Posted on by TracyC

Mystery at Kittiwake Bay

Mystery at Kittiwake Bay by Joyce A. Stengel, 2001.

Cassie Hartt has only recently moved to Kittiwake Bay, Maine with her mother and brother following her parents’ divorce. Her mother is a nurse, and she has found a job at the local hospital, which is actually 30 miles away from the little town where they were able to find a house. Because of her mother’s long commute, Cassie will need to look after her 7-year-old brother, Danny. Soon after arriving, she meets a nice boy named Marc Nolan, who is a little older than she is and loves boats, and a girl name Liz Painter, who likes photography and walks her cat on a leash. Liz is the one who introduces Cassie and Danny to the Beachcombers Club, which is a group for kids Danny’s age who like to go swimming and camping and the kids who hang out at the Sand Shack coffee shop. Marc is one of the Sand Shack kids, and so is a boy named Ryan Jerrick, who is Liz’s crush. Cassie is glad to be making friends and starting to get settled into her new home, but soon, there are complications.

One evening, on her way home from the grocery store with her dog, Sam (short for Samson), Cassie sees some mysterious figures sneaking around in the dark. She doesn’t know who they are, but the way they’re sneaking around worries her. She later learns that there have been robberies in the area.

Cassie develops a fascination for the large house that she saw on a cliff near the ocean, and Marc and Ryan tell her that’s a senior citizens’ residence called Waterview Manor. Both of them work there part time. Liz says that the house wasn’t always a senior citizens’ residence and that there are a lot of weird stories about the place. It was built by a rich man before the Civil War, but it became property of the town in the 1950s. One of the stories about the place is that it was once part of the Underground Railroad helping escaped slaves. The boys say that a woman named Mrs. Wentworth says that her grandfather was one of the people helping escaped slaves. There’s also a story about Captain Kidd hiding his treasure somewhere around the old house, although Ryan doesn’t believe any of these stories. He thinks Mrs. Wentworth just tells tall tales. Cassie thinks that she might like to volunteer at the house, like the boys did before they started working there as employees. If her little brother joins the Beachcombers Club, she’ll have some free time for volunteer work.

When Cassie goes to Waterview Manor to sign up, she witnesses an argument between Ryan and Mrs. Wentworth, who is confined to a wheelchair. Ryan was being disrespectful because Mrs. Wentworth was telling one of her stories about the history of the town that Ryan thinks is outlandish, and Mrs. Wentworth was telling him off. Ryan doesn’t actually like working at Waterview, but he has to keep his job because he needs the money. Cassie thinks he’s arrogant. Ryan has no patience for the fetching and carrying he has to do for the older people, and he thinks that Mrs. Wentworth’s mind is going. Cassie thinks that Mrs. Wentworth sounds like she still has her faculties and is sympathetic when Mrs. Wentworth laments about not being able to do things she used to do because her hands and feet won’t obey her anymore. Mrs. Wentworth is physically feeble these days, but she knows what she’s talking about when it comes to local history.

After she signs up to volunteer, Cassie can’t resist a peek into the forbidden East Wing of the house, and she meets Marc there. They both admit that they’re curious about the stories of treasure in the house. Unlike Ryan, Marc believes Mrs. Wentworth’s stories, and Cassie can’t wait to hear more!

Mrs. Wentworth used to be a history teacher, and she does know more about local history than Ryan gives her credit. She tells Cassie how her grandfather used to be a conductor on the Underground Railroad and how his friend, Mr. Palmer, who was the original owner of Waterview Manor, was a stationmaster, which meant that he hosted and hid the escaping slaves that Mrs. Wentworth’s grandfather conducted to him. Mrs. Wentworth’s grandfather told her about a secret room where they used to hide people and a secret tunnel that would take them to the landing site for the boat that would smuggle the runaways to Canada. When Cassie asks her about the story about Captain Kidd hiding his treasure somewhere in the area, Mrs. Wentworth said that her grandfather always believed he did, although Captain Kidd was much older than both her grandfather and the Manor. She explains a little about the life story of Captain Kidd and how it seems that most of his treasure was never found.

However, they soon have a more modern mystery on their hands. Whoever has been stealing things in the area recently seems to have started taking things from Waterview Manor. First, an expensive chess set belonging to one of residents disappears. Then, some jewelry and a coin collection disappear. Then, someone steals Mrs. Wentworth’s beloved lavaliere necklace, a special present from her late husband. For someone to both know about the residents’ valuables and to have access to them, the thief must be somebody working at the Manor! Who, could it be? Is it grumpy Ryan, who needs money? Is it John, another employee, who often acts a little strange? Could it even be helpful Marc, who seems nice but is often lurking around areas where both he and Cassie aren’t supposed to be? Or is it someone else Cassie wouldn’t even think to suspect?

The mysteries of the past start mingling with the mysteries of the present. Cassie sees signal lights from the tower of the old house that remind her of of the signals Mrs. Wentworth said the Underground Railroad used. Is someone now using them for a different purpose?

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

My Reaction

The Underground Railroad is a popular subject in US children’s books. There is something compelling about people sneaking around on clandestine missions and hiding in secret rooms and secrets passages, and since these things were used in the real life Underground Railroad, they make convenient devices for US children’s books with some historical flavor. The former Underground Railroad secret passage in Waterview Manor does play a role in this story. Someone is using it for a new purpose, just like they’re using signals from the tower.

The purpose of the Underground Railroad secret tunnel in the story is also to show that Mrs. Wentworth knows what she’s taking about when she tells her stories about local history. Ryan tries to discount her stories because some of them sound a little far-fetched and dramatic and because he thinks scornfully of the old people he serves in his job. Ryan has a negative attitude and looks at the elderly as being senile and demanding. Cassie feels differently because she has more empathy and, perhaps, because her mother is a nurse, which may make her more aware of the human condition and more comfortable helping other people. She seems to understand what Mrs. Wentworth means when she talks about finding it frustrating that she can’t do things she used to do, and she says that she agrees with Mrs. Wentworth when she says that she likes keeping her hair long even though a nurse at the Manor says it would be easier to care for if she cut it shorter. The nurse is probably thinking that short hair would be easier on those who might have to help Mrs. Wentworth wash and brush it, but Cassie understands when Mrs. Wentworth explains why she likes her hair long. Cassie thinks the people who live at Waterview Manor are interesting, and she admits to her mother that she likes to pretend that they’re her grandparents. She is fascinated by Mrs. Wentworth’s stories, and because she and Marc believe what she says, they are able to get to the bottom of the mysteries surrounding the Manor.

I was pretty sure I knew who at least one of the thieves was, and I was also pretty sure I knew why. I was correct in my first guess, but there were enough red herrings along the way to give me some doubts, so there was plenty of suspense in the story. One of them wasn’t fully aware of what he was getting involved with at first, but he does bear responsibility for what he did even after he knew.

This book also deals with the subject of divorce and how it affects families and children. Books like this were once rare, but they have been very common staples of children’s literature since the late 20th century, reflecting changes in American society and a growing willingness to discuss difficult topics with children. Moving to a new state and starting over after the divorce wasn’t easy for Cassie, her mother, and her brother. Cassie quickly becomes interested in the history of her new town, and it doesn’t take her long to find some new friends and a volunteer activity to keep her occupied. However, other aspects of the changes in her life and family will take longer to get used to. Her mother has to work long hours with a long commute, so Cassie frequently has to be responsible for her younger brother when he’s not at activities of his own, and her mother often isn’t home for Cassie to discuss things with her.

