cover up his own shameful deed and to force others into helping him get things his way. Willinghast does not care either about accurate history or about the welfare of future generations; he only uses them to cover up his own misdeeds. He’s used other people to repeat his dirty work before, and he’ll do it again, blaming Caleb each time for bringing it on himself by trying to survive instead of just accepting his own murder and staying dead … unless things are different this time around. The violence ends when someone finally says no and refuses to play along. So, what Kenny is really looking for, in this situation where he seems to be given a choice between two horrible options, is a third option that allows both him and Caleb to escape.

Because the story is framed as one being told by Kenny to the author later, readers know from the beginning that Kenny finds another solution to the problem that doesn’t include murdering Caleb or being trapped in the past as a ghost. The suspense comes from the readers wondering how he’s going to do that. Kenny’s solution isn’t entirely peaceful (spoiler) because he ends up shooting Willinghast, but that could be seen as an act of self-defense, not only saving himself but also Caleb and all of Willinghast’s future victims. It seems like eliminating Willinghast was the only way to end the cycle of murder because it wasn’t really Caleb’s attempts to save himself or bring his murderer to justice but Willinghast’s attempts to cover up his crime that kept the cycle going. Willinghast blames Caleb for trying to avoid being murdered, but the truth is that it’s his original act of murder that created this situation from the beginning and his continual cover-up and recruitment of unwilling abettors that has kept the cycle going. Readers can debate whether there was another way to solve the problem, but once Willinghast is gone, the cycle is broken.

Some might also point out that the reason why Willinghast targeted Caleb in the first place was that Caleb shot one of Willinghast’s associates first, but the reason why Caleb did that was that Willinghast’s associates were violently targeting a black neighborhood, and Caleb was trying to hold them off. Once again, violence begets violence until someone decides not to participate. In the end, Kenny commits a violent act, but the cycle ends because he gets the one person who was at the center of all of the other violence from the beginning. Kenny also remembers everything that happened when he returns to his own time, which brings up a point that I’ve already mentioned but I’d like to explain in more detail: Willinghast is a liar.

The only reason why Kenny knows, or thinks he knows, that Willinghast has power over him and can prevent him from returning to his own time as long as he holds one of his belongings is because Willinghast says so. Nobody else in the story says that, and frankly, Willinghast is a known liar. He was never a real historian. He’s only another ghost from the past masquerading as one to trick people into doing his bidding. He fakes historical records to manipulate people. He is an admitted murderer. He said that Kenny wouldn’t remember what happened in the past when he returns to his own time, so he wouldn’t have to feel guilty about shooting someone, but Kenny remembers everything. This didn’t occur to me when I first encountered this story as a kid, but looking at it now, I can’t help but think, why the heck should Kenny believe anything that Willinghast says about how the time travel works?

At the point in the story where Willinghast tells Kenny that he’s trapped in the past as long as he has his key chain, Kenny already been to the past once and returned from it without either Willinghast’s help or interference. Kenny did not get to the past by Willinghast’s power, but through Caleb’s memories. Willinghast was counting on Kenny to be frightened and confused so that he would rely on his word for what’s going to happen to him in the past and feel like he had something real to lose for not going along with his plans, but even as I read the story, I doubted him. I think what he said about Kenny needing his key chain to return home might have just been another of Willinghast’s lies. I don’t recall seeing anything in the story that proved that Willinghast was right, and it seems that none of his other victim/accomplices put his lies to the test to find out. There is no one else trapped in the past as a ghost because we never see any such people in the story. So, if that hasn’t actually happened to anyone before, how would Willinghast or anyone else know that such a thing was even a possibility?

The fact that Kenny remembers shooting Willinghast also suggests that everything Willinghast said may have been a lie. He claimed that none of the other time travelers retained their memories, so Kenny wouldn’t remember if he shot Caleb. If Kenny wouldn’t remember shooting Caleb, how would he be able to remember shooting Willinghast? Unless Willinghast needs to be alive after Caleb’s death to rewrite people’s memories, it sounds like the idea that Kenny wouldn’t remember what happened in the past was a lie. We never see or hear from the other people Willinghast manipulated, so we don’t know for sure that they had no memories or guilt over what happened. That could be another subject for debate among readers, but from what I saw in the story, I’m thinking that Willinghast should be considered a liar on everything he said. I think the real trap wasn’t that Willinghast was holding Kenny in the past so much as Willinghast was making Kenny believe that he was. Although he tried to make Kenny believe that he only had two choices, Kenny himself found a third one. Perhaps there were other possible choices, but we know that there was at least one more option than Willinghast led Kenny to believe he had.

