Remember how I wanted to find some ghost stories that I remembered from my youth?
https://sporkful.blogspot.com/2025/04/spooky-season-hodgepodge-and-hereafter.html
There were mainly two that I remembered.
In the April post, I thought I had identified them as The Ghost Next Door by Wylly Folk St. John and Wait Till Helen Comes by Mary Downing Hahn.
I was half right.
I ended up with an abundance of proof that the one with the malevolent gazing ball in the garden was not Wait Till Helen Comes. While a single version of the book was not available through our library system, they did have a graphic novel based on it and it was in a collection of three ghost stories by Hahn. The other two were Deep and Dark and Dangerous and All the Lovely Bad Ones.
What about that gazing ball?
A different search pointed me in the direction of Jane-Emily by Patricia Clapp.
I did not remember as many details from this this as The Ghost Next Door. For example, I did not remember that it was set in the early 20th century.
That made it a good companion for The Ghost Belonged to Me by Richard Peck, source material for Child of Glass.
The Ghost Belonged to Me was published in 1975, and then the movie aired in 1978. The movie was contemporary, but the book was historical fiction.
(There were a lot of changes, and I liked the book better. It's part of a series, so I could try hunting down more, but I am not committed to anything yet.)
Jane-Emily was written in 1969, The Ghost Next Door in 1971, and Wait Till Helen Comes in 1986.
I guess I didn't read it then because it was too new.
Oddly, Deep and Dark and Dangerous and All the Lovely Bad Ones were published in 2007 and 2008, respectively.
I had read something else of Hahn's, Daphne's Book from 1983, but there is nothing supernatural about that.
(Hahn has a lot of ghost books and a lot of not-ghost books.)
The graphic novel was from 2022, so I know I am not the only person with old ghost stories sticking with them for year.
I liked them all pretty well.
For what I remembered, you notice different things as an adult.
There are a lot of issues with blended families, which seems appropriate for the time period. Obviously there is death -- the ghosts have to come from somewhere -- but divorce is an issue in the "modern" ones, and then not.
What I mean by that is that there are no divorces in Jane-Emily or The Ghost Belonged to Me, and there are none in Deep and Dark and Dangerous and All the Lovely Bad Ones. For The Ghost Next Door and Wait Till Helen Comes, divorce is integral to the plot. Then you have missing information on family tragedies, and sources of information that can act as wild cards.
I think that plot point reflected the times and was on people's minds, but then if they were turning to the past they would not write it in.
Drowning was the most common cause of death, followed by fire, but there were some outliers.
Secrets were the biggest problem complicating the hauntings.
That tracks.
The second biggest problem was the refusal of some people to take it seriously. Even if you don't believe in ghosts, if you have someone who does and is worried, telling them it's just their imagination is not going to help.
That's something I really appreciated about Joe Morton (Dr. Drayton) in What Lies Beneath.
I also appreciated that in Hahn's books, kindness to the ghosts mattered. That is important, because some of them start out pretty dangerous and looking for permanent company, if not revenge.
On the other hand, Emily needs a firm refusal and the smashing of the gazing ball.
Not ghostly at all, but this made me smile: in Wait Till Helen Comes, when Helen destroys a lot of property and it is blamed on vandals, law enforcement insists they couldn't be local. They are probably from Adelphia.
There's a similar reference in Daphne's Book. As it is, you get the impression of someplace with more money and worse people, but if you lived in Maryland in the '80s, it probably takes on new meaning.
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