There is also some tension between Cassie and her brother because the divorce has changed their relationship with each other. Because Cassie has become more of a caregiver to Danny because her mother has to work, she has to make arrangements for Danny before she can do anything on her own, which sometimes makes things awkward for her. Danny also becomes jealous because Cassie does have more ability to do things on her own than he does and because she makes friends and settles into their new town more easily than he does.

One part of this book that I hated was when Danny intentionally left Sam outside alone to spite Cassie, and Sam is poisoned by one of the villains and nearly dies. Cassie is very upset with Danny because of this incident, understandably so, but I didn’t like it that the other characters were pressuring her to be okay with Danny and forgive him too quickly. They do this because Danny is young, they think that he left the dog out by accident, and Danny feels really badly about almost getting the dog killed. Cassie knows, although Danny doesn’t initially admit it, that Danny left the dog outside on purpose. That purposefulness maliciousness is not a thing that I think should be too easily forgiven, especially not because someone just “feels bad.” Let’s insist on a little empathy here, Danny. Cassie feels bad because you almost got her dog killed. Sam really feels bad because he’s the one who almost died! Maybe your feelings shouldn’t be given first priority here, since you were the one who caused the harm. Sam is a dependent animal. Under no circumstances should animal abuse be excused, and leaving a dependent animal outside alone to be lost, hit by a car, or yes, harmed by some other malicious person is abusive. Danny should not be given a pass for malicious behavior or animal abuse just because he “feels bad.”

Giving people that type of excuse for malice and abuse just encourages more of it in real life because the person finds that there are no consequences for their actions and it gets them the forgiveness and attention they want, so they keep doing it. It’s a dangerous thing to allow. The story makes it clear that Danny was acting out on bad feelings that he already had about the divorce and feeling neglected by both his mother and Cassie, but I think it’s important to make it clear to him that, even if he’s “feeling bad”, that does not give him the right to hurt other people or animals. Nobody has the right to hurt others just because they’ve got mixed-up feelings. I hate it that the other characters don’t seem to feel that way.

The story ends happily when Danny tries to make it up to Cassie by investigating the situation and Cassie rescues him from the bad guys. They have a heart-to-heart talk that makes Cassie realize how important Danny is to her and that she has to make time for paying attention to him and supporting him more during this difficult time. Still, I feel very strongly that the story and the other characters should emphasize to Danny that causing hurt because you feel hurt is wrong and damaging to relationships. The way the other characters tried to make Cassie feel bad about the situation also really felt like gaslighting. She had a real and serious reason for being angry with her brother, and it just made me really angry when they acted like she was the bad one because Danny was “feeling bad” and she wanted him to be accountable for his actions. He knew what he was doing, and he should have known it was dangerous to Sam, even if he didn’t know that someone was going to deliberately try to kill the dog.

I know that Danny has some emotional issues that need to be addressed, but I’m saying that he also has some behavior issues that also need to be addressed. There are helpful ways to deal with emotions and destructive ways to deal with emotions. Danny is not too young to understand the consequences of his actions and to accept them. I don’t think that learning that it can take awhile to regain trust after betraying someone’s trust is also an unbearable lesson. In fact, I’d call it a life skill. If it helps him to develop more empathy and consider other people and the consequences of his actions before he lashes out, it is worth it.

Posted on by TracyC

Something Upstairs

Something Upstairs cover

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 by TracyC

The House on Hackman’s Hill

House on Hackman's Hill cover

The House on Hackman’s Hill by Joan Lowery Nixon, 1985.

This creepy book is interesting partly because it is told in two parts. About half the story is a flashback that explains the history of the house and the mummy inside it, and the rest continues in the present day.

The very beginning of the story is in the present, starting with a pair of cousins. While they are visiting their grandparents, Jeff tells his cousin Debbie that he’s found out about an old, abandoned house nearby that supposedly contains a hidden mummy and that there’s a reward for anybody who finds it. Debbie doesn’t believe him at first, but he says that he heard all about it from their grandparents’ neighbor, Mr. Karsten. Jeff persuades Debbie to come with him to check out the old house. Debbie comes and takes pictures of it because she’s interested in entering a photo contest.

The place looks really creepy, and they have the odd feeling like somebody is watching them, even though the house is supposed to be empty. Debbie says that they should ask their grandparents what they know about the old house. At first, the grandparents don’t want to talk about it. They just say that it’s an old house and not very interesting. Debbie asks them directly about the mummy, and they say that there are a lot of rumors about the old place, but they don’t really believe them. The kids decide to talk to old Mr. Karsten again. Mr. Karsten says that he knows all about the old house on Hackman’s Hill because he lived there for awhile when he was young, back in 1911.

Paul Karsten’s Story

Paul Karsten’s mother was a secretary, and she went to work for Dr. Hackman, the former owner of the house, after the death of her husband. Dr. Hackman was a strange man with changeable moods. He was pleasant enough to Mrs. Karsten, but he hated children and didn’t really like having her son Paul in his house. Dr. Hackman was a history professor, specializing in Egyptology. He was approaching retirement, and he wanted to devote himself to his papers and his collection of Egyptian artifacts. Mrs. Karsten’s job was to help him catalog his collection, and Dr. Hackman offered such a good salary, Mrs. Karsten couldn’t refuse. The mummy was delivered the same day that Paul and his mother moved into the house.

Paul was given a room in the tower of the house, and while he thought that it had a great view at first, he got nervous when he noticed how the tower room was situated on the edge of a cliff. One of Dr. Hackman’s servants, Jules, makes a comment about how Paul should be careful because they don’t want “another accident”, refusing to say more about whatever “accident” occurred there before. Paul was uncomfortable with the house and with Dr. Hackman. He tells his mother that the house frightens him and that he wants to leave, but his mother reassures him that the place only looks strange because of the Egyptian artifacts. Paul found the artifacts he once saw at a museum exhibit frightening and he’s particularly disturbed by a statue that Dr. Hackman has of a man with an animal head, but his mother says that’s just a statue of an Egyptian god.

Paul had notice earlier that a long box had been delivered to the house, and he gives into temptation and tries to look inside. However, he is stopped by Jules. Jules and his wife Anna warn Paul that this house isn’t very good for children and that Dr. Hackman doesn’t like people nosing around or messing with any of part his collection. At dinner, Paul admits to Dr. Hackman that he tried to look in the box and apologizes for his curiosity. Dr. Hackman accepts the apology, and before Paul goes to bed that evening, Dr. Hackman shows him the mummy case that was in the box. Paul asks him if it’s real, and Dr. Hackman says it is. Paul says that he heard that it’s illegal to take real mummies out of Egypt, but Dr. Hackman says that there are ways, if you’re willing to pay for it, and he was. Dr. Hackman says that his eventual goal is to turn his house into a museum of Egyptian artifacts so that scholars will come there to study them and read his papers, and he will be famous. He also says that he knows how to protect himself from the mummy’s curse. The talk of curses scares Paul, but Dr. Hackman says that nothing has ever happened to him personally because of any tomb curses … implying that something might have happened to someone else.

