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Among the Ghosts

Among the Ghosts by Amber Benson, 2010.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

My Reaction

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

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

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

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Moondial

Moondial by Helen Cresswell, 1987.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

My Reaction and Spoilers

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Posted on by TracyC

The Magic Nation Thing

The Magic Nation Thing by Zilpha Keatley Snyder, 2005.

Abigail O’Malley’s life was turned upside down when her parents divorced when she was in kindergarten. They sold the family home, and her father went to live in Los Angeles and pursue his law career while her mother opened a detective agency. Abby isn’t fond of her mother’s detective agency and has no such ambitions herself. In fact, she would be satisfied if she just has a nice, normal family someday. She misses the nice house where her family used to live and doesn’t like the shabby Victorian house where she and her mother now live and use as the office of the detective agency. Abby envies her friend, Paige Borden, whose family has plenty of money and who life a much more “normal” life. Abby’s mother, Dorcas, isn’t too enamored of the Bordens, thinking that the family is boring. She wishes that Abby would become interested in joining her detective agency someday because the truth is that Abby isn’t quite normal herself, although she doesn’t like to think about it much.

Abby’s mother, Dorcas, says that Abby has an ability to notice information that other people miss, but that’s not quite it. Dorcas says that people in her family have had a “gift” for doing unusual things, like reading people’s minds or finding missing objects. Dorcas is convinced that Abby has inherited this “gift.” However, Abby denies having any such “gift.” As far as she’s concerned, she just occasionally gets hunches about things, and once or twice, they’ve turned out to be right. Abby resents the idea of a special gift partly because she thinks that her mother’s crazy desire to be a detective has something to do with her belief that she also has this special gift, and Abby doesn’t think she does. Abby doesn’t like to think about any of her relatives having been that strange. She just wants a normal family, like Paige’s.

However, Abby’s gift is re-awoken when her mother accepts a case involving a missing girl, who is believed to have been kidnapped by her own father because her parents are divorced. When Abby holds a locket belonging to the little girl, she begins to have visions, not unlike visions that she’s had at other times in the past. Mrs. Watson, who owned the day care that Abby used to attend said these vision episodes were just her imagination, which Abby used to think of as her “Magic Nation.” Abby has spent years trying to ignore it, but this is one of those times when it’s impossible to ignore. Abby has a vision of the little girl at Disneyland with her father. At first, Abby doesn’t want to admit the existence of this vision, but thinking about how worried the girl’s mother is, Abby casually suggests to her mother that, if the girl was taken in a custody dispute, her father might have decided to take her somewhere fun, like Disneyland, to try to win the girl’s favor so she’d want to stay with him. Her mother follows up on the hint, and with the help of the police, the girl is found and reunited with her mother.

That’s the end of the kidnapping case, but it’s only the beginning of Abby’s acknowledgement of her “gift.” Dorcas’s success in the kidnapping case brings more business to her detective agency. As Dorcas gets busier, Abby feels neglected, but Paige’s mother offers to look after her after school to help out, helping Dorcas to feel better about Abby’s friendship with the Bordens. Abby enjoys spending more time with Paige after school, and the girls even start getting along better with Paige’s annoying younger brothers, Sky and Woody. The youngest boy, Sky, particularly comes to like Abby when Abby intervenes after he makes the family’s intimidating cook angry by spilling juice in the kitchen. Abby sensed the boy’s fear and went to the kitchen to find out what happened. Although Abby still wonders how much of her “hunches” are really due to some kind of “gift” because they don’t work all the time, she increasingly realizes that what she still thinks of as her “Magic Nation thing” is not something that she can simply ignore.

Paige is fascinated by Abby’s mother’s work, and she particularly idolizes her pretty assistant, nicknamed Tree. When Abby tells her that her mother and Tree are investigating a case of arson, Paige talks her into coming with her on a little stakeout of their own, which messes up Tree’s actual stakeout and Dorcas’s plans. Dorcas is angry with the girls, and Abby finds herself using her “Magic Nation thing” to try to learn something about the arsonist and make up for ruining the stakeout. Abby does discover who the arsonist is, although she still doubts the reality of her “hunches.” When she shares that information with Tree, Tree also becomes aware of what Abby can do. Tree has known that Abby sometimes gets “hunches” about things, and although Abby still isn’t sure what to think about them, Tree says she’s noticed that Abby’s hunches pay off more than her mother’s do. Then, after the arsonist is caught and Paige goes overboard in her idolizing of Tree for catching the arsonist, Abby lets it slip that she was the one who figured out who the arsonist was.

