There's A Ghost In This House

A little blue-faced girl welcomes you to her grand old house, which she’s heard is haunted. Yet, try as she might, she can’t find the ghosts anywhere. She’s looked under the bed (twice), in the library and up the chimney. Where can they be?

Fortunately, readers can see the naughty (but quite adorable) white-sheeted ghosts on a series of transparent pages, as they hide from the little girl in all manner of amusing ways – hanging from the chandelier above her head, rocking in rocking chairs in the attic and sliding down the banisters. This added interactive element of the book – adding the ghosts to an otherwise ordinary page by laying the transparent sheet over it - make it a complete joy, along with Jeffers’ own quirky take on a haunted house, depicted in a series of old style black and white photographs with formal captions.

There’s a Ghost in This House has the feel of classic 80s picture books like Funny Bones for the supernatural-yet-cute theme and Jan Pienkowski’s Haunted House for the interactive paper engineering. It’s a simple seek and find kind of storyline, with the ghosts often “hiding” in amusing places such as masquerading as the faces of portraits on the walls and squeezing themselves into spaces on bookshelves – perfect for young readers to spot. Yet there’s also a sophistication to Jeffers’ use of collaged materials that adults will delight in looking at too. Absolutely brilliant.