When Paul tells his mother that Dr. Hackman has a real mummy, she is worried and upset. She doesn’t like the idea of people obtaining artifacts through unethical or illegal means, although she knows that the laws are poorly enforced. Mrs. Karsten doesn’t believe in superstitious curses, but soon, strange things begin to happen. While putting away his things in his room, Paul discovers a strange, triangular piece of gold metal with some kind of design on it. When he goes up to bed, he feels like someone is there in the room, although he can’t find anyone. During the night, he wakes up, sees that one of his windows is open, and feels an odd urge to walk toward it, but fortunately, his mother comes to check on him and stops him. Paul and his mother both realize that they were woken by the sound of a cry in the night. His mother supposes that it was some kind of night bird, but Paul knows that it was probably something to do with the curse.

Paul insists that Jules and Anna tell him about the accident that took place in his room. They say that they weren’t working for Dr. Hackman when it happened, but they know that the person who fell from the tower room was a guest of Dr. Hackman’s, he was from Egypt, he died when he fell, and his body was shipped back home. At first, Paul thinks that the gold piece he found probably belonged to the Egyptian guest, but that’s not quite it.

Dr. Hackman gives Paul the job of polishing some of his statues, knowing that they bother him. It amuses Dr. Hackman as a mean joke. However, Paul’s fear of them fades while working with them because he begins to appreciate their artistry. Dr. Hackman is surprised that Paul is able to see that and not just be afraid of the statues. Paul asks him about the statue of the man with the animal head, and he explains that it’s a statue of Anubis, the god of the dead, and scares Paul again by saying that Anubis is the one responsible for the curses on tombs. He says that Anubis’s head is a jackal head and that jackals hunt at night and have a bark like a cry. This confirms to Paul that the curse was responsible for the cry he and his mother heard.

Paul eventually comes to realize that the strange gold piece attracts the mummy and the mummy’s curse, which is why Dr. Hackman knows that he’s in no danger. Dr. Hackman put it in the tower room to make sure that the mummy’s wrath would only come to whoever was in that room … and that’s why he made sure that Paul was given that room, too. To protect himself and his mother, Paul knows that he has to get rid of that gold piece.

Mr. Karsten finishes his story by explaining to Jeff and Debbie where he hid the gold piece and how Dr. Hackman disappeared, apparently a victim of the curse. Nobody ever discovered what happened to Dr. Hackman, and the mummy disappeared that same night, but a museum has offered a reward for anybody who finds the mummy. Mr. Karsten says that various people have tried to stay in the house and find the mummy, but nobody has succeeded. Everyone has been frightened off after just a single night in the house.

Jeff doesn’t believe in curses, and Debbie agrees to accompany him into the old house to find the mummy and claim the reward.

Return to the Present

The rest of the story is about Jeff and Debbie’s adventures with the house on Hackman’s Hill. Jeff says that he thinks all the spooky curse stuff was just put on by Dr. Hackman, who was a mean old man having a joke by scaring a kid with all that talk of curses. Dr. Hackman was definitely a mean old man who enjoyed scaring young Paul Karsten, but questions still remain. How much of what Paul experienced was really real, and what happened to Dr. Hackman? If the curse was just something he made up, why did he scream the night he disappeared, and where did he go?

Jeff’s idea is that all the creepy stuff happened at night, so the best time to go look for the mummy would be during the day. (That’s actually pretty sensible. Why go to a supposedly haunted house during the night if you don’t have to?) The kids make a plan and put together a collection of useful supplies and food for their mummy hunt. They decide to go while their grandmother is busy watching her favorite soap opera and their grandfather is in town, arranging some sort of surprise for them.

When they enter the house, they discover that everything is still inside. All of the furniture and Egyptian artifacts are like Mr. Karsten described them. Debbie has an instant camera that with takes pictures that develop themselves. (No brand name mentioned, but basically, a Polaroid instant camera or something very similar. Those were popular when I was a kid in the 1980s and into the early 1990s, especially for families and amateur photographers. They’re not as popular now with the popularity of smart phones and digital photography, but they’re still around. Although police photographers now use digital cameras, instant cameras have been used in accident and crime scene photography because they produce quick results, the photos last for a long time, and because they develop immediately after being taken, they can’t be digitally altered. What I’m saying is that Debbie has made a good choice for recording their adventures and any evidence that they uncover, and it pays off almost immediately.) When Debbie takes a picture of the statues that Mr. Karsten told them about, she notices something frightening right away: the Anubis statue doesn’t show up in photographs.

Jeff discounts the photographic evidence because Debbie’s hand shook, and the picture is somewhat blurred. However, the kids start hearing noises in the house. Then, Debbie notices that a bad snow storm is approaching. She wants to leave the house immediately, but Jeff realizes that they can’t because they’d never make it back to their grandparents’ house by the time the storm hit. Night approaches, and the kids are about to see just how true Mr. Karsten’s story was. The kids are trapped in the house by the snow storm, but they’re not there alone.

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

My Reaction and Spoilers

I thought that this was a fun, creepy story. The creepiness is tempered somewhat in the first half of this story because it’s told in the form of a flashback. We know during the first part of the story that Paul survives his ordeals and lives to old age because he’s telling the story of what happened when he was young to Jeff and Debbie as an old man. When Jeff and Debbie go into the house themselves, it’s less certain what’s going to happen.

There are points in the story after Jeff and Debbie enter the house where it seems uncertain how much of what Paul Karsten experienced was supernatural and how much might have been due to the machinations of Dr. Hackman, who seems to have been a very disturbed man by himself. They soon discover that the house has secret passages that could allow Dr. Hackman to move around the house unseen and create some strange phenomena himself to scare or harm people in the house. There was a point where I thought perhaps everything would turn out to be part of some elaborate plot by Dr. Hackman or someone else, but (spoiler) there is real supernatural phenomena happening.

Before the end of the book, Jeff and Debbie discover both where the mummy is hidden and where Dr. Hackman hid the mummy’s golden eyes, which Anubis has been searching for all this time. They also learn what really happened to Dr. Hackman all those years ago. He apparently did become the victim of the curse that he had tried to evade by inflicting it on others. When the story ends, it seems that the curse is ended permanently, although Jeff and Debbie do manage to get some things out of the experience.

I liked how, even though the story does turn out to be supernatural, the author introduced the idea that it might not be because that element of uncertainty kept the suspense going for longer and introduced some interesting possibilities for readers to consider. It also made it a little more plausible that the kids would be willing to enter the house because they could believe that the house itself was harmless without Dr. Hackman there to continue his plots.

Posted on by TracyC

Mystery of the Empty House

Mystery of the Empty House by Dorothy Sterling, 1960.

Patricia Harrison’s family has recently moved from their apartment in New York to a house in Haven. Her father used to live in Haven when he was a boy. His mother still lives in town, and he still knows some of the other people who live there. Patricia, called Pat, is still unpacking her belongings when a boy from across the street, Jim Gray, calls to invite her to play ball with him and some of his friends in the field behind her house because his mother used to know his father when they were kids. Pat isn’t very used to playing with boys because she went to an all-girls school when she was in New York, but she agrees to go play ball with the boys.

When she goes to meet the boys, some of the other boys, the Paine brothers, don’t want her to play with them. When Jim said they were meeting “Pat”, they assumed that “Pat” was another boy. Jim says he doesn’t care if Pat is a girl or not because they could really use another player. Pat thinks they’re rude, and since they don’t seem to want her, she starts to leave, but Jim stops her and persuades her to stay. Even though Pat is usually good at baseball at school, she finds herself making clumsy mistakes when she plays with the boys, probably because she feels uncomfortable with them. Finally, she hits a home run, which is great, but there’s a problem. She accidentally hit the ball into the window of an old, abandoned house nearby that looks haunted.

