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Sweet Valley Twins Super Chillers #2

The Ghost In the Graveyard

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Strange things have been happening to Sam Sloane ever since he moved from San Francisco to Elizabeth and Jessica Wakefield's neighborhood in Sweet Valley. He can't figure out why everything in town looks so familiar—or why he's mysteriously drawn to a crumbling old mansion in town. When he visits a cemetary in the dead og night and sees a ghost who looks just like him, he tumed to Elizabeth and jessica for help.At first the twins think Sam is imagining things. After all, who believes in ghosts? But the more the girls get to know their new friend, the more they feel he's telling the truth. Something is out there. The twins are going to have to do a little ghost hunting of their own. But what happens if they do discover a ghost? Or, worse, what happens if it discovers them?

185 pages, Paperback

First published June 1, 1990

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About the author

Francine Pascal

1,149 books1,886 followers
Francine Paula Pascal was an American author best known for her Sweet Valley series of young adult novels. Sweet Valley High, the backbone of the collection, was made into a television series, which led to several spin-offs, including The Unicorn Club and Sweet Valley University. Although most of these books were published in the 1980s and 1990s, they remained so popular that several titles were re-released decades later.

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Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews
Profile Image for Stay.
2,670 reviews224 followers
January 17, 2025
Sometimes dead people are a lot friendlier than the living."

This was a lot more thrilling than the first one. Will definitely be finishing this series

RTC
Profile Image for doughnad.
30 reviews2 followers
August 30, 2026
One of my fave Sweet Valley books when I was growing up!
Profile Image for Tiffany Spencer.
2,186 reviews19 followers
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October 15, 2024
The Ghost in the Graveyard
Liz is reading a ghost story in the lunchroom. Jess can’t understand how she can do this-and why she’s doing it-. But she’s interested enough to ask what it’s about. Liz says it’s about a girl who keeps thinking she’s being followed, but when she looks there’s no one there. Liz says one day she sits in her regular seat in the lunch room and the monster catches her. She then grabs jessica’s arm making her jump. Caroline then comes over and tells them a new family is moving in down the street. They have a boy that’s in the sixth grade and he’s cute-so she heard-. Jessica wonders will he be going on the boat ride. Liz suggest they go over that night and invite him. Jessica tho says they should wait and find out some more about him (she wants to see if he’s cute enough). That night, she goes in the living roomo “to read” (to see if she can catch a glimpse of the new boy). She waits and waits but doesn’t see anyone. It gets late and Jessica finally goes upstairs leaving Liz to read her ghost story.

Jessica wakes Liz up early and says the new boy is moving in and they have to go meet him. The boy is tall and has curly black hair. The twins introduce themselves and he says his name is Sam Sloan. He’s moved there from San Franciso. He says he’ll be going to Sweet Valley Middle. He says it’s too bad he moved there so late. He’ll have to wait to meet people. Liz says he can come on the boat ride. Sam says hesitantly he won’t know anyone but then says ok. He’ll ask his parents. They offer him a ride to the marina. (If it doesn’t rain. It looks like it’s about to storm). Then his dad calls him over to help put the stuff in. The twins agree he’s cute-and has amazing eyes-. Jessica can’t wait to find out more about him and to make Lila and Ellen jealous.

After the rain lets up, Sam finishes up with his room and takes off on his bike. We find out Sam grew up in Sweet Valley but his parents died and he was adopted by the Sloane’s at 9 months. As he rides, he feels a sense of belonging. Something is pulling him towards it. He ends up at a crumbling mansion. (Not sure why). Now he wants to get away and rides back home wondering what it is about that house. That night, Sam has a dream about an old man trying to get to him but the wind keeps pushing him back. He can’t see the man’s face. He sits up confused and remembers he’s dreaming the dream about the storm that never ended. He’s been having the dream since he lived in San Fran.
Sam tries to explain his feeling of de ja vus to this parents. He tells them about the old house. They say they don’t think he’d remember and they don’t know anything about the old house. When he gets to the marina, the feeling hits him again like he’s been there before. Sam decides he can trust Liz and tells her about the feeling. Liz tells him it’s dejavu and maybe it’s just the feeling that he belongs that.
Weirdly the fisherman seems to recognize him and tells him to say hello to his father. Liz says he just thought he was someone else. Sam doesn’t agree but doesn’t say anything. Then Liz introduces him to Amy and some of the rest of the girls. Sam wonders off to find some guys Then he has the “pleasure” of meeting Lila -who tells him to move out of the Unicorns seat-. None of the boys pay him any attention. Liz zomes over and invites him to a pool party the twins are having.