Because there are violent themes in this story, it isn’t for very young kids, but it does combine some historical details with excitement for kids who enjoy scary stories. There is also some use of the n-word on the part of the villains in the story, so be warned. The story is thought-provoking on the subjects of history and personal choices.

In the end, after Kenny has finished telling his story to the author, he says that he knows that Caleb survived the room where he was murdered before and no longer haunts it. Caleb ran away after Willinghast was dead, but Kenny doesn’t know where he went after that or what happened to him. He finds himself worrying that the violence caught up with him again somewhere else and that maybe he’s just haunting a different house now because the memory of all that was done to him will never end. This is the final question the story leaves readers. Is that how it really is? Is there an end to the wrong, or are Caleb and others like him still ghosts who haunt us all?

This story reminds me somewhat of a YouTube video made by Kaz Rowe in 2022 about the history of ghost hunting. While talking about the history of belief in ghosts and our society’s fascination with ghosts and ghost stories, Kaz Rowe points out that many of our historical American ghost stories focus on moments when our society failed and innocent or vulnerable people suffered. The ghosts that haunt our society often represent unresolved situations – unpunished crimes, unacknowledged injustices, perpetuated wrongs, and tragedies that can’t be undone. There is a feeling that there was more that our society could have done and should have done to prevent needless death and suffering, and that’s probably true. Perhaps some of these problems were the result of people who thought (or convinced others) that they only had one option or just one choice between two bad options – black-and-white thinking, if you will – so they made terrible choices, never considering or choosing to acknowledge that there might be other ways. One of the difficult parts of studying history is considering the choices not made and the things people of the past left undone. It does create an unsettling a sense of the unresolved, that the past is still with us and haunting us today. What Kaz Rowe was talking about is that part of the interest in communicating with ghosts is that sense of the unresolved. There were people in the past who needed help and didn’t get it, people whose voices weren’t heard when they needed someone to listen, and people who suffered when no one seemed to care. When people reach out to ghosts, they seem to be saying that, even if no one heard them or cared about them in their time, someone does care now and wants to hear what they have to say. We don’t have the ability to go back and change the past, like the character in the story, but there may be the hope that caring and listening can, in some way, offer peace to the ghosts of the past because someone finally understands what they went through and how they felt.

Do I think Caleb and others are still haunting us? Yes, after a fashion, I think so. There is the haunting feeling of a past that can’t be changed or entirely made right. Caleb isn’t haunting Kenny’s house anymore, but he is haunting Kenny’s mind because of the shared trauma of what they went through and Kenny’s lingering fears about Caleb’s life after the events.

In that sense, I would say that maybe the ghost hunters have it right. Maybe the best thing to do with the ghosts of the past is not to be afraid of them but to pay attention to them and see them and their situations for exactly what they were. The haunting in the back of our minds comes from our inability or unwillingness to see what we can sense is there and is begging to be seen. That feeling comes from the human impulse to investigate and understand. It’s the unknowables and uncertainties in life that are the most frightening. When you know, even when you know the worst, you stop worrying so much about it. There are no more unanswered questions and things that just don’t add up, the questioning little voices in your head fall quiet, and the ghosts have nothing more to say because they’ve been heard and seen.

Posted on December 20, 2021June 1, 2023 by TracyC

The Children of Green Knowe

Green Knowe

The Children of Green Knowe by L. M. Boston, 1954, 1955, 1982, 1983.

Seven-year-old Toseland is traveling by train to stay with his great-grandmother Oldknow at the old family home, Green Noah, for Christmas. His mother is dead, and his father now lives in Burma with his new wife, who Toseland doesn’t know very well. He has no brothers or sisters, and he spends most of his time at boarding school, so he is often lonely, wishing that he had a family outside of school, like the other boys. His great-grandmother is the only other relative he has, and he has never met her before. He is a little nervous at the idea of meeting her because he knows that she must be very old.

When Toseland arrives at the station, it’s raining, and there has been flooding, but there is a taxi-man waiting to take him to the house. When he arrives, he is immediately fascinated by the large, old house and all of the things in it. It reminds him of a castle, and he marvels at how his great-grandmother could live in such a place. He is surprised at how at home he feels there and how easily he likes and gets along with his great-grandmother. For the first time in his life since his mother died, he really feels at home, and when he asks if the house partly belongs to him, too, his great-grandmother reassures him that it does.