The boys are mad because it’s the only baseball they have. Pat says they could just go get the ball, but the boys say they can’t. When she asks them if they’re scared, they say that’s not the problem; they’ve just promised that they won’t go near the old house. Pat says that, since she didn’t promise, she can just go get the ball, but Jim stops her from going into the house. He tells her that they can just buy a new ball. When Pat asks him why he doesn’t want her to go in, Jim says that it’s a secret having to do with the Paines. Pat says that she’s sick of the Paines and insists on going into the old house.

The old house is dark and spooky. When she climbs in through the window, Pat is startled when she runs into another person inside. At first, she can’t see the other person too clearly because it’s dark, but when she asks the girl who she is, the girl tells her that she’s Patricia Harrison. Pat is shocked and tells her that she can’t be Patricia Harrison because that’s her name. The girl finally laughs and admits that her real name is Barbara Thomas. Barbara lives next door to Pat’s grandmother and decided to stop by and meet her. When she saw Pat playing with the boys, she decided to go explore the old house instead.

Barbara is the one who explains the history of the house and the Paines’ attitude to Pat. The Paine family used to live in the old house. It’s the oldest house in town, dating back to the Colonial era. Nat Paine, the oldest of the Paine boys, was always proud of his family’s old home and used to brag about how George Washington and Lafayette visited the house during the Revolutionary War. It was even occupied by British soldiers at one time. Unfortunately, the father of the Paine boys was killed during the Korean War several years earlier (dating this story to the late 1950s or 1960, the year it was published). Since then, the family has fallen on hard times, and they’ve been unable to pay the taxes on the house. Now, because of the unpaid taxes, the town council is threatening to sell the old house to pay the unpaid taxes. The Paines have been forced to move out of the house and into a much smaller place, and Nat is very upset about it. Plus, he’s been going through this phase where he’s decided that he hates girls because he’s just getting into middle school, where all the boys either start developing crushes or decide that they hate girls. His younger brothers are being pests because they’re following his lead.

Barbara says that her father felt bad about what happened to the family and tried to convince other people in town to help the Paines pay the taxes on the old place. They could have helped, but they’ve made it plain that they just don’t want to. As Barbara’s father put it, “people in Haven are a bunch of rock-ribbed, rugged individualists who wouldn’t help their own grandmas.” (I have strong feelings about that, and I’ll explain them in the reaction section.) Barbara reveals right away that the secret Jim is keeping for the Paine brothers is that Nat made his brothers take a vow with him that they wouldn’t enter that house again “until it was rightfully theirs.” Barbara says that Nat’s sense of pride talking, and “You know how boys are.” She thinks Nat’s being overly dramatic, although she sympathizes with the family’s plight. When Pat suggests that maybe they shouldn’t be in the house, either, Barbara says that she comes there all the time to explore. Barbara thinks the old house is fascinating and that there might be a secret passage somewhere. She invites Pat to help her look for it sometime.

At dinner that night, Pat finds out that her parents already know about the death of the boys’ father and the trouble that the family is having over their old house. Pat’s mother says that the old house is a good example of the saltbox style of house that was popular in Colonial New England. (I remember my old high school history teacher explaining how the slope of the roof was meant to help snow slide off during the winter, but the uneven slope also allows more living space to be added onto an existing house.) However, Pat’s mother says that there probably aren’t any secret passages in the house because houses from that time were built pretty simply and didn’t even have closets or bathrooms. She doesn’t think that there’s any place in the old house to conceal a secret passage.

Now that Pat knows the issues with the Paine family, she begins to feel better about them, and they start being nicer to her. As Pat begins settling in, she becomes better friends with Barbara and is happy that she has another girl as a friend. They ride their bikes downtown together, and Barbara sleeps over at Pat’s house. As the girls are getting ready for bed, Pat looks out the window and sees a light in the old Paine house when no one is supposed to be there. Barbara says that whoever’s in the house is probably looking for the secret passage and the treasure. When Pat asks what she means by “treasure”, Barbara says that there’s a rumor that there’s treasure hidden in the house from Revolutionary times. The family used to be rich, but after the American Revolution, when the children of the family returned to the house after their parents were killed, the family fortune had vanished. People think that the ancestors of the Paines hid their fortune somewhere during the war and that it’s still waiting to be found. (I already had some misgivings about the people of Haven and their intentions in kicking the Paines out of their house, and now, suddenly, my suspicions are even worse.)

Barbara says that they can’t just let this mystery sneak steal what should rightfully belong to the Paines and ruin the only chance they have left of regaining their house. The girls sneak over to the house to spy on the intruder, and they end up frightening him away. The girls tell the boys about what they witnessed the next day, and they persuade the Paine brothers to come into the house with them in spite of their “vow” to look around and see what the intruder was searching for. As they inspect the kitchen fireplace, where the man was searching, and look at the flashlight he dropped, the man shows up again. It turns out that he’s a college student doing research on the Paine family.

Back in Revolutionary times, the family that lived in the house was the Woodruff family. (A Paine ancestor married into the Woodruff family, changing the family name, but the Woodruffs are also ancestors of the current Paines. It’s the same family.) The college student, Robert Popham, found some old papers that indicate that the head of the Woodruff family, the first Nathaniel Woodruff, was a Tory. Nat, who was named for this ancestor (full name Nathaniel Woodruff Paine IV), angrily denies it, saying that his family was known to associate with George Washington and Lafayette, hosting them at their house. Robert explains more about the papers he found, but he also says that the last letter Nathaniel Woodruff wrote to his wife before he was killed indicates that he feared for his life and left something hidden in an old post box to pass on to his young son. However, as Nat points out, the date on this final letter was shortly after Nathaniel Woodruff’s wife was murdered by unknown assailants. (She was found scalped, so people blamed her death on American Indians, but it’s also possible that she was killed by someone else who just wanted to make it look that way to cover up the real reason for her murder.) Nathaniel Woodruff didn’t know his wife was already dead, and since she never got the letter and he was also killed soon after, the box is probably still hidden somewhere. Robert thinks that what Nathaniel hid was proof that he was actually a spy for the Patriots and that he feared for his life because he suspected that the British knew he was a spy. He says that he wants to find this hidden box and the information it holds because it would make a fantastic historical research paper.

The kids are completely on board with the search for the hidden box, both because the Paines want to preserve the reputation of their ancestors and because there may be valuables hidden in the box that will help the Paines pay their taxes and keep their home. However, they only have until August 15, the date that the town council has set for selling the Paine house. They only have until the end of summer to figure it out!

The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive. The book is also known by the title Secret of the Old Post Box.

My Reaction and Spoilers

To begin with, I didn’t like the people of Haven right from Barbara’s description of them as “rugged individuals who wouldn’t help their own grandmas.” It is pretty cold to turn out a war widow who is working as an underpaid nurse in the community and her children after their father was killed serving his country. I completely agreed with Barbara’s father’s assessment of the townspeople’s levels of generosity from the first. I suppose at least some of the townspeople of Haven probably thought they were actually being kind, giving Mrs. Paine several years after her husband’s death to come up with the mounting tax money, while doing nothing to help her and not actually paying her enough to manage and letting her family sink deeper into the hole until there was no way for them to escape, but in realistic terms, that’s not really kind at all.

