The Ghost of the Millhouse
The Ghost of the Millhouse
We entered the mill itself. Aunt Sue showed us her office, then took us on a tour of the building. It smelled of dust and rat droppings. Blue [the dog] came bounding down the stairs. He licked our hands and followed us around. Aunt Sue said he slept somewhere between hay bales. She told us the mill had been built more than 150 year ago and had serviced the area for many years, providing a place for local farmers to have their grain ground into flour.
“Farmers would come here from all over, bringing their crops in their wagons. The grain was weighed, stored, ground and sold here. Now the mill is protected as a historic park so that people will always be able to see how things worked in the olden days.”
She pointed to a few big boxes of old papers and photos on a dusty table.
“I'd like you to look carefully through these, and see if you find anything unusual. Are there receipts that tell us the price of grain a century ago? Are there official survey papers for the property? We need to make sure we don't recycle anything of value.”
This sounded like a serious job and much better than mucking out the chicken coop. I wondered how Mark and Angela were getting on.
“Come on," Mary Jane said. "We're looking for treasure.”
And that's just what it was like. We didn't know if a piece of yellowed paper would be just a scribbled note or an interesting discovery.
We spent the rest of the morning reading and sorting papers, putting them in neat stacks and trying to find dates on them. Mary Jane even kept a list of papers by numbering each one and writing down what it was. We separated photos from papers, receipts and newspaper clippings. One weird thing happened. I spotted Blue in one of the old black-and-white photos. He was sitting on a hay bale, looking straight at the camera.
"Look at Blue in this picture," I said, showing it to Mary Jane.
She turned it over and frowned. "How old is Blue, Aunt Sue?" she called out to the office.
“Blue? Oh, he's maybe five or six.”
“Then how come he's in a photo from 1915?”
“What?" Aunt Sue came over to our table and looked at the photo. "Well, I'll be," she said. "That looks like the exact same dog. Must be one of his forefathers.”
"Or maybe Blue is a reincarnation of this dog," I said.
Blue just wagged his tail and stared at us expectantly.
Are there animal ghosts, I wondered, or only people ghosts?
Josh, the story's narrator, and three of his friends spend part of their summer helping Aunt Sue and Uncle Doug fix up an old mill in an historic park. They live in Aunt Sue and Uncle Doug's old and possibly haunted mansion, learn the basics of how the old mill worked, participate in the production of a movie, and help raise money for more repairs to the buildings on the property.
This chapter book, part of the “Orca Echoes” series, has themes that fit the elementary school history curriculum, such as developing some understanding of our past and exploring ways in which students might contribute to their communities. The book includes succinct information on many things, such as: how a mill works; what a paranormal society does; live traps; homesteading; and box-elder bugs. While it isn't mentioned in the text, illustrations depict a mixed-race couple and Josh and his friends as being from various ethnic backgrounds. The story's pace is steady, but the plot feels disjointed, moving from one incident to the next with the occasional mention of a ghost, until over halfway through when a movie crew comes in. Uncle Doug likes making ghost jokes, and Mary Jane displays the patience to befriend a feral cat and its kittens; generally, however, the reader has little opportunity to become attached to the story's characters since their development takes a back seat to history lessons and description, as per the following excerpts:
Then [Aunt Sue] looked at us. "I am sure glad you all agreed to come for part of your summer holidays. We'll have lots of fun. We have some old bikes around, we can go for hikes in the area, and you can swim in the millrace."
"Millrace? What's that?" Ange asked.
“It's the canal you might have seen next to the mill. A hundred and fifty years ago people manipulated the river by building a long canal, maybe four miles long, with dams. Then they diverted the water into it. The water runs this way now, through the millrace. Once it reaches the mill, there's a sharp drop. The water plummets over the end of the millrace, where they have built a waterwheel. The water actually moves the wheel, which powers the machinery that grinds the wheat into flour inside the mill. Pretty amazing how they engineered all that so long ago, huh? It runs pretty slow these days, so it's safe for you kids.”
Uncle Doug added, "There isn't a nail used in the whole mill building. It towers four stories high above the fields and is all put together with wood and pegs." He explained that….(Pp. 21-22)
"Amerigo was a colourful character." [Aunt Sue] read us some stories about how he had homesteaded and built a log house right next to the mill site. She explained that homesteading was to settle on land under a special law that allowed people who didn't own land to buy public land for themselves. The article even had an old, scratchy black-and-white photo of a weathered man wearing a dirty cowboy hat. "Amerigo did not agree with many people, and it sounds like he caused quite a stir around here," Aunt Sue said.
Uncle Doug stretched out on the couch with his feet on the coffee table. He had his laptop on his belly, and suddenly he let out a roaring laugh. "Whoa, listen to this! I just got an email from a movie producer in LA!" (Pp. 45-46)
Young readers would more eagerly glean relevant syllabus information from The Ghost of Mill House if it were experienced by credibly drawn characters with whom the reader felt some attachment.
Karen Rankin is a Toronto, Ontario, teacher and writer of children’s stories.