Lila thinks Sam is cute but is boring. He doesn’t talk to anyone but Liz. Jessica thinks Lila should be taught a lesson for talking about Liz being nice. Jessica is supposed to help Liz with No-Cooking- Mondays but she comes in late and then says she has to watch a movie -about reincarnation- when it’s time to clean up. After a conversation with Lila -during commercial break- Lila says she thinks she was Cleopatra in another life. Jessica says yeah right but again Lila rubs her the wrong way. Steven suggests she get even.

As the party starts, Lila and Jessica decide who people probably where in a previous life. They say they bet Peter is Albert Einstein and Ginny- Lou is Annie Oakly. They ask Liz and she says she hopes she was Florence Nightingale. Amy comes over and they start talking about the Kent Keller movie. Sam is by himself again and Lila comes over to him. He says he’s thinking of reincarnation. He thinks he might be reincarnated. He tells Liz about the house. He thinks the house might have been his in another life. Jessica calls her over to help with the hot dogs and she says she wants to hear more about his theory later. Liz tells Jessica and Jessica tells her she thought she didn’t believe in that stuff. Liz says she doesn’t but Sam does. Then Jessica asks her to help her play a trick on Lila.

Jessica introduces Ellen to Sam. They start talking about reincarnation and Sam says he thinks he use to be in the circus. He starts to juggle a ball, Ellen’s sneaker, and a ketchup bottle. Everyone is impressed. He admits he learned in -in- a class in San Fran. The party is a success! Sam agrees to help Liz clean up if she’ll go with him to see the house. Jessica finds someone better than Cleopatra in a book and waits for Liz to put her plan into action.

Jessica pretends to be sleep (having a nightmare) and says it’s her gold and she never should have come back to SV. Liz advises not to wake her and says that she often has this dream of being someone else. She says her name is Lilian Barns. When Jessica wakes up she pretends it was a dream. Lila says she’s heard the name before and asks if she has a book on SV history. She says her father might have one and Lila goes to look for it. They search for it-tho Jessica already knows where it is-. Lila finds out she owned a gold mine. She took 4 pieces with her. Some guys found her and shot her. Lila says if she knows where the gold is she could be a millionaire. So, they need to find the gold.

Liz can’t believe that Jessica didn’t tell Lila it was a joke, and says maybe she shouldn’t play about things like that. She invites her to go with her and Sam. Ken invites Sam to play basket ball but he has to turn it down. Sam tells th the twins he used to live there, and Liz tells him she doesn’t think he lived there in another life. She thinks this was probably his old home. When they get to the house, Sam sees something move in the upstairs window. The twins don’t see it.
They ask a lady that lives next to the mansion if he used to live in the house. He says he used to be named Burrows. She says the house used to belong to Jeremiah Severs. She says if they can’t find an heir they’ll have to sell it to a developer. After this,

Sam says he wants to be alone for a while. It starts to get dark, but Sam goes to Whyte Memorial Cemetary. A tall, gaunt, man grabs him and demands to know what he’s doing there. He thinks he’s there to tear the place up. He tells him the man he’s there to see his parents but he doesn’t know their last names. The man says his name is Clayton and he says a lot of kids come there to cause mischief because there scared. He offers to find his parents if he gives them their date of death. Sams says he’ll find it on their own. He tells him if he needs him to call.

Sam -now alone- takes out his picture. There are a lot of Burrows and Sam realizes these are his relatives. There’s one named Micheal that died 30 years ago that makes him wonder. All of a sudden he hears footsteps. They start and stop and start and stop. When he turns around he sees a ghost with his face. Micheal? Sam gets out of there. In the library, Liz studies the famous people who believed in reincarnation. She runs into Sam on the way out. He tells her about what happened. He gets her to agree to go with him the next night. Liz gets Jess to come with them. Lila says they shouldn’t tell the other Unicorns about her reincantation. Lila says she has a plan to hypnotize her and they go to the library where Lila attempts it.

Jessica goes alone with it and tells her the gold is on McClarion Street. Jessica leads her to the mansion but doesn’t want to go inside. She gets out of it by telling her they’re supposed to meet the Unicorn’s at Casey’s. At Casey’s Lila tells a story about how she saw a ghost in Milan who says he was murdered in that room and he kills everyone in the room. So, she moved her things. Jessica leaves the meeting abruptly and heads home to convince Liz she doesn’t want to go with her to the mansion. She tells her she has to ‘rearrange her closet”. Liz tells her don’t even try it. To make things worse, Steven says two guys he knows spent the night at the cemetary and they heard noises coming from underneath the ground. Liz doesn’t believe it but Jessica wonders if it’s true and if Sam really did see a ghost. They wait for the ghost and at first nothing happens. Then the ghost appears.

