Little Ghost of Grimwood

Boomer has been riding Grimwood's Ghost Train for seventy-five years.Not because he has to. Because someone has to. The fog machines need checking. The skeleton trio need cuing. The scares need to land at exactly the right angle — not too soon, not too late, in the precise gap between laughing and screaming where the magic lives. For seventy-five years, Boomer has held that gap open alone, and if the Ghost Train has given him anything in return, it hasn't been company.Then the carnival ghosts arrive — Madame Mystique with her crystal ball and her opinions, Patches the patchwork clown who has never met a pratfall he didn't commit to, the Popcorn Brothers who understand acoustics and can weaponise burnt-caramel scent. Then a hidden chamber opens in the ride's walls, and a girl named Zara Martinez starts noticing the things nobody else is supposed to notice: fog curling into words, animatronics running half a beat wrong, a brass nameplate in a crate that shouldn't exist.And then the Blackwoods move.The Blackwood family has been collecting ghost anchors for decades — the small, ordinary objects that tether spirits to the places they love — storing them in hidden rooms, cataloguing them, hoarding them with the patient efficiency of people who have decided that joy is a resource to be managed. Every anchor collected is a ghost stranded. Every ghost stranded is a light going out. By Halloween, they intend to have everything.The Little Ghost of Grimwood is a middle-grade ghost adventure about found families and buried histories, about the courage it takes to stay visible when invisibility is safer, and about the particular magic of a place where the living and the dead have learned to take care of each other. It is also about a boy who has been alone for seventy-five years and what happens when someone finally sits beside him — not because they're supposed to, not because the ride requires it, but because Row Seven, Seat Two is exactly where she wants to be.The Ghost Train is still running. The lights are still on.The question is who keeps them that way.