Abby had been trying to keep this weird and questionable “gift” a secret, but once she tells Paige that she was the one who found the arsonist, she has to explain how she did it. To Abby’s surprise, Paige believes her about the “Magic Nation thing” and thinks it’s really cool. She’s noticed before that there are times when Abby seems to know things that other people don’t or learns things more quickly that most, and Paige thinks that’s a product of her “Magic Nation.” Paige is so enthusiastic about Abby’s “gift” that she thinks the two of them should start their own detective agency, and she starts trying to find cases for them to solve. Paige’s efforts to find an exciting mystery for Abby to solve don’t lead to much, and Abby finds herself doubting her “gift” and its usefulness again.

Then, Abby goes on a ski trip with Paige and her family, and young Sky disappears. Abby realizes that, whether or not her “gift” is real or reliable, she has to try again for Sky’s sake.

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

My Reaction

I like Zilpha Keatley Snyder books. She’s also the author of The Headless Cupid. This story is well-written and fun to read, and I enjoyed seeing how Abby comes to understand and accept her “gift” and make it work for her. I particularly liked the way that Abby comes to understand her “gift” and accept its limitations. There are points when Paige is disappointed or angry that Abby can’t use it to come up with all of the answers that she wants on demand, but Abby can’t make the “gift” do what her friend wants, and she makes it clear that Paige is going to have to accept that. Sometimes, Abby isn’t even interested in trying to use her gift in the way Paige wants, just like she isn’t really interested in using her gift to follow her mother’s profession. Abby comes to realize that an important part of learning to live with her gift is making it clear that this “Magic Nation thing” belongs to her – it’s her gift, to use or not use, as well as she can, in whatever way she sees fit. It’s her right to create her own boundaries, even refusing to talk about her “gift” when she doesn’t want to. The “Magic Nation thing” can’t be forced, and Abby herself won’t be pushed or bullied, either. This personal development is actually a bigger part of the plot than any of the mysteries that Abby solves or attempts to solve.

We don’t know what will happen with Abby and her “gift” after the story ends. There are hints that Abby might be willing to use her powers again, if the situation is important enough and she’s still able to do it. It seems that her mother no longer gets the visions that she used to get when she was Abby’s age, which is why her “hunches” don’t work out as well as Abby’s do now. Dorcas isn’t going to be able to rely on her “powers” to make her a great detective, but Abby comes to appreciate that her mother still enjoys her work and is pretty good at it, not because she’s relying on psychic powers, but because she works hard and is attentive to details. It’s possible that Abby’s powers will also fade as she grows up, but even if they do, it will be okay because Abby can also have a fulfilling life doing the things she loves and is good at. Dorcas is still more enamored of the idea of their shared “gift” than Abby is, but the reality is that neither of them really needs to rely on it. It might be there in the future, if they need it, but it’s not their only strength.

There are some contemporary cultural references in this story that help set the time of the story. Paige is a Harry Potter fan, Abby says that she has some Lemony Snicket books, and they refer to Jennifer Lopez, the Olsen Twins, Leonardo di Caprio, and Britney Spears.

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The Shimmering Ghost of Riversend

The Shimmering Ghost of Riversend by Norma Lehr, 1991.

Kathy Wicklow is going to visit her Aunt Sharon at their old family home over the summer. The old family home, Wicklow Manor, is in Riversend, California, which is in an area where gold was found years ago. Kathy isn’t happy about the trip. She has to leave her dog behind because her aunt owns a cat. She doesn’t even really know her aunt very well. Aunt Sharon is her father’s sister, and her mother has said that she’s weird (which was not a good thing for her to say, both because it’s insulting and because that’s not something to make her daughter glad about spending time with her). Kathy blames her mother for going back to work. Because her mother is working and won’t be home with her, Kathy has to leave her home, her friends, and her dog for a month!

