Autumn Albert sees dead people. But it’s the striking lack of ghosts that alarms her when she arrives on the mysterious island of Imber off the Cornish coast. One ghost in particular is nowhere to be seen — her father, who died at sea in unexplained circumstances on a birdwatching trip gone wrong.
At home in London, she is used to seeing ghosts everywhere, at school, on the bus and at home, where her best friend, Jack, the shade of a Victorian chimney sweep, lives in the fireplace, a “coal-smudged” Cockney who is forever 12 years old.
When a peculiar clause in her dad’s will demands that she and her mum relocate to the seaside he always hated, and move into his secret house he never thought to mention — a storm-battered cottage beneath the cliffs — Autumn becomes even more determined to find out what has happened to him. “It was unspeakable to admit that Dad still hadn’t visited. That not even the slightest, smallest hint of him had appeared. The crushing irony that after 12 years of ghosts appearing unbidden, the only one she wanted wasn’t there.”
But Imber is “wrong to its bones” according to the pale, glassy-eyed ferryman who takes them across the water; the island will not give up its secrets easily.
Autumn keeps hearing a song floating on the wind, a sea shanty about a lost child. Could it be a clue? Who is the strange woman with silver hair who sings to the sea, palms to the sky, with a voice that turns your “blood to sea salt”? And what’s with the weird pebbles with perfectly round holes in the centre?
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Fans of Frances Hardinge will love this atmospheric mystery, which is a sea-sprayed spin on a traditional ghost story: in this world, it is the ghosts who are Autumn’s friends and the living who are her foes. An earlier version of this story won The Times/Chicken House Children’s Fiction Competition in 2021 — readers can now enjoy the winning entry for themselves.
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The chapters are quick and punchy, and there are pace and plot twists a-plenty. It is also gently supernatural rather than seriously scary, so an ideal read for young, independent readers who may be bored of witches of the cackling, cauldron kind this Halloween and are ready for witches who can summon up storms instead.
It’s still spooky — but spiked with a salty tang of sea air.
The Witchstone Ghosts (9+) by Emily Randall-Jones (Chicken House, 341pp; £7.99)
