Camp Haunt

Dawn Vogel's Camp Haunt is a ghost story for 11 year olds told through the letters, diaries and reports from one very strange summer at a girls' camp.

What happens

It's 2003 and Camp Fairmarsh is celebrating its 120th year. Eight weeks of canoeing, horse riding and campfire songs. No phones allowed.

Cabin 8 gets four girls who have nothing in common. Jessika is only there because camp was the alternative to juvie. Brooke has been coming for years and thinks she owns the place. Alexis has asthma and a lot of enthusiasm for the camp newspaper. And quiet Mary writes very old-fashioned letters home to someone she only ever calls "M".

On the first night a new counsellor, Dori, tells the camp's history round the fire. She tells it as a ghost story. Was the founder burned alive? Did her own sister have something to do with it?

After that, people keep smelling smoke near Cabin 8. Nobody can find a fire. Someone hears running footsteps in the woods. The camp nurse starts writing up campers' nightmares.

What makes it such fun to read is that you're putting the pieces together yourself. Brooke's snooty letters home say one thing, Jessika's diary says another, and a very dull purchase order for firewood tries to explain it all away. You find yourself reading the grown-ups' reports as closely as the girls' letters (and noticing what they don't say).

It's a slow creep rather than a jump scare. The oddest things are the small ones.

Worth knowing before you hand it over

Jessika is fifteen and on probation for shoplifting, and Brooke is already planning to be a counsellor when she turns eighteen. Their letters include gossip about a friend's dad caught with his mistress, a nurse reading a camper's nightmare as being about boys, and the rumour of the founder's death. The camp's own old history also talks about "Indians" in a way that feels dated now.

Nothing here is graphic, but it does feel like it's aimed at the top of the shelf. A reader who's already enjoying spookier books for older kids will lap it up. For a reader at the younger end it might be one to read together.

What to read next

If they want another girl at a summer camp with a secret in its past, Camp Scare has a new girl frozen out by her cabin and a lake with small towns sunk underneath it.