Although Kathy loves to draw, she doesn’t think that she’ll want to do that in a place she is sure she’s going to hate. She also thinks maybe her parents don’t trust her at home because of the weird dreams she’s been having. Kathy has dreams about things that later happen, although she doesn’t know why.

Her father has nostalgic memories of the old family home where he and Sharon grew up. Sharon has only recently returned there after living on the East Coast. Kathy’s father says that Sharon is looking forward to seeing Kathy again and getting to know her because she hasn’t seen Kathy since she was a baby.

Right from the first, Wicklow Manor gives Kathy the creeps. There’s even a small graveyard nearby where Kathy’s father says their ancestors are buried because people used to be buried close to their homes. When she can actually see the house, Kathy is also shocked to realize that she has drawn that house before! She thought that she had invented the house she drew from her imagination, but somehow, she had a vision of the real house. Her father thinks that she must have seen a picture of it somewhere or maybe was inspired by his descriptions of the place. However, Kathy has also done a drawing of Aunt Sharon’s pet cat, without knowing what it looked like before. When they meet Aunt Sharon, she mentions that she’s glad Kathy is there because the house has been lonely, especially at night. Kathy’s dad starts to ask her if something is still happening, but Aunt Sharon quickly denies it before he can finish the thought. Kathy can tell there’s some kind of secret between them.

Aunt Sharon has turned the family’s manor into an inn, and she’s expecting guests soon. It also turns out that part of the reason why Kathy’s mother says that Sharon is weird is that she’s into health food, and Sharon is aware that Kathy’s mother thinks that she’s a weird health nut. Kathy’s father volunteers her to help in the kitchen, although Kathy is a little worried that she won’t like the health food, although the lemonade that she makes with maple syrup instead of sugar is pretty good.

Still, Aunt Sharon gives Kathy a beautiful room with a balcony. Kathy also meets a boy named Todd who lives nearby with his great-grandfather, who is called Upstream Mike. Todd and his great-grandfather pan for gold in the nearby river, and Mike also takes his burro called Nugget into town so tourists can pay for rides on him and pictures with him. Todd is just a little older than Kathy, and he tells Kathy that he likes to write down stories that his grandfather tells him, especially scary stories about the old Wicklow Manor. Kathy asks if there are ghosts there, and Todd tells her to ask his great-grandfather about it. Kathy asks her aunt about ghosts, and Aunt Sharon tells her that Mike has told scary stories about the place for years that were apparently passed down in his family. Mike’s family lived in the area when the first Wicklows arrived.

Aunt Sharon shows Kathy some of the things in the house that belonged to their ancestors, including a portrait of a pretty young woman, who Aunt Sharon says was Jenny Wicklow, who died young by drowning in the river and was buried in the old family graveyard. One of their ancestors, James Wicklow, made his fortune as a banker during the Gold Rush days, and Jenny was his daughter. There is one room in the house where Kathy isn’t allowed to go, which is the old room in the tower. Aunt Sharon says that the staircase is broken, and she can’t have it fixed yet.

On her first night at the manor, Kathy sees a woman in a cloak with a lantern. When she asks Mike about it, he says that it’s a ghost or spirit of some kind that usually appears to young ladies at the manor, possibly a banshee or similar spirit that is a harbinger of death. Kathy worries about that, and Mike tells her the story about Jenny Wicklow. Jenny was one of three children of James Wicklow. She also had a sister named Lora and a brother named Daniel, and Kathy is a descendant of Daniel. After their parents died, Daniel went to work in the city and left the running of the manor and family farm to his sisters. The two young women hired a handsome young drifter to help them, but he started flirting with both of the sisters. The sisters seemed to develop a rivalry for him and argued with each other about it. Rumor had it that Lora was the one who pushed Jenny into the river so she could have not only her own inheritance but her sister’s as well and get the man they both wanted. After Jenny was dead, it seemed like all of their gold disappeared, and so did Lora. People assumed that Lora ran off with her lover and took the money. Mike thinks that the ghost is dangerous, and that Sharon is the one who’s in danger!

Kathy soon begins to learn that Mike is both right and wrong about the ghost. The ghost is Lora, but she’s not trying to hurt Sharon or anyone else. Something tragic happened at Wicklow Manor years ago, and Lora is trying to tell someone about it, if she can find anyone brave enough to listen … and to discovered what actually happened to Lora herself.