We don’t actually hear the townspeople express their own feelings because the children don’t talk to the adults about their search and discoveries until they’re sure of what they found. When Barbara explained how her father felt about the townspeople’s unwillingness to help the Paines, I was also a little suspicious of their motives, and when Barbara mentioned that there’s been a popular rumor about hidden treasure in the Paine household for years and everyone has heard of it, I got really suspicious. Basically, I started looking for thieves among the townspeople. I immediately suspected that the “rugged individuals”, or at least some influential ones in the community, wanted to steal some historical treasure from a veteran’s widow and orphans because people who would would kick the widow and orphans out of their home might as well be out to steal their legacy, too.

If that was part of their plan, they weren’t very good at it, and they never even show up in the story. Perhaps I’m judging them a bit harshly, although in a way, I’m a little disappointed because that kind of Machiavellian plot would have made the story much more exciting. From the way the story goes, the townspeople might just not believe that there’s any treasure to be found because that rumor has been going around for so long and nothing has come of it. Still, I was suspicious of them for a good part of the book because it looked like the author was setting them up to be suspicious.

I was also annoyed by the townspeople because I found them ineffectual and uncreative in their approach to a community problem. They miss opportunities, and worse, they deny opportunities to others because they’re apparently stuck in their “rugged individual” mindset and won’t even entertain ideas that might help themselves as well as others when people like Barbara Thomas’s father suggest them. I often think that high-and-mighty rugged individualistic attitude cuts out so many genuinely fun, creative, and amazing possibilities that can make a community rich in character as well as money. It’s maddening to a person who thrives on creativity and likes to consider possibilities.

When I started getting really irritated at the townspeople, I guessed that, before the end of the story, they would do something to redeem themselves that would simultaneously leave me unsatisfied. I figured that the point where the townspeople finally come together would probably result in something that I thought they should have been working on from the beginning, and then, they’d act like it was such an amazing idea that they’d never thought of before and I’d be really irritated with them all over again because I thought of something like it very early in the story. Actually, that’s not how the story goes, and it’s still irritating to me.

So, what would I want them to do in this situation? Basically, the community wants its tax money, and the family wants to keep their house with a living wage that can support them. Fine. So, I asked myself, why not make this historic house, which is known to be the oldest house in town, into a community project which would actually contribute to the common good of the community (I don’t think “common good” is a dirty word, although I’m aware that some “rugged individualists” think so) and provide the Paine family with an additional source of income? If the town council invested in fixing up the house, which is also known to contain some very interesting Colonial antiques as well as fascinating architectural details and a unique history, the house could be turned into either a museum or a period bed-and-breakfast to encourage local tourism. (Sleep where George Washington and Lafayette slept!) Since it does have original furnishings and actual bedrooms, it probably wouldn’t take a lot to make the conversion for either of those projects.

The town and its business owners would benefit from the tourism, giving them an actual monetary return on their investment, and the Paine family could stay on with the house as its caretakers, receiving additional wages from visitors. People couldn’t say that the Paines simply received a handout because they would be doing valuable community work to support the town’s image and industry. It would satisfy Nat Paine’s family pride because he could talk to tour groups on the weekends and during the summer about his family’s great legacy to the history of his town. The whole community could even expand on the idea to further attract visitors, setting up a sort of local living history center, where people can learn Colonial crafts and recipes (something like what the Townsends demo on their YouTube channel), and schools from neighboring towns and cities could book field trips. Local business owners could support it with a themed restaurant and shops selling Colonial-era replicas and memorabilia and books about the time period. The town could hold special celebrations a few times a year to draw in more visitors, like a big Fourth of July parade or a Colonial Christmas celebration (although I known not all of the American colonies actually celebrated Christmas) or a re-creation of old harvest parties (more historically accurate) with plays by the local theater group (if they don’t have one, they could form one) or dramatic readings from Washington Irving at the local library or a themed fair with people selling local artisan crafts. They wouldn’t have to do all of this at once, but they could start with the matter of the house and build up from there. It’s an idea that has the potential for future expansion. This story is even set pre-Bicentenniel, so imagine what the town could do if they already had everything up and running by July 4th, 1776! Doesn’t anybody plan ahead? That’s creative use of resources. That’s community action. That’s job creation. Even if it’s not as big as Plimoth Plantation (now called Plimoth Patuxet to better incorporate the Native Americans) or Colonial Williamsburg (which both already existed by the time this story was written and could have provided inspiration), it’s still a money-making industry that is inherently built into the town’s very nature and won’t disappear tomorrow because some outside business decides to move or close a job-providing factory or something. Even if they didn’t get national or international attention, they would probably still be a destination for people from around their state and neighboring ones, and there’s potential for continued development. The project just need to be supported and promoted by the community.

Unfortunately, that’s not what they do. My griping aside, I guess if the solution was really that simple and the townspeople were more thoughtful and pro-active, we would lose the source of tension and the obstacle that our heroes have to overcome. The August 15th deadline is what pressures the kids to hurry up and find the treasure, so as irritating as it is to me, I have to put up with it.

The treasure hunt part is a lot of fun, and I liked the children’s logical, methodical approach to their search. When the children eventually find the hidden box, the story isn’t over. There are coded messages in the box that they have to decode to learn the full truth about Nathaniel Woodruff. Part of the story explains how they figure out how to decode the substitution code and the book code that compose parts of the message. The story they learn about Nathaniel Woodruff is better than anything the Paines had originally thought.

So, did they save the old house and do anything cool, like start a unique museum? Yes, and no. Although they don’t find any jewels, gold, or traditional sort of treasure, the letters that they find in the box are worth quite a bit. They sell them to a wealthy local business owner, and he donates them to a local university library. (So, you know, the wealthy business owner who never makes an actual appearance in this story and who wouldn’t have helped a war widow and her orphans for their sake can buy their family legacy and present it as his magnanimous gift to the university. I can’t say that he’s terrible for doing this because it does help, but I still think my idea was better.) The Paine family has enough money to keep their house and fix it up. It’s a pretty good ending, but I still prefer my vision. The story points out that it’s not a matter of everyone living happily ever after because they’re all their imperfect selves and still have some problems, but one lesson that they all learned from this experience is how to create their own book code to use for passing notes in class. It’s not profound, but codes are fun.

Posted on by TracyC

Susannah and the Blue House Mystery

Susannah and the Blue House Mystery by Patricia Elmore, 1980.

Susannah Higgins and her friend, Lucy, live in Northern California. Susannah loves mysteries and she’s asked Lucy to be her partner as a detective. Susannah loves mysteries and is always looking for a mystery to solve, but so far, the girls haven’t found anything worth investigating. Susannah finally finds the mystery she’s been looking for when another friend’s grandfather fails to meet her at the bus stop. Shy Juliet Travis, who is largely shy because people at school have made fun of the burn scar on her face, meets her grandfather at the bus stop every day, and then, they walk home together. When he fails to show up one day, Juliet is sure that something is wrong. Susannah and Lucy, finding Juliet upset, try to reassure her, saying it’s probably nothing and that her grandfather probably forgot the time or his clock stopped. They offer to walk Juliet home to see if her grandfather is there.

