Frost Hollow Hall

Emma Carroll's Frost Hollow Hall is a Victorian ghost story for 9 year olds that opens with a dare on a frozen lake and gets colder from there.

What happens

Tilly Higgins is waiting for her father. He has been away on the railways for six weeks and he is due home today with the wages, and the family owes four weeks' rent. She has put her Sunday frock on. She has been watching the door for two hours.

It is not him. It is Will Potter, who she cannot stand, with a pair of ice skates under his coat and a dare.

Frost Hollow Hall is the big house nobody goes near, because the heir to it drowned in the lake there a decade back. Tilly goes anyway. Not for Will. For the skates.

She gets too far out. The ice cracks, the water takes her, and she goes down into the dark with her skirts dragging her under.

And then there is a light, and a boy in a white shirt with lavender eyes takes both her hands and brings her back to the bank.

He is in her dreams after that, and he is not peaceful. He tells her he cannot rest until the truth is known, and that it is her turn to save him. Then Tilly finds something small and hard sewn into the hem of her frock, with a name engraved inside it.

Tilly's voice carries the whole book. She says in't and flip's sake and God's teeth, she cannot sew and is thoroughly sick of hearing about it, and she misses nothing. The poverty sits on the page without a single speech about it. Turnips in a basket. The blue bits cut off the cheese. Not enough chairs for everyone to sit down at once.

It is beautifully cold, too. Frost on the inside of the windowpane. Trees all white like bones. A lake spread out like a great metal platter.

Two things to be ready for. The drowning is in chapter three and it is not brief. Tilly goes under, cannot find the hole in the ice, feels everything go heavy, and then watches herself from above while Will tries to bring her round. And her father may simply have got on a ship to America without telling them, which is the sadder of the two threads and the one that sits under everything else.

A child who wants to be properly haunted will love this. A nervous swimmer, or a child currently worrying about a parent going away, might want it in daylight and in company.

What to read next

Emma Carroll has written a lot of these. The Snow Sister is the shortest way in, with another poor Victorian family, another sister who has died, and a night spent in a haunted room at a manor because the snow is too deep to get home.