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

My Reaction and Spoilers

For a good part of the story, I wasn’t sure exactly what Lora’s ghost was attempting to accomplish, keeping me in suspense. I did have the sense that Lora wasn’t the one who had murdered Jenny and that she had probably been murdered herself, which was why nobody saw her after Jenny’s body was found.

Mike is correct that Lora is the ghost, but she was not Jenny’s murderer. Like Kathy, Lora was psychic. She has been trying to communicate with different girls in the family over the years to clear her name, but the other girls have all been frightened of her. Sharon claims not to believe Kathy at first about how Lora is trying to communicate with her, but she later admits that it was because she was frightened. She also saw Lora when she was young, and that’s part of the reason why she was afraid to return to the old family home for so long. She was afraid to admit that the house was really haunted and that she was afraid of the ghost. It was a long time before she could even tell her own mother and brother about seeing Lora because she was afraid of being different from everyone else in the family. Sharon is also psychic, and like Kathy was initially, she was afraid of her gift.

Kathy and Todd use the messages that Lora communicates through Kathy’s drawings and Lora’s old diary to learn the truth. Jenny was murdered by the man she loved. Lora didn’t actually love him at all. She saw that he was a violent person and tried to warn Jenny about him, but Jenny wouldn’t listen because she thought Lora wanted him for herself. Lora saw the murder that was going to happen in a dream, and she wanted to stop it by using her own inheritance to pay the man to leave her sister alone. However, Lora was unable to save her sister. After he killed Jenny, the man came after Lora and murdered her, too. Then, he stole both of their inheritances. He hid Lora’s body, which was why everyone thought she must have run away with him.

After Lora’s ghost leads Kathy to where her body is buried in the cellar and she is given a proper burial in the family graveyard, the haunting ends. However, Kathy learns to appreciate her psychic gift because of this experience. She finds it reassuring that she shares her abilities with other people in her family. When she reads in Lora’s diary that Lora thought of her own psychic abilities as a gift, Kathy also comes to think of being psychic as a gift rather than a weird defect or something to fear.

The mystery in the story was good, and I also liked the information about panning for gold that Mike gives to Kathy when he gives her a gold panning lesson. There is also a tie-in with real children’s literature because Kathy mentions that she is reading Down a Dark Hall by Lois Duncan. I’ve reviewed Down a Dark Hall on my site, and it is about girls with psychic abilities at a haunted boarding school who channel the spirits of famous people to complete their unfinished works. The channeling and spiritual possession in that book are dangerous and harmful to the girls doing it, but in this book, Kathy becomes reconciled to her psychic abilities and Lora’s gentle spirit, who needs her help.

Posted on by TracyC · 2 Comments

Shadow in Hawthorn Bay

Shadow in Hawthorn Bay by Janet Lunn, 1986.

Mary (or “Mairi,” they spell it both ways) Urquhart and her cousin Duncan had always loved each other.  They were always close as children, feeling more like two parts of one person than separate people, and they always imagined that they would spend the rest of their lives together.  Then, Duncan’s parents, Mary’s Uncle Davie and Aunt Jean, decided that they wanted to travel to Canada, while Mary and her parents stayed at home in the Scottish Highlands.  Duncan hadn’t really wanted to go.  He was only eleven, and he promised Mary that when he was older, he would work hard to earn enough money to come back.  However, Duncan never came.  He only sent Mary a brief letter about the dark forest where he now lives.  Mary feels like the Duncan she knew is gone forever.

Four years later, in 1815, when Mary is fifteen, she has a strange feeling, like Duncan is calling to her from across the ocean.  All of her life, Mary has had a strange gift for seeing into the future or reading others’ minds.  The “gift of two sights,” people call it, but Mary doesn’t feel like it’s a gift.  It makes her uneasy, and she can’t control it.  She hears Duncan’s calls to her through her “gift,” but she is afraid because she doesn’t want to leave Scotland.  She wants Duncan to come to her.