Juliet and her mother live in a small apartment house next door to the old, once-grand Blue House. Her “grandfather” is the last of the old Withers family. (Juliet and her mother aren’t actually related to Juliet’s “grandfather” at all. He’s just a family friend who likes to treat Juliet and her mother like family because none of them really have any close relatives. Mrs. Travis got divorced when Juliet was a baby, and Juliet hasn’t seen her father since. Mr. Withers’s only relative is a niece named Ivy.) The Withers family was once one of the richest families in the area, but they haven’t been really wealthy for some time. Ivy Withers has some money and is a social climber, but the Blue House mansion where Mr. Withers lives has fallen into severe disrepair. Ivy pays Mrs. Travis to be her uncle’s cleaning woman, and that’s about all of the attention either the house or Mr. Withers receives.

Juliet’s mother, Mrs. Travis, cleans houses and is also an artist. When she first meets Susannah and Lucy, she comments that she’d like to do a sketch of Susannah because her face would be good for an African princess. (Susannah is African American, and this is the first mention of it in the book.) Juliet asks her mother about her grandfather, and her mother says that she thinks he went to see his friend Joe. Juliet feels a little better, thinking that her grandfather just lost track of time with his friend, but by the next morning, Mr. Withers still hasn’t come home. Susannah and Lucy go to visit Juliet again, but she and her mother don’t know much about Mr. Withers’s friend, Joe. They don’t know his full name or where he lives to see if he’s really seen Mr. Withers. Susannah says that they should take another look around the Blue House, even though Mrs. Travis has already looked there.

In the Blue House, they discover that Mr. Withers took his good coat instead of his old one and left his wallet with his identification behind. Mrs. Travis also remembers that he was carrying an umbrella, even though it wasn’t supposed to rain that day. From this information, Susannah deduces that he went to another city, where there was a chance of rain, but it couldn’t have been too far away because he didn’t take luggage or his wallet with him, and he was planning to be back to meet Juliet that afternoon. Also, since Mr. Withers doesn’t have a lot of money, he probably went by bus. After making a call to bus station to check the bus schedule for buses leaving around the time he left, they decide that the most likely place he would have gone was Sacramento. Then, the customer service agent tells them that the bus returning from Sacramento arrived late because an old man had a heart attack. Realizing that the old man could have been Mr. Withers, who couldn’t be identified because he left his wallet at home, they begin phoning hospitals to learn where he could have gone. Sadly, they learn that Mr. Withers was the man who had the heart attack and that he died in the hospital.

That would be the end of the mystery of the disappearing grandfather, but it turns out to be the beginning of a greater mystery. Susannah is disappointed that the mystery seems to be over just when she wanted to investigate some odd points of the situation more deeply. Lucy thinks that sounds heartless to be thinking of Mr. Withers’s disappearance and death as just an exciting adventure like that, but Susannah explains that there are still some aspects of the situation that seem strange. They still don’t know why he went to Sacramento. Apparently, it was something important because he felt the need to dress up in his nicer coat. (It couldn’t be to see a doctor because his Medicare card was one of the cards he left behind in his wallet.) They also don’t know who “Joe” is because this friend didn’t turn up at the funeral. Nobody else seems to know who “Joe” is, either.

Susannah also begins to suspect that Mr. Withers may have made a second will, leaving something to Juliet. Mr. Withers didn’t have much to leave, and it’s publicly known that he promised his house to Ivy because she helped him pay the taxes on it for years. Mr. Withers lost most of his money years ago due to a bad investment, and thieves also stole many of the valuable antiques that he used to own. However, on the morning of the day he died, he told Juliet that he was going to leave her a “treasure.” Juliet says that this “treasure” was supposed to be a book of some kind, and he emphasized to her that she should “see a good man.” What is that supposed to mean, and did Mr. Withers really have a treasure to leave to Juliet? Someone else must think that Mr. Withers had something of value because someone has been sneaking around the Blue House at night.

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

My Reaction

I read this book years ago, when I was in elementary school, but for a long time, I’d forgotten the name of it and much of the plot, which made it difficult to find it again. As with so many other things, I found it again by accident while looking for something else on Internet Archive.

The part that stuck with me the most from when I read it as a kid was the scene where Susannah and Lucy meet Juliet’s mother, who is an artist. Mrs. Travis likes to do sketches of people she’s just met so she can use their faces in paintings later. When she first sees Susannah, she takes her by the chin and studies her face. She compliments Susannah’s bone structure and says that her face would be great for an African princess, which is a rather odd thing to do and say to somebody on first acquaintance. I liked the quirkiness of Mrs. Travis, and I kind of wished somebody would tell me that I looked like a princess. (I don’t, and I never really did. I look more like somebody’s teacher or librarian. I’m not either of those, but I just look like somebody who would be.)

The scene with Mrs. Travis is also the first mention in the book that Susannah is black. She is shown as black on the covers of the books in this series, but Mrs. Travis’s description of her as having the look of an “African princess” is the first indication of it in the text. The reason why I like that is that, before we get to that point, Susannah is described by her friend Lucy as an aspiring detective, an “amateur herpetologist” who dreams of buying the snake called Beelzebub in the pet store, and one of the few people who can draw out shy Juliet and get her to talk before we are given any indication of her race or appearance. I like it that readers are drawn into Susannah’s own quirky and distinctive personality before she is described physically, so she isn’t typed by race or appearance.

Further on in the book, Lucy describes more of Susannah’s appearance, saying that she has glasses and wears her hair in two clumps on her neck. They didn’t always get along because they’re in the same academic group at school, and of the two, Susannah is really the better student. She got on Lucy’s nerves by constantly nagging her to do her homework and improve her grades so their group could get the school’s Top Scholar Award. Susannah complained that Lucy actually could do better at school if she just tried and called her a “clown” and a “dumb blonde” (the first indication of what Lucy looks like) for not even trying to do better. Lucy retaliated against this criticism by drawing unflattering cartoons of Susannah. They started to resolve their differences when they got into an argument over something Lucy said to another classmate about Susannah. Lucy said that Susannah “prevaricates”, which means to lie, but what she really meant was “pontificates.” At first, Susannah was mad at Lucy for calling her a liar, then she laughed when she realized that Lucy mixed up words that were vocabulary words for their class, and then, she realized that there was some justification to Lucy’s criticism of her, that she does sometimes act like a know-it-all. Realizing that someone else had a justifiable criticism of her caused Susannah to soften her own criticism of Lucy, and their relationship improved.

I liked the description of how Lucy and Susannah came to be friends, and it also fits in with how the girls become better friends with Juliet. Appearances are important to Juliet because the burn scar on her face has made it difficult for her to make friends with people. They never explain how she got the scar, but she is very self-conscious of it because of the teasing she got about it early in life. She is very shy and has a habit of turning her head to the side as she talks to people because she doesn’t want them to look at the scar. Lucy thinks to herself that the scar isn’t really so bad. As she spends more time with Juliet, she realizes that she hardly notices it anymore, just like most of the time, she hardly notices anymore that Susannah wears glasses. It’s common for people to have various types of imperfections, and Lucy herself has crooked front teeth. The only reason why Juliet’s scar really matters is that it matters to her because it makes her feel bad about herself. What Juliet wants most of all is an operation to remove the scar tissue so the scar will be less noticeable, but her mother can’t afford it. By the end of the book, she can afford the operation, and she goes ahead with it, although part of me wanted to see her rethink it because she sees that she can make friends anyway, whether she has a scar or not.

