Some of the creatures in these pages might only have a message for you, but some are the stuff of nightmares. These thirty-two short stories — from tales passed down for generations to accounts that could have happened yesterday — are collected from the thriving tradition of ghost stories from American Indian cultures across North America. Prepare for stories of witches and walking dolls, hungry skeletons, La Llorona and Deer Woman, and other supernatural beings ready to chill you to the bone.
In 1978, to avoid becoming a desaparecido like her mother, eighteen-year-old Mavi takes a teaching job at Vaccaro School, an isolated finishing school in Patagonia, rumored to be haunted.
Rosa Ramona Díaz has just moved to the small, un-haunted town of Ingot the only ghost-free town in the world. She doesn’t want to be there. She doesn’t understand how her mother a librarian who specializes in ghost-appeasement could possibly want to live in a place with no ghosts. Frankly, she doesn’t understand why anyone would.
Parallel plotlines set in different times, one told in text and one in art, inform each other as a young girl unravels the mystery of a ghost next door.
One evening at bedtime, Charlotte finds a tiny ghost in her bed. She quickly discovers that the ghost does not know how to share. Despite his chorus of “Mine!” that rings through the house, he and the patient Charlotte become fast friends. They spend every moment of the next day with each other, making pancakes, playing games, and learning along the way that it is more fun to share.
A brand new offering from the award-winning author-illustrator of the OTTOLINE books Ada Goth is the only child of Lord Goth. The two of them live together in the enormous Ghastly-Gorm Hall, which is so big that they hardly ever see each other. Lord Goth believes that children should be heard and not seen, so Ada has to wear large clumpy boots around the house so that he can hear her coming. This makes it hard for her to make friends and if she’s honest, she’s rather lonely. Then one day William and Emily Cabbage come to stay at the house, and together with a ghostly mouse called Ishmael, they begin to unravel a dastardly plot that Maltravers, the mysterious indoor gamekeeper, is hatching. Ada and her friends must work together to foil Maltravers before it’s too late!
Margarito is eleven years old now and he’s way past believing in Grandpa Ventura’s ghost stories, but he loves listening to them anyway. One evening on his way home from his grandfather’s, Margarito finds himself alone in the gathering dusk, crossing a narrow bridge. Suddenly, a woman in white floats towards him and calls, “Come to me, child ? come to me!” He frantically hides in the shallow river, but soon sees a pair of yellow, glowing eyes swimming towards him. Before long, the Donkey Lady and La Llorona are circling each other, fighting to claim poor Margarito as their next victim!
When the downtrodden Noor rebel in the West, Wen, overhearing a plan to crush the Noor with powerful war machines, leaves the ghostly Bo, now a boy determined to transform himself into a living machine, and journeys into the war zone to warn the Noor, and her great love, Melik.
While spending the summer with elderly relatives at Clawstone Castle in northern England, Madlyn and her brother Rollo, with the help of several ghosts, attempt to save the rare cattle that live on the castle grounds.
When a phantom elephant turns up uninvited and starts getting a little girl into trouble, she has no idea how to make him go away. But her grandmother happens to have a menagerie of phantom pets herself, so she knows just who to go to for help?