However, she is unable to resist Duncan’s calls.  She asks her parents for help with money for her passage to Canada, but they tell her that she is wasting her time and that, even if they sold their family’s most precious heirloom to give her the money, there would not be enough for the return journey.  A family friend gives her the money instead, and although Mary doesn’t really want to accept it and doesn’t really want to go, she can’t help herself.

The journey to Canada is miserable, and when she finally arrives at the place where her aunt and uncle live, alone and without money, she learns something which she thought she had sensed during the journey: Duncan is dead.  Duncan committed suicide while Mary was still on the ship to Canada.  Mary has arrived too late.  To make matters worse, one of the family’s neighbors, Luke Anderson, tells her that her aunt and uncle gave up the idea of farming in Canada and have already begun the journey back to Scotland.  Mary has no money to follow them, and they have no idea that she’s now in Canada, alone.

Luke takes Mary to Mrs. Colliver, who tells Mary a little about her family and their life in Canada and why they decided to leave.  Mary is devastated by the loss of Duncan and tries to tell Mrs. Colliver about how she felt that Duncan had been calling out to her, but Mrs. Colliver tells her that she doesn’t believe in ghosts or things like that.  Although Mary knows that her “gift” is real and so are spirits, she learns that others in the community share Mrs. Colliver’s no-nonsense, disbelieving attitude toward such things.  Mary, in her despair, wants to rush straight back to Scotland, but Mrs. Colliver, with her practicality, points out that Mary can’t possibly get there without money.  She tells Mary that she can stay with her family, that she will give her room and board in exchange for help with chores and that she can earn extra money for weaving and spinning.  Mary is clumsy at household chores because she was always better with animals at home, but when Mrs. Colliver sees Mary’s skills with animals, she is appreciative.

Life is hard in the small farming community.  Mrs. Anderson, Luke’s mother, explains to Mary that most of the people who live there are refugees.  When they were young, their families moved there from the Thirteen Colonies that now make up the United States because they were Loyalists.  When the Revolution came, they couldn’t stay, and so had gone north to Canada, where they struggled to establish a new community for themselves with their small homesteads. During her time there, Mary witnesses the death of a baby and the hardships of this strange place, seeing why Duncan didn’t like it there.  They tell her that Duncan was a strange boy who would seem bright and happy one day, but black with depression the next, something Mary remembers in him even before he went to Canada. 

The people are kind and welcoming to Mary, although they find her a bit strange.  As Mary struggles to make a life for herself, hoping to earn enough money to return home, she slowly comes to appreciate Luke’s kindness and help.  She learns healing arts and the use of herbs from another woman in the community, developing new skills.  In helping others, she earns their appreciation and a place in their community.  Luke Anderson becomes very fond of Mary, but she still mourns for her lost Duncan.  In spite of his kindness, she doesn’t see how she can make this strange, hard, dark forest of Canada her home, where it doesn’t even seem like the spirits she believed in and that seemed to protect her when she lived in Scotland exist.

Mary is melancholy and feels like she doesn’t belong in Canada.  It distresses her that she can no longer feel Duncan’s presence . . . although she can oddly hear him calling to her sometimes.  Mary also unnerves people when she makes predictions that come true and speaks about ghosts and spirits.  When she almost gives in to her homesickness and depression and kills herself, lured to the spot where Duncan drowned himself by his ghostly calls to her, she finally sees Duncan’s death for what it really was and finds the courage to refuse to follow him down the dark path that he chose for himself and to fight for the life she has been building, the one she really wants to live.

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

My Reaction

This book is part of a loose trilogy, involving ancestors and descendants of the Anderson and Morrisay families.  All of the books take place in or near Hawthorn Bay in Canada, but at different time periods.  Some of the characters are psychic, like Mary, or have the ability to travel through time, like Susan in The Root Cellar, who is apparently Mary’s granddaughter.  The connection between Mary and Susan is never stated explicitly, but it’s implied by their last name, shared psychic abilities, and comments that a friend makes about Susan’s grandmother in The Root Cellar.  In this series, the characters from each of the books generally don’t appear in any of the others (except, perhaps, for Phoebe, who appears briefly in this book and is the main character in the third story).  Most of the time, you only know about the family connections by reading the books and taking note of the last names.  The books go backward in time as the series progresses, and the connection between the Anderson and Morrisay families is only obvious in The Root Cellar.