Deceptive appearances are a large part of the mystery because things in the Blue House, Mr. Withers’s treasure, and even Mr. Withers himself weren’t quite what they seemed to be. Mr. Withers was unfortunate for losing his money and most of the beautiful antiques that he loved, but he didn’t lose everything. Ivy thinks that he was a lonely, bitter hermit who rejected all of his old friends because he was too proud to see them after he lost his money, but Lucy realizes that the truth is that Mr. Withers just made new friends who wouldn’t judge him because he was now poor. Mr. Withers wasn’t lonely, and he was even happy with the new people in his life and the secret he was keeping. Even the mysterious “Joe” and the “good man” were not what everyone assumed they were at first. As I read through the book, I remembered what Mr. Withers’s trick was, but it took me some time be sure of the villain. I thought I knew who it would turn out to be, but the author does a good job of making multiple people look guilty.

One other thing I’d like to add is that apparently none of the children in this book live in a two-parent household. Books featuring children of divorced families were becoming increasingly common in the 1980s and into the following decades, and there are three children in this book who live in single-parent households. Juliet’s mother is divorced. Lucy lives with just her father, and to her horror, she eventually discovers that he’s starting to date the divorced mother of the most annoying boy in her class (who actually proves to be very helpful in their investigation). Susannah also appears to live with her grandparents. This book doesn’t explain why, but she always talks about her grandparents and not her parents.

Posted on by TracyC

Mystery of the Melted Diamonds

Mystery of the Melted Diamonds by Carol Farley, 1986.

This is the last book in the Kipper and Larry mystery series.

This time, Larry has come to visit Kipper and his family on their farm in Kansas while his father attends a police convention in Florida and will be spending Christmas with them. At first, Kipper thinks that Larry probably regrets this visit because Kansas isn’t very exciting, and it’s snowing while Larry’s father is in sunny Florida.

The situation gets worse when Kipper gets into a fight with his friend Scooter when Larry and Kipper were supposed to be spending the night at Scooter’s house. Scooter apparently cheated at a game, and Kipper got so mad that he said that he and Larry would just go home. The problem is that the boys have to walk a couple of miles to reach the farm where Kipper’s family lives, and the snow has turned into a blizzard.

The boys start to get scared that they might freeze to death when Larry spots a light from a house nearby and heads toward it. Kipper thinks that it’s a dangerous mistake because the house with the light is the old Morgansterne house, and it’s been empty for years. However, when the boys reach the house, there are oil lanterns burning in the windows and a fire in a wood-burning stove. Out of desperation, the boys let themselves into the house to warm up, but then they start to wonder who lit the fire and the lanterns. They search the house to see if there’s anyone there, but they don’t find anyone. The only thing they find upstairs is an old box of Christmas ornaments.

The boys spend the rest of the night in the house without seeing anyone and continue to the farm in the morning. When they explain to Kipper’s mother what happened and where they spent the night, she’s concerned, both because the boys were out in the snowstorm and because nobody should be in the old Morgansterne house. Old Miss Morgansterne, who owns the house, has been living in a retirement home, and no one else is supposed to be there. Kipper’s mother decides to call the sheriff and have him look into it.

The sheriff comes and questions the boys about what they saw in the house, and they ask him about a robbery at a jewelry store in town that the family heard about on the radio while waiting for him to arrive. Larry wonders if there’s a connection between the robbery and the supposedly empty house that seemed to be occupied by someone before they arrived. The sheriff doesn’t see why there would be a connection between the two events, but Kipper’s younger brothers think that maybe the robbers were in the house the whole time, hiding in some kind of secret passageway, like in books and movies. The sheriff thinks that the boys have overactive imaginations.

However, there is more to the theory that the house and the robbery are connected than the sheriff thinks. Soon, the sheriff is alerted that the car that is believed to belong to the robbers has crashed into a pond near a dangerous curve in the road and the two men inside the car are dead. When they search the car, they find some of the jewelry from the robbery, the less expensive costume jewelry, so it seems that they were correct that these men were the robbers, but strangely, the most expensive jewels from the robbery, diamonds, are still missing. The sheriff says that it’s almost like they melted away, like the diamond-like snow that Larry commented on earlier.

It makes sense to the boys that the robbers were in the Morgansterne house before they were. They remember seeing a car like the robbers’ car along that road before the snow storm got bad, and it would explain why the house was empty all that night. The robbers accidentally saved the boys’ lives by lighting the stove in the house for them, but they never returned to their hideout in the empty house because they had their car accident. But, somewhere along the way, the diamonds they stole seem to have vanished. Can the boys figure out how?

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

My Reaction

Overall, I liked the story. I had more than one theory about where the diamonds were, and one of them turned out to be correct, but there was enough doubt in my mind to keep the story interesting until the end.

Posted on by TracyC

Cranberry Halloween

CranberryHalloween

Cranberry Halloween by Wende and Harry Devlin, 1982.

The citizens of Cranberryport need to raise money to build a new dock after theirs was destroyed in a storm. Almost everyone in town volunteers to help, and Mr. Whiskers volunteers to keep the money they raise in his grandfather’s old moneybox.

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Mr. Grape, a rather cranky old man, not only refuses to donate money to the cause but he insists that it is a mistake to trust Mr. Whiskers with the money because he is a sloppy and careless person. However, Maggie’s grandmother speaks up for Mr. Whiskers, and he gets the job of treasurer for the fund.

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On Halloween night, Mr. Whiskers and young Maggie make their way to the town party, where Mr. Whiskers will present the money for the dock at the town hall.  As they pass by the spooky old house where Mr. Whiskers’s aunt used to live, two men in pirate costumes try to steal the money from them.

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Mr. Whiskers and Maggie hide in the spooky old house, but the pirates are still waiting for them outside. What are they going to do?

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Mr. Whiskers uses his memories of the old house to find a way out, and it isn’t long before they uncover the villain who put the pirates up to the attempted theft.

The book includes a recipe for Cranberry Dessert in the back.

CranberryHalloweenRecipe

Posted on by TracyC · 1 Comment

The Dreadful Future of Blossom Culp

DreadfulFutureBlossomCulpThe Dreadful Future of Blossom Culp by Richard Peck, 1983.

This book is part of the Blossom Culp Series.

It’s 1914, and Blossom Culp is just starting high school. Although the principal of her old school tells her that this is a chance for her to make a fresh start, it looks like Blossom’s future is going to be very much a continuation of her immediate past.  In high school, she’s still a social outcast, looked down on by girls from better-off families, like Letty, the class president.  Also, despite her principal’s assertion that Blossom’s previous forays into the occult were imaginary, the product of the mental confusion that accompanies puberty, and that she is bound to grow out of them, Blossom knows that her psychic abilities are a natural gift and will not be ignored.

Blossom begins high school friendless because Alexander Armsworth has been ignoring her lately because of his important new position as class vice-president, his infatuation with Letty, and his friendship with a couple of local hooligans, Bub and Champ. Alexander is looking forward to his role in planning the school’s Halloween Festival, telling Blossom that he’s over their earlier, childish occult escapades and the Halloween pranks he used to pull.  Meanwhile, all of the other girls in school are infatuated with their handsome history teacher, Mr. Lacy, and so is the girls’ gym teacher, much to Blossom’s disgust.  Blossom thinks that Mr. Lacy is full of himself and denies that she has any such silly crush on Alexander.

