The Ghost Garden

Emma Carroll's The Ghost Garden is a short, spooky story for 9 year olds set in the summer of 1914, when the things a girl digs up in a garden seem to be warning her about what's coming.

What happens

Fran's dad is Head Gardener at Longbarrow House, and she loves helping him in the holidays and finding lost things in the soil. Then one morning her fork snaps a bone buried among the potatoes. Minutes later, the old lady's grandson Leo has his leg broken by his sister's cricket bat.

Coincidence? Fran isn't so sure. Especially when a tiny china doll turns up among the onions, and that same afternoon her mum announces a baby is on the way.

Leo is stuck in a bath chair for weeks, and Fran gets roped in to push him around the grounds. She'd much rather not. He's awkward and only wants to talk about newspapers and a war he's sure is coming. She's shy and a bit prickly. Neither of them is any good with other children.

So watching them slowly become friends is lovely. They go hunting for an ancient burial mound, find an old map stuck behind a desk, and then come across something at the mound that turns the whole summer eerie.

It's short and it moves quickly, but there's a lot packed in. Fran's mixed feelings about a new baby. The posh Walker twins mocking her country accent. A dad who might sign up to fight. There's a short note at the back, too, explaining how the war actually began.

Be ready for the first chapter. Leo's broken leg is described quite vividly, with bone sticking out through his torn trousers and blood on the bat. Inside the mound there's a skeleton with a blade in its ribs, and later a whole army of silent ghostly soldiers marches past. A child who hates gore might need a hand through the opening.

For a reader who likes a proper shiver with some real history underneath it, it's perfect. And who hasn't wondered what might be buried at the bottom of the garden?

What to read next

Emma Carroll fans could go on to In Darkling Wood next. There's a wood at the end of a grandmother's garden, a new friend who vanishes without warning and letters written in November 1918, when the war has just ended.