SOLVED. Ghost children playing hide and seek, cherub hands on pillars [s]

[Carolyn]

This would have been published prior to 1985. I started reading it more than 20 years ago when I was in elementary school (4th or 5th grade), but I only ever got as far as the first chapter as I had planned to come back to it.... I am sorry that this is so vague a description! please help if you can!

It starts with character's arrival at a relative's estate, maybe mansion (parents may have been killed or sent for summer with relatives, I'm not sure). There is an overgrown garden (in my mind's eye there is an old swing set, but that may be my addition) with a rickety gate. Children's laughter is faintly heard, but when turn to see, there are no kids there (may have started swings swinging). I remember mention of cherubic hands on a pillar of the house as if ghost child was hiding behind the pillar (with arms hugging it or just partially hidden), paying hide-and-seek with other ghost children or new living arrival to the house. I believe this was in the main hallway of the house.

Sorry this is so vague! I appreciate any help you can offer! Thanks!

[Kate]

This sounds like The Children of Green Knowe by L.M. Boston. I loved this book when I was a child.

[Carolyn]

I'm not sure if it is the Green Knowe book, but I have ordered it from the library to read and see if it jogs my memory. I'll post my results....

[Kelly]

Try "The Headless Cupid." I loved it when I read it in the late 1970s - early 1980s.

[Cathy]

I don't think it's The Headless Cupid -- kids in a blended family find that their new step-sister is highly dramatic and she holds seances in their big old rambly house. There's the slightest suggestion that the youngest son might possibly be psychic or talented somehow for real, but there are no ghosts playing hide and seek.

I agree that Children of Green Knowe is a good bet -- boy comes to live with his grandmother, and the house is haunted by four children from, I think, Elizabethan times. They're both terrific books!

[Carolyn]

I am finishing reading The Children of Green Knowe. This seems to be the book that I started so any times in elementary school. I seem to have added quite a bit in my memory of it - probably because of the UK vernacular used, which is why I probably ddn't finish it! It is a great story, and I am looking forward to the others! Thank you for your help with finding this book again!

[Lindsey]

I thought 'Children of Greene Knowe' too I watched it about 25 years ago, scared me to death - was a series, on after school! I remember a sundial being quite prominent and a rocking horse!

[Kate]

Just a humorous note about The Children of Green Knowe and associations. My 5th grade teacher read this book aloud to us around 1968, and I read it several times on my own because I liked it so much. The funny thing is that when I read The Shining by Stephen King in 1978, the mental pictures of the topiary were all shaped by the topiary I had envisioned in Green Knowe. An odd connection.