ABSTRACT
This chapter suggests that a more capacious understanding of what constitutes the children’s ghost story can reveal a great deal about the histories of both the ghost story and children’s literature. “Crossover fiction” is therefore a useful, if somewhat anachronistic, concept with which to approach early ghost stories in terms of the possibility of child readers. Alfred Hitchcock’s collection targets older readers of “ten upwards”, which seems to contradict or at least complicate Pearce’s reference to teenagers. The chapter explores the latter half of the twentieth century; the period associated more definitively by Pearce and Hahn with the children’s ghost story, and charts the dominance of one particular strand of the work: the ghostly time-slip story. A significant strand of children’s writing from the 1950s onwards is the time-slip narrative. Time-slip stories frequently employ similar devices to haunted house narratives: for example, one of their key characteristics is “an overwhelming sense of place”.
