The Ghost in the Mirror by Marcia Kruchten

One of my favorite books as a child, The Ghost in the Mirror by Marcia Kruchten, has an opening paragraph that reads: I should have known all along that things weren’t what they seemed to be. The house tried to tell me, but I wouldn’t listen. I was too wrapped up in my own problems to see. And the ghost was there all the time, waiting for me…

Looking back, I now understand why I loved this book so much. It contained three of my favorite storytelling elements: houses as characters, settings with atmosphere, and the past haunting the present.

As I matured, my reading taste became more sophisticated, of course; however, I found that I continued to be drawn to books possessing these elements. For instance, in Daphne Du Maurier’s Rebecca, Manderley, the story’s gray stone mansion, is a character. And the book’s setting, the windy Cornish coast, is full of atmosphere. Rebecca, Manderley’s former resident, seems to haunt the house, her ghost tormenting the current Mrs. de Winter. In the same manner, the houses in Emily’s Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, Thrushcross Grange with its lush grounds and Wuthering Heights with its grotesque carvings, are characters at the very heart of the story. The setting, the Yorkshire Moors, like Rebecca’s Cornish coast, evoke a sense of mood and mystery. And finally, there is a ghost, Cathy, who remains wandering about the wild moors.

It is no surprise then, that these elements are found in my own stories.

Photo: My tattered copy of The Ghost in the Mirror.