The Ghost At Dawn's House (1996) - Plot & Excerpts
this was one of my faves when i was a kid. i was so jealous of people who lived in new england because their houses were wicked old & maybe had secret passages! then i moved to new england (when i was 22) &...yeah, a lot of the houses are pre-fab 60s era suburban knock-offs completely devoid of secret passages. bummer.i also loved this book because it was so atmospheric, with all the storms & dawn constantly reading ghost stories & scaring the crap out of herself. when i was a kid, i lived in ohio, where there were thunderstorms & tornadoes all summer. i was never afraid of tornadoes because they made everything look so cool. the air would become perfectly still & the sky would turn yellow or green & you'd see a twister coming over the horizon & have to dive for cover in the basement. i always brought along a BSC book for such occasions. anything to avoid looking at the walls & seeing spiders.so, plot: dawn is into ghost stories & searching her house for a secret passage. one day, whilst reading ghost stories in her barn, she falls into a hidden trap door, which turns out to be a passage to a secret passage. this is what i don't get (& it never bothered me as a kid): apparently the secret passage goes underground & comes up INSIDE dawn's house. the exit is a wall in dawn's room, the wall she shares with her mom's room. apparently it springs open somehow. okay, how do the schafers not notice this kind or architectural discrepancy? the passage is apparently large enough for a person to fit through & contains a staircase. so it's eating up a good three feet of space between the walls. plus, it's space that is empty, ie, uninsulated. wouldn't that make the house really drafty? i just don't understand. dawn reads a history of stoneybrook & decides that a crazy old-timer named jared mullray shut himself up in the secret passage when his family was forced to abandon their farm. she thinks he eventually died there & is now haunting the passage. this whole plotline blows except for the ghost being named jared. that's my boyfriend's name! even as a kid, i thought it was a cool name. when i grew up & first heard of the jared that became my boyfriend, i thought, "hey! like jared mullray, crazy secret passage ghost dude!" jared says most people think of jared, the subway sandwich weight loss spokesperson. or jared diamond, if they're nerds/history grad students.dawn hears weird noises & finds random shit in the passage, like old-timey ice cream cones & buffalo head nickels. but it turns out to be nicky pike, who needed a secret hide-out to get away from the triplets, who tease him, & all his sisters, who are girls. i'm only nine books in & i've already had it with the whole "triplets tease nicky" story. get over it & grow a pair, nicky. maybe it's just two pike-centric books back to back. i never cared for the pikes that much. anyway, dawn keeps nicky's secret...but still thinks the passage is haunted.
Dawn and her brother find a secret passageway in their house! It's super fun to explore, but at the same time, it starts to be awfully creepy when evidence of occupancy begins to turn up. Who's in their passage? Is it a ghost? Luckily Dawn, the ghost stories expert, is on the case!Overall, this story as a mystery fell flat for me because the "explanations" after the fact didn't add up. They were all stretched unbelievably to explain the weird noises and mysterious items left in the passage, and logical steps to investigation were ignored in favor of more convoluted, revelation-preserving investigative techniques. However, the fun/creep factor of the secret passageway appealed to me as a kid--I liked how it was described and thought the author did well sucking us in with the temptation of the unexplored chamber connected to your own home. . . .
What do You think about The Ghost At Dawn's House (1996)?
Dawn finds a secret passage and starts seeing evidence of ghosts. I really liked the descriptions in this book because it was actually kind of exciting--the idea of finding a cool passageway in your own house was really unimaginably cool, though of course when I think about its probability of actually being constructed the way it was described my brain kinda starts to melt. (Fun to read when you're a kid, though.) I thought the "clues" were contrived, though--as usual when it came to kids' mysteries in which the author assumes the audience is kind of oblivious--and didn't like how the book came around to providing answers to why unexplained items were appearing in the secret passageway (causing Dawn to think the place was haunted). (I think the "explanation" for the scary things that were happening was about as silly as the way they handled the same situation in Book #2 in this series.) I don't remember Dawn being a ghost stories buff before this, so that seemed kinda convenient, but maybe I just didn't notice.
—Swankivy
It's Dawn's turn to tell a story and she's got ghosts on the brain! This book I liked, as it had some really interesting spooky elements (perfect for fall reading) but also had a lot of really interesting disasters on the baby-sitting end of things. Seriously, do these things happen? Knowing kids, they do. Mrs. Pike, you are my hero - I want to be more like you!A fun read but I almost dropped this down to three stars because we never resolved a portion of the plot. I'm deciding to take the high road on this one, deciding that as this book came out originally as a spooky Halloween kind of read, that it had to throw a little scare with no explanation into things. All the same, I wish I had been given a real answer. But that's just me.I do like how Dawn interacts with her brother and think this is one of the better books in the series.
—Kristine Pratt
This has always been one of my favorite BSC books. Since a Dawn book was my first BSC book ever, I've always had a bit of a soft spot for her. The added bonus of her being a ghost loving fiend with a secret passage in her very own house? Bonus beyond words.It doesn't hurt that this is one of the BSC books that actually holds up well over the years. It still makes me look forward to summer storms that beg for a book of ghost stories to be read while the sky falls.I love the bits where Nicky Pike bonds with Dawn, even before she knows what's going on.Despite the discrepancy in how the passage is detailed in the book and how it's pictured on the cover, I love the cover art, too.
—Marian
