The Haunted Library 8 – The Hide-and-Seek Ghost

Dori Hillestad Butler's The Hide-and-Seek Ghost is the eighth Haunted Library mystery, a gentle ghost story for 5 year olds with a prankster, a house for sale and a ghost who won't stay put.

What happens

Kaz is a ghost boy who lives in a library. His best friend is Claire, a girl who lives upstairs and can see ghosts when nobody else can. Together they solve ghostly mysteries.

This time their client is Eli. He goes to Claire's school and he's a famous prankster, so when he says there's a ghost in his house nobody believes him. His family are trying to sell the house, and the buyers keep getting scared off. His mum and his sister think he's doing it on purpose so they won't have to move.

Kaz doesn't trust him either. But then marbles bounce down the stairs when nobody's home. A book of jokes turns up open on Eli's bed at exactly the right page. Something wails "Ding dong, you're wrong" from the kitchen. Is it Eli, his sister, or a real ghost?

There's trouble back at the library too. The grown-up ghosts are upset about something that happened long ago, and nobody will tell Kaz what it was. When it looks as if he'll have to move out, Kaz decides to run away (to Claire's school, tucked inside her water bottle).

And poor Kaz still can't glow, however hard he tries. Everyone tells him to relax and breathe, which isn't easy when someone's just shouted BOO in your face.

The ghost ideas are lovely for young readers. Ghosts shrink right down to travel in a water bottle. They pass through walls and swim through the air. Humans are "solids", and a ghost who feels sick is "skizzy". It's spooky in a cosy way.

It's deep into a long series and it mentions earlier cases, but it explains itself as it goes. If you've got a reader who likes a mystery with lots of suspects and a few red herrings, this is a gentle place to practise.

What to read next

If your reader is new to Kaz and Claire, the first Haunted Library book is where the two of them meet, on the day the wind blows Kaz out of his old haunt and in through the library window.