The Haunted Library 4 – The Five O’Clock Ghost

Dori Hillestad Butler's The Five O'Clock Ghost is the fourth Haunted Library mystery, a gentle ghost story for 5 year olds about a haunting that starts at exactly the same time every day.

What happens

Kaz is a ghost boy who lives in a library with his ghost dog Cosmo and grumpy old Beckett. His best friend is Claire, a girl who can see ghosts when nobody else can. Together they're C and K Ghost Detectives.

Claire gets a phone call from a boy called David. At five o'clock every afternoon, a lamp in his house switches itself on, the garage door rumbles up and an angry voice bellows out of the TV. Nobody can make out what it's saying.

Kaz goes along shrunk down inside Claire's water bottle (that's how he gets about). Secretly he's hoping the ghost is someone from his own family. They were all scattered by the wind when their old haunt was knocked down, and he hasn't seen them since.

What's so nice about these books is how cosy they are, even with a ghost in every one. Kaz isn't a scary ghost at all. He's a worrier. He hasn't got the hang of his ghost skills, and going through walls makes him feel skizzy (that's ghost for queasy, and there's a glossary of ghost words so children can pick them up).

Claire is the brave, bossy one. She decides people will only take her seriously if she has proper ghost-hunting equipment. So she wraps a mini vacuum cleaner in tin foil, adds a bit of wire for an antenna, and calls it a ghost catcher. Then she tests it on Beckett, and very nearly hoovers him up!

The mystery is a proper little puzzle, with clues to jot down in Claire's notebook. Kaz spends a fair bit of it clinging to Cosmo in case he floats off into the Outside.

Kaz losing his family is a sad idea underneath it all, but the book keeps it soft. He carries on hoping, and that's the feeling that stays with you. Isn't that exactly the kind of ghost you'd want to meet?

What to read next

If this is the first one you've picked up, go back to the very first Haunted Library book, where Kaz's haunt is pulled down and he first drifts into Claire's library.