The Haunted Stairs

Gwendolyn Brooks has moved into a strange neighborhood. A little blond girl with pigtails keeps on appearing in her yard accusing her of stealing her new Beatles record, Please Please Me, a record cut decades before she was born. A little boy in a baseball outfit continues to hit balls into her yard and accuse her of stealing them despite hall walls that separate all the properties. His baseball is autographed by Mickey Mantle, who played decades ago.

Things don't get any better when she meets the kids more her own age --- Regan and Raymond Wycherley. Regan is immediately terrified of Gwendolyn Labrador Retriever and her ruddy Abyssinian cat. She leaps up onto a masonry garden wall to escape them. She screams, doesn't watch where she's going, and falls into a side yard as a result. Then nobody can find her because she disappears.

The house is weird, too. There's green slime in the pool from day one. It spreads to the sink, the faucet, the shower, and the hot water heater. They can't get rid of it no matter what they do. Everything else breaks down, including their car. The very water pipes themselves seem to screech. Matters get worse when they try to go on a trip. It seems to Gwendolyn that the house doesn't want them to go.

Is this just a case of the moving day blues? Or is it something else in this young adult supernatural thriller by Linda Cargill?