The ghost runs and Liz runs after him. Sam chases after her. When she catches up to “the ghost” it’s a guy-that looks like Sam-. He says his name is David Barton. Jessica points out the obvious they’re twins. After they find out both their parents -one and the same- are burried there (Ted and Julie) and they were both adopted, this seems to confirm it. (And that their both the same age-Eleven turning twelve next week). Liz says they should speak to their parents and they decide to go to Sam’s.

We find out neither was told about the other and Sam realizes this is why the man at the marina seemed to recognize him. The twins also realize that David must go to another school. When they get to Sam’s -and the twins are gone home- they see they both have dogs named Terry. Sam introduces David to his parents and tells them how they meet. Then they go surprise David’s parents but they surprise them by already knowing about Sam. David is upset and hurt. They say they were going to tell him when he was older. David wants to know why they were separated. They tell him their parents -and grandmother- were in a car crash. Their aunt was given custody but she was too old to take care of them. She put one up for adoption. She put Sam up for adoption, She thought if she told them she had a twin they’d want him too. She broke her hip after this and they adopted David.

David wants to know if Sam can sleep over. His parents say yes and then they should invite his parents over for dinner. The twins are watching tv and all the lights go out and they hear rumbling in the basement, but it turns out to be just Steven pranking. The twins notice more similarities in David’s room -same type books, same way of displaying their baseball cards-. They decide to have a double bday party. They also have had the same dream about the man in the storm. They both have the dream that night. Sam shows David the picture and tells him about the house. David is uninterested in learning anything about their parents.

Jessica starts to feel guilty after Lila gets freaked that she’ll get murdered in this life too. She’s about to tell her it’s just a prank when Lila starts talking about the gold. She decides to string her along a little longer. The next day, both sets of twins meet the caretaker -who turns out to be the man in Sam and David’s dreams-.He shows them the garden. The twins think it’s something strange about him -the boys- and ask his name and he says it’s PJ. They ask about their parents and show him the picture. He tells them the Burroughs use to own the house. To make this long story short. Jermiah and Peter were friends, they went into a business venture together, fell out, and never spoke again because each thought the other was cheating them. Peter died. Jeremiah got the house (through false papers).

Sam wants to know about Micheal, but PJ walks off angrily. When Sam goes after him, he’s vanished into thin air. Jessica goes to hide the box there to end the prank but feels eyes on her. At City Hall, Liz and Sam look more into his parents. They find out Micheal had the same bday as Sam and David and he died the day before his 12th bday. (It’s almost the twins 12th bday). There’s something else on the picture but it’s too small to read. The clerk suggest they go to the library -to find the newspaper for the day he died- but it’s closed.

When Lila finds out Jessica was just pranking her, she storms off. Jessica then hears noises and tries to get out of the gate but it’s locked. Liz senses Jessica’s fear and it leads her to the mansion. She unlocks the gate which isn’t locked. Jessica thinks Sam and David should stay away from the mansion. At the library, Sam finds out Micheal and his grandfather died when they went out boating to celebrate his birthday. He calls David and is alarmed to find out that his dad took him sailing. They called him but no one answered. Sam knows its about to happen again and rushes to find David. (The grandfather looks like PJ). Sam goes to the Wakefields and he and the twins call the marina but don’t get any help so they decide to go there. On the way they see a storm’s coming. Jessica almost falls into the water, but Sam and Liz save her. Sam sees his brother and his father’s boat come apart and then he passes out. When he comes to he finds out David’s father was picked up but they can’t find David.

Sam has a dream about the man again and realizes that the man is PJ and he’s showing him where David is. So, David is found and rescued. The twins discover a hidden door and find some papers that show the house is legally there’s. When they ask a neighboor have they seen the caretaker around, they say there was never a caretaker.

