Seven Ghosts

Chris Priestley's Seven Ghosts is a proper spine-tingler for 11 year olds about a day trip to the most haunted house in England.

What happens

Jake is one of twenty children who've won a ghost-story competition. The prize is a tour of Grimstone Hall with a guide called Mrs Fox, who promises seven ghosts, and every one of them a child. Jake isn't impressed. He thinks the others are all goody-goodies, and he only entered because his English teacher talked him into it.

But Mrs Fox keeps giving him funny looks. And a cracked old mirror in the entrance hall nags at him, like a memory he can't quite catch.

The tour goes room by room, and at each stop Mrs Fox tells a story. A rich boy who wants a traveller boy's kite. A servant girl from the workhouse who has to answer a horrible old lady's bell at all hours. A boy who shuts the ice house door on a village child at a Christmas party, just for a laugh.

Each tale is short and sharp and told as if someone's whispering it to you in the dark. Each one is about a child being cruel or being treated cruelly, and then the ghost comes back. It's classic ghost-story stuff, done really well.

Meanwhile, back in the present, Jake keeps seeing things the others don't. A pale girl in an old-fashioned apron at the end of a corridor. A boy standing right next to him one minute and gone the next. Jake decides the hotel must be hiring actors. Is he right? That's the question that'll keep your reader turning pages.

Just so you know, it's genuinely scary. Children die in these stories, and not gently. A boy is shot by accident on a grouse shoot, and we see him lying in the heather covered in blood. A servant girl is worked until she collapses. A boy is found frozen to death. The ghosts come back looking just as they did when they died. A reader who's easily frightened (especially at bedtime!) might want to wait a while. One who loves a good scare will be in heaven.

What to read next

Once they're hooked on Chris Priestley's ghosts, The Last of the Spirits is set on a freezing Christmas Eve in London. Two hungry children sleeping in a churchyard come face to face with the chained ghost of Jacob Marley.