With the deaths that occur in the book, discussions of suicide, and the influence of Duncan’s selfish, malevolent spirit, this is not a book for young kids. I’d say that readers should be middle school level or older. There is also some implied sex and pregnancy out of wedlock when one of Luke’s brothers gets one of Mary’s friends pregnant. Her friend doesn’t give the details of what happened, but from what she says, it’s implied that Luke’s disreputable brother forced himself on the girl and that she went along with it because she didn’t know what else to do. The description of that incident is minimal, but older readers will understand what happened. There is a scandal in the community because of it, and the disreputable brother leaves rather than face the consequences of his actions.

Themes and Spoilers

I enjoyed the book for its references to Scottish folklore, which Mary believes in and seems to be in touch with through her “gift” and for Mary’s growing confidence in her abilities and more mature understanding of what her cousin was really like and what her relationship with him really was.  In some ways, I do feel sorry for Duncan because he seems to have been suffering from some kind of mental illness, possibly bipolar disorder or manic depression, which would explain how his moods could shift so abruptly and dramatically.  However, Duncan was also a selfish and controlling person.  Although Duncan’s death was sad, Mary realizes that his end was of his own making, and it’s not the future she wants for herself.  There are some disturbing scenes in the story.  Mary witnesses the deaths of others, including a baby, because it is a harsh environment, where people sometimes succumb to sickness or bad weather, although these deaths are not described in too much detail. 

There are also some frightening moments, like when Duncan’s ghost almost convinces Mary to kill herself and when he similarly lures a young boy, Luke’s younger brother, to the spot where he drowned and almost kills the boy because Mary finds the little boy comforting and Duncan doesn’t want her to be comfortable and happy.  In the beginning, readers see Duncan through Mary’s fondness for him, so the true darkness of his personality isn’t immediately apparent, although I had some misgivings about him from Mary’s first description of how they played together as children.  I didn’t like the way she described how he would tease her until she became angry or hurt and then he would sulk until she comforted him.  She says that wasn’t really fair, but to me, it was disturbing because I have seen that kind of selfish personality before, and it’s never a good sign.  It shows right from the first that Duncan doesn’t really care about Mary’s feelings.  He cares only about his own feelings, and he has no interest in changing his behavior out of consideration for her.  In fact, the very idea that he should consider her feelings seems somehow insulting to him, even though he supposedly loves her.  He just thinks that she needs to reassure him that everything he does is fine whether it is or not.  In his view, Mary is obviously wrong to feel hurt even when he tries to hurt her because he has more right to his feelings than she has to hers and he should be able to behave any way he wants with no consequences.  That’s what Mary’s first description of Duncan said to me.  As soon as I saw that, even though some might consider it just the actions of an immature child, I had some suspicions about him.

My suspicions were somewhat confirmed before Mary left home. Her mother told her that she didn’t think Duncan was worth chasing after, calling him sulky and thoughtless, but the full truth of that doesn’t strike Mary until she confronts his spirit where he died. Because people in Canada don’t like to talk about Duncan much, when Mary first hears about his death, it isn’t immediately clear that he killed himself or how.  At first, it’s just somewhat implied, but when Mary is almost lured to her death, she sees the full truth about Duncan. 

Mary comes to realize that, although everyone, including Duncan and herself, felt like the two of them were two parts of the same person, they really weren’t.  Mary sees that not only can she live without Duncan, she has been living without him for years.  She lived without him for a time in Scotland, and she’s been living without him in Canada, and she can continue to live without him wherever she chooses to live the rest of her life.  When she was younger, she had thought of Duncan as being the stronger of the two of them because he was not plagued by the same “gift” she was, but she realizes that she is actually the stronger of the two of them.  Duncan’s “love” for her had also always been a selfish one.  He couldn’t bring himself to work hard and return to Scotland for her sake, but he expected her to give up everything, even her own life, to join him in Canada and in death.

When Mary realizes all of this, Duncan’s spirit loses its hold over her, and she comes to see that the darkness in him was darker than the forests that had seemed so frightening to her before.  Free from the shadow of Duncan’s death and his selfish spirit, Mary is able to see the beauty of Canada and to be more open to the good people around her, forging a new future with a better man.