My Thoughts
I cut it short. There’s also a end of the spring party and Lila gets Jessica back and Liz also gets Jessica back for skipping the No Cook Mondays. But this one just reminded me of a male version of Twitches-without them finding out they had magic-. Also, it reminded me of another show “Ravenswood”-which was a PLL spin off and it also had to do with a group of kids who were reincarnated versions of their ancestors and I wanna say there ancestors died in an accident and bad things kept happending to them so it looked like they were going down the same path. It wasn’t really all that scary. The only part that was a little bit scary was PJ vanishing and being told there was no caretaker. Then him showing up in the dreams -like he was somehow controlling Sam and David’s dreams-, Which is EERIE!

Rating: 5 and a half,
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
Profile Image for Trinity.
13 reviews1 follower
September 15, 2014
I loved this book! After this book, I want to read more of these books!
Profile Image for kylajaclyn.
717 reviews57 followers
April 10, 2018
This one was so boring. They honestly use these titles to make the books sound way more exciting than they actually are. I love Liz’s side part on the cover, though. Blonde hair on fleek!

So this dude Sam Sloane that no one gives a shit about has just arrived in Sweet Valley from San Francisco. The twins try to include him in parties and things, but he just mopes around and acts weirdly drawn to everything in the city. But one night he swears he sees a ghost in the local graveyard... who looks just like him!

He asks the twins to come back to the graveyard with him so he can show them what is going on. Steven talks about ghosts there and scares the twins (mostly Jess), but Liz tries to remain reasonable. At the cemetery, the twins and Sam meet for a long time. They are about to give up when the ghost does appear! But Liz knows ghosts don’t have tans or wear Johnny Buck shirts, so she asks him what’s going on. The boy introduces himself as David Barton. The boys quickly learn that they were twins separated at birth. Sam was in the cemetery to visit the graves of his dead bio parents.

I really thought the plot would be done and over by this point. But there’s more! Everyone talks about reincarnation throughout the whole book. The boys, particularly Sam, feel drawn to the Seever house on MacClarendon St. There they meet a caretaker named PJ who tells them more about their origin story. But he won’t tell them about Michael, a little boy with a grave in the cemetery who died at 11, the same age as Sam and David.

The day before the boys’ birthday, Sam does some sleuthing at the library. But what he finds frightens him: PJ is the reincarnation of their relative Peter J Burroughs, and he was unable to save little Michael in a boating accident. Sam is horrified when he learns that David’s Dad has taken him sailing for his birthday. He tries to alert the Coast Guard to stop them, but it is too late. A storm does begin raging, just as he predicted. He faints on the deck and has a dream of David being saved by PJ. He tells the police where to find David, and he is exactly where the Dream said, alive and well! Score another one for twintuition.

I wish the story was over by this point. It’s not. David and Sam have been carrying around a picture of the Seever house. It has an old man in the window in the left corner. Now that PJ has rescued David, the man is gone, but the side of the house in the picture has been shown to contain a hidden door. The boys go back and discover stuff that was used by a nemesis of Peter’s. Among these things is a deed saying the house should belong to Sam and David. They throw an after- birthday party in the mansion.

Fuck, the story is finally over at this point. I am getting tired just reading it to you.

Also, there are two side plots involving Jessica and Lila pranking one another and Jess skipping out on Liz when she tries to make their mother a homemade dinner. It’s all as lame as it sounds. It is putting me to sleep this very moment.

Quotes:

[Jessica] took pride in the fact that no one could stay angry at her for more than a day.

That’s because you manipulate them into kissing your ass, Jessica.
Profile Image for Alex.
7,016 reviews1 follower
October 17, 2019
I had totally forgotten how ludicrous this book is! The ghost part aside, the entire adoption thing just makes absolutely no sense. Also, “natural parents” just sounded bizarre every time they said it. Why not say “birth parents”?

The trick Jessica plays on Lila is fun, though, and Elizabeth getting stuck doing the Monday night dinners made me laugh. Those two plots saved this book for me.
Profile Image for Brandy.
247 reviews1 follower
November 13, 2023
This was the first time I ever read this one and I really enjoyed it. Some of the twins high jinks were in there but it also shows the connection twins have. Even if one was far away for some part of their life. past meets present to save a family member . Not being able to rest after death because of a lost you felt you were to blame can be a hard thing.
Profile Image for Sabrina.
8 reviews3 followers
April 13, 2009
I loved this book! I remember it as if I read it yesterday, I read it so many times. It was my first "big girl" book, and my grandma gave it to me.

Lots of good memories attached to this book.
Profile Image for Jodie.
2,421 reviews
October 24, 2010
Super chillers and super editions were the stuff of legends. They are still some of my favorite reads from childhood. I loved the series and these were longer adventures to delve into. Good stuff.
Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews