What's the Name of That Book??? discussion
SOLVED: Children's/YA
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SOLVED. Collection of spooky/ghost stories; staircase-post coming alive at night, ghost of girl waking up in bathtub, unlucky coin, dead friend showing up in school photo. [s]
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I'm pretty sure I read a book very similar to that but the stories were Japanese instead....
Thanks for your reply :) Ah maybe mine were adaptations of that? I have no idea though, and the only real indication of it being British that I have is the fact that the girl was named after the English Queen, and that another character's sister ran off to Ibiza... Otherwise I don't know :(
Oh wow, thank you so much!! That's the book! :) I can't believe you found it haha, thank you!
The book was a hardback, and I remember that the cover was dark blue, and I could be wrong but I seem to remember that it had a staircase-post (possibly with a hat or coat on it) image on the cover, as this was one of the stories, and the title might have been the name of this story.
I don't remember this staircase story very well, but what I do remember is that a family either moved into a new house, or just got a new staircase in their old house, and the staircase had a post at the end with a round part on top. I think the father jokingly gave it a name, and put a hat or coat on it. The family went along with this joke and it became a "character". I think there was an older brother and a younger sister. The staircase post then comes alive at night and moves up the stairs, and the brother is the only one who knows and gets scared. I don't remember how it ends. There could have been something with the sister's mobile phone?
The next one I remember might have been called "Queenie". It was about a girl who stays with her grandmother or an old woman whom she knows, because her sister is in Ibiza with her boyfriend. I don't remember exactly how the story progresses, but in the old woman's apartment is a bathtub, and at a specific time (maybe midnight) the ghost of a girl appears in it. This is the old woman's sister who died because she had a weak heart, and she died at that time. The girl was called Elizabeth and nicknamed Queenie after the English Queen.
There was another story about an unlucky coin (or penny?), where some kids found that if a person had this coin they gradually lost the will to live. I think they gave it to a bully maybe? And at some point they gave it to a teacher they didn't like, and I think he almost jumped off something but they regretted it and stopped him.
The last one I remember was told by a grandmother to her grandchildren I think, recalling her childhood. The children were visiting her and found an old school photo of hers in a drawer, and asked her about it. She then told the story of how she had a best friend who looked a lot like her, when she was young. At this time school pictures were taken using old cameras and they would move from one end of the row of kids to the other, and so they had a plan for one of them to stand at one end, and then run to the other end so as to appear twice. I don't remember exactly how it worked but it was something like this... Before they took the picture though, the grandmother and her friend got into a fight, and the friend later died in a car accident. She decided not to go through with the plan, but later on there she was, on the picture, twice... Someone next to "her" said something like, "yes you did run to the other side, I felt you pull my hair" or something, and when she looked closely it was her friend, and not her, even though the friend had died. I think maybe there was actually a story about some boys who actually did this double-act on the picture, and maybe she told this story instead and kept the one about her friend to herself? It could be either...
These are all the ones I remember, and sorry for the long and detailed post! I'm just really hoping someone might know the book I'm thinking of, or might recognise a story! :)