| On this All Hallows Eve, I come to you with three scary stories guaranteed to mesmerize the young goblins and ghouls in your haunted house. Call this first one Laura Ingalls meets Amanda Verner in a prairie cabin possessed by the spirits of settlers past. Even the book cover of Amy Lukavics’ “Daughters Unto Devils” gives me the chills. The story goes like this: After a winter of tragedy and loss in the mountains, the Verners decide to move south to a new house on the prairie. But Amanda can’t escape the secret she is bringing to the new cabin. A torrent of nightmares, hallucinations and paranormal events unfurls as Amanda howls, “I’m starting to believe that Hell is everywhere.” I’ve always been a fan of gothics so I’m including Mary Amato’s clever “Open Mic Night at Westminster Cemetery” on this list. If you know your Edgar Allen Poe history, you know that the “Quoth the Raven” poet was buried here. Amato says that when she twice visited the Baltimore resting ground, she was ”struck by its spooky ambience.” She wandered among the graves, noting the names of the deceased, and eventually made some of the dead and buried into characters. Her story features 16-year-old Lacy Brink, who wakes up dead at Westminster and shakes things up for her fellow spirits, including an open mic night that tests the talents of the immortal. And my third Hallows Eve ghost story for young adult readers is the audiobook of Laura Ruby’s “Thirteen Doors, Wolves Behind Them All.” Even the title is shiveringly delicious! The story is set in the Depression-era Midwest where Frankie and her sister have gone to an orphanage after her mother’s departure and her father’s abandonment. There are kind nuns and terrifying nuns and a teenage spirit who begins to take stock of her own life before it abruptly ended. As Frankie and her sister make friends and even fall in love, Pearl grows close to another ghost as they confront one another’s past.
— Kerri Miller | MPR News | 