The two of them talk about what to call each other. Toseland’s great-grandmother asks him to call her Granny (although she is still often called Mrs. Oldknow throughout the book), and she asks him if he has any nicknames. Toseland says that the boys at school call him Towser and his stepmother calls him Toto, but he doesn’t like either nickname. Granny Oldknow says that Toseland is a family name and there have been other Toselands before him. The last one was his grandfather, and his nickname was Tolly, so Granny asks him if he would like to be called that also. Toseland says that he likes that nickname better than the others, and his mother used to call him that, so he is called Tolly from that point on.

Granny Oldknow shows Tolly to his room and helps him begin to unpack. It’s a wonderful room with many old toys that used to belong to the other children who have lived in the house in the past. Among the toys is an old dollhouse which Tolly realizes is a miniature version of the house they’re in. When he finds the miniature version of his room, he notices that there are four beds in it instead of one. He asks Granny Oldknow if other children stay at Green Noah, and she cryptically says that they do sometimes, and he might see them, but they come when they want to.

Tolly becomes fascinated by a portrait of three children in old-fashioned clothes with their mother and grandmother. Granny Oldknow tells him that those three children lived in the house long ago. The oldest boy was an earlier Toseland, who was nicknamed Toby. His younger brother was named Alexander, and their little sister was named Linnet. Granny Oldknow had been an orphan when she was a child and was raised at Green Noah by an uncle. Because she was an only child, she often lonely and liked to pretend that the children in the picture were her siblings, so Tolly decides that he’d like to do the same thing.

Tolly asks his great-grandmother questions about Toby, Alexander, and Linnet and learns details of their lives. Toby had a sword because he was going to be a soldier when he grew up, a pet deer, and a horse named Feste who loved him. Alexander had a book in Latin that he loved to read and a special flute. Linnet used to keep birds in a wicker cage that is still in Tolly’s room, along with the toy mouse that used to belong to Toby. Sometimes, Tolly thinks that toys in his room move when he’s not looking, and at night, he hears children moving about and laughing, and he thinks that it’s the three children from the painting.

Tolly comes to the conclusion that the three children are still around Green Noah and that they’re playing hide-and-seek with them. He tries to play with them, too, and the children apparently give him a twig in the shape of a ‘T’. Granny Oldknow tells him that she used to play hide-and-seek with the children when she was young, and they would give her an ‘L’ twig because her first name is Linnet, like the little girl in the painting. Later, he hears the children singing Christmas carols. Tolly becomes frustrated that the children tease him and never really show themselves to him, but Mrs. Oldknow tells him that “they’re like shy animals” and that he has to give them a chance to decide that they’re ready to come to him.

He finds the key to the old toy box in his room, and inside the box, he finds more things that belonged to the three children. When he shows them to Mrs. Oldknow, she talks about how things were when the three children were alive at Green Noah. Tolly is shocked when he realizes for the first time that Toby, Alexander, and Linnet are all dead. Mrs. Oldknow gently tells him that they lived at Green Noah centuries ago and could not be alive now. Sadly, the children all died young in the Great Plague during the 17th century. Their illness was sudden and brief, and they all sickened and died in one day along with their mother. Tolly and his great-grandmother are descended from the children’s older brother, who wasn’t at home when this happened. However, the children never left Green Noah, which used to be called Green Knowe years ago. Tolly still loves the children, even though they’re ghostly and elusive. He craves the sense of family he gets from them, having been deprived of family feelings for so much of his young life.

Mrs. Oldknow continues to tell Tolly stories about the three children and other members of his family. As his connection to his ancestors grows, Tolly begins to catch glimpses of the children more and more, and eventually, he’s able to see them and talk to them. He asks the children about their mother, and the children say that she’s in heaven but doesn’t mind them coming back to visit their old home from time to time. The children don’t seem sad at being dead, enjoying the freedom of playing around their old home with the animals and the spirits of their old pets, who keep them company. Their final illnesses had only lasted a few hours before they died, and their deaths happened so long ago that they say that they hardly remember the Great Plague and what it felt like. Tolly is still sad and frustrated that the children appear and disappear so suddenly, but his attachment to them grows and so does his attachment to Green Noah itself. As Christmas comes, Tolly develops a bond with his family, both living and dead, and a realization that the old family home that connects them is also his home, a place they can all return to.

The book is the first in a series and is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive (multiple copies).

My Reaction and Spoilers

This is a ghost story, but it’s not a scary ghost story. There’s nothing frightening about the three ghost children. It’s sad that they died so young, but at the same time, they’re not very sad about it themselves. They seem to enjoy playing together endlessly with the animals around their old home and seeing the new relatives who inhabit the house, their older brother’s descendants. Even their former pets are no longer sad at the children’s passing because they are also spirits who continue to play with them through the centuries. There is one semi-scary part of the story involving a witch’s curse placed on an old tree called Green Noah, which is how the name of the house was changed from Green Knowe, but Tolly is protected by the ghosts of his ancestors.

There is never any desire for the characters to rid Green Noah of its ghosts. They are family and are part of the place, as much a part of it as the living are. The ghosts do not feel trapped there, either. They are just revisiting the home they loved and the family members who now live there. They can come and go as they please, and the ghost children often do.

This also is not the kind of story where a child knows that a place is haunted but can’t convince the adults or tries to hide the ghosts’ presence from the adults. Mrs. Oldknow is fully aware that the ghosts are there and has known about them since her own childhood. Generations of children in the family have probably known about them and played with them, and they are also not the only family ghosts who inhabit the old house. At one point, Tolly and Mrs. Oldknow hear a woman singing and the rocking of a cradle, and Mrs. Oldknow says that she’s heard it before around Christmas, a grandmother singing to a baby. Tolly is confused because even little Linnet wasn’t a baby when she died, and Mrs. Oldknow says that this isn’t the children’s grandmother but somebody from generations earlier than the three children. This grandmother ghost has been around so long that Mrs. Oldknow doesn’t know who she or the baby are supposed to be, although we are told that they are about 400 years old, where the three children died about 300 years earlier. Generations of the same family have lived in the house and have all left their mark on it, and part of them is still there. Now, Tolly has also become part of this family home, and it’s also a part of him. The ghosts are hesitant to fully show themselves to Tolly at first and seem more attached to Granny Oldknow, probably because she’s lived there longer, since she was an infant. The ghosts know her, and she knows all of their stories. However, they are all family, and Tolly develops a new connection to his family as his great-grandmother tells him the stories about them, and he can hear and see the ghosts more often.

Really, that feeling of connection and connectedness is the primary focus of the story. In the beginning, Tolly is lonely, feeling like he doesn’t have a family and doesn’t belong anywhere or to anyone. His father lives far away in Burma with his new wife, and Tolly doesn’t feel connected to them. His mother is gone, and he spends most of his time at school, even having to remain there during the holidays when other students are going home to their families. His great-grandmother inviting him to Green Noah is the first time that Tolly feels a real connection to anyone in his family since his mother’s death, and through her stories and his encounters with the ghosts, he comes to see that he really is part of a much larger family, going back ages. Just because most of his family is now dead or scattered doesn’t mean that they’re not his family. They still love him, and he loves them, even across the centuries. Green Noah really is a family home, and it’s a place that family can return to, even those who seem to be gone forever. It’s a place that has known both the joys of a happy family and the tragedies of loss that families experience from time to time. Through it all, it’s still home, and importantly, it becomes the home that Tolly has been wishing for.

The story takes place in the days leading up to Christmas, and by Christmas, Tolly has received important presents. First, the ghostly Alexander grants him the give of his special flute, which had been a reward from King Charles II for singing so beautifully for him when he was alive. Tolly also has musical talents, and his great-grandmother decides to switch him to a different school so he can develop his talents and so he can stay at Green Noah during his school holidays. On Christmas, Tolly also receives his own pet dog, very much like the one that the ghostly Linnet owned, and he names his dog after hers, just as he has been named after all the other Toselands who have gone before.

In some ways, the story reminds me a little of When Marnie Was There (some people might know the story from the Miyazaki movie version), which has similar themes of family and belonging and ancestors reaching out across time to remind children that, while life is brief and often complicated, love is eternal and everyone belongs somewhere and to someone. However, The Children of Greene Knowe is a much gentler story, and it also contains some shorter stories about Tolly’s family.

#124 The Pumpkin Head Mystery by Gertrude Chandler Warner, 2010.

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