Blossom makes an unexpected friend in a girl called Daisy-Rae, a girl from the country who has brought her younger brother into town to attend school and hoped to get an education herself but has been too afraid of the big town to actually attend classes.  Daisy-Rae hides in the school during the day and lives alone with her brother at night in the old chicken coop at the abandoned Leverette house.  It is through Daisy-Rae that she learns that Alexander and his friends aren’t so above childish pranks as they claim to be.  Blossom also discovers that Mr. Lacy has been romancing her old principal.  Mr. Lacy isn’t quite what he appears to be and has some unsavory secrets in his past.

Matters come to a head when Alexander (at Letty’s urging) tries to persuade Blossom to dress up and become the fortune teller for the haunted house that the freshmen class is doing for the Halloween Festival.  The haunted house is also a fundraiser, and Letty figures that they can get extra money from people if they’re willing to pay to have their fortunes told, and who would be better for the job than Blossom?  However, Blossom isn’t one to go out of her way to please others, especially Letty, and it turns out that they’re holding the haunted house in the Old Leverette place.  For some reason, that old house makes Blossom’s mother uneasy.  She seems to think that it’s haunted, but in an unusual way.  Blossom tells Alexander that she will not agree to be their fortune teller until he agrees to check out the house with her before Halloween and find out what’s wrong with it.  She figures that, since both of them are psychic, they can learn what’s so unusual.

As Blossom learns, her abilities don’t confine themselves to the past and people who have died but extend to the future and the people who haven’t yet been born.  Inside the Old Leverette house, Blossom suddenly finds herself entering the distant future, the 1980s.  In the 1980s, the Leverette house is once again lived in, and Blossom meets a boy named Jeremy who is a lonely social outcast, like herself.  Jeremy is a computer nerd, living with his divorced mother.  He takes Blossom on a tour of their town as it is in Blossom’s future, much larger than it used to be and with many familiar landmarks missing.  However, what Blossom sees in the future gives her the inspiration she needs to solve her problems in the past and hope that things will improve.  In return, she also proves to Jeremy that he is far from alone and has had a friend for longer than he ever imagined.

The time travel to the 1980s comes off as being a little corny (or so it seemed to me), but the writing quality of the book is excellent.  The author has an entertaining turn of phrase, and the book, like others in the series, is humorous and a lot of fun to read.

Besides being a kind of fantasy story, there are some interesting tidbits of history in the book, showing how people lived in the 1910s.  Blossom explains about the things she and her classmates did at school, like wearing beanies on their heads to show which year they were (freshmen, future graduating class of 1918).  At one point in the story, Blossom takes Daisy-Rae and her brother to their first movie, a silent film with an episode of The Perils of Pauline serial.  While Blossom worries about the future, readers can get a glimpse of the past!

As for what Blossom learns about her own future, she avoids finding out too much because she’d rather not know the details.  However, there are implications that she and Alexander may eventually marry and live in his family’s old house.

The book is currently available online through Internet Archive.

Posted on by TracyC

What’s a Ghost Going to Do?

WhatGhostDo

What’s a Ghost Going to Do? by Jane Thayer, 1966.

Gus is a friendly ghost who lives a quiet life alone in his old house, which is run-down and shabby, with winter visits from his mouse friend.  However, Gus discovers one day that the property is being sold.  The government wants the land to turn into a park, and if that happens, Gus’s house will be torn down!  If they decide to tear the house down, where will he go?

WhatGhostDoSale

For a time, Gus tries living with another ghost in another old house nearby, but that arrangement doesn’t work because the other ghost doesn’t like Gus rattling chains.  Then, Gus tries living in a hole with his mouse friend, but it’s really too small for him.  The only place that seems right for Gus is his old house, which is in danger of being destroyed!

WhatGhostDoHints

In desperation, Gus whispers in the ears of the man in charge of preparing the park for the government, Mr. McGovern, trying to get him to notice the virtues of his house.  Fortunately, Mr. McGovern accepts Gus’s vision of the house as a beautiful piece of the past and finds a way to restore it to its former glory so that Gus can keep his home and others can appreciate it, too.

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Gus’s house becomes a museum in the park, and Mr. McGovern also officially acknowledges Gus as the resident ghost.

The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive. It’s part of a series.

WhatGhostDoMuseum

My Reaction

I’ve had this book since I was a little kid. I always felt sorry for poor Gus throughout the book, but the story has a nice ending, with Gus and Mr. McGovern finding a creative way to restore the house and put it to good use, filling it with antique furniture for both Gus and the public to enjoy. I haven’t read any of the others in the series yet because this is the only one I’ve ever had.

Posted on by TracyC

Old Black Witch

OldBlackWitch

Old Black Witch by Wende and Harry Devlin, 1963.

OldWitchChimneyA boy called Nicky and his mother are looking for a new place to live somewhere in New England.  The mother wants to buy an old cottage with the idea of turning it into a tea room.  At first, they have trouble finding a place, but finally they buy an old house that badly needs fixing up, not knowing that there is an old witch living there.

The witch (whom they call Old Black Witch, since she’s dressed all in black and sooty and doesn’t seem to have any other name) has been sleeping in the chimney of the house for about a hundred years, and they wake her the first time they try to start a fire in the fireplace.

The witch is furious to discover that the house has new owners and worried about where she’s going to live because she needs an old house to haunt.  Nicky and his mother invite her to stay and live in the attic, which has enough dust and cobwebs to satisfy her tastes, while they clean up the lower part of the house for the tearoom.

The locals have heard stories about the house being haunted, but the nice tearoom soon becomes popular with ladies in the area, especially after Old Black Witch decides to help out Nicky’s mother in the kitchen.  Old Black Witch’s blueberry pancakes are wonderful and win many fans for the tearoom.

Then, one night, a couple of burglars break in.  Since Old Black Witch is kind of evil herself, she can’t really fault them for wanting to rob the place . . . until she suddenly realizes that they’re stealing from her, too, and uses her magic to fix the burglars for good and give herself the pet toads that she’s been wanting.

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

OldWitchToads

My Reaction

One of the things that I like about this story, which was a favorite of mine when I was a kid, is that Old Black Witch isn’t particularly evil although she isn’t too nice, either.  She’s as bad and disagreeable as a cranky old witch who’s lived in a chimney for over 100 years ought to be, but not so bad that she can’t make some new friends and help them out once in a while.  Friendly enough for the kids, but not too sweet to be a real witch.  It’s part of a short series, although I haven’t managed to find any of the other books yet.  Some of the pictures are in full color and some are in black and white.  Don’t ask me why she has a spoon in her hat because I’ve never been completely sure, either.  Somehow, on her, it looks good.

The back cover of the book has the recipe for the blueberry pancakes.

OldWitchPancakeRecipe

There was a short film version of this story from 1969 called Winter of the Witch.  It follows the book fairly well, but with some variations (there were no burglars).  In the film, the pancakes have the power to make people happy, and that’s what gives Nicky’s mother the inspiration to open a pancake parlor in their house.  The witch finds a new sense of purpose, although she still plans on going back to her old, wicked ways once the world is happy enough to need a good, old-fashioned scare.  I don’t think that it was ever released on dvd, but it is possible to see it on YouTube and Internet Archive.