Gooseblog: Goosebumps #37: The Headless Ghost

It's time to get a-head on the competition as we travel through another R.L Stine ghost story. It's The Headless Ghost AKA Headed For Disaster.

COVER STORY

This cover is fine. I wouldn't consider it too scary, though maybe because it never affected me to the level of certain other covers. I guess I'm more sterner for ghosts carrying their head in their arms than I am skeleton families. Despite that, I like the broken looking banister, the great use of oranges and blues for the shadows. it really pops well and sells the book's concept. A fine cover, but not in my higher picks.

STORY

Duane Comack and Stephanie Alpert are our protagonists. They're a pair of pranksters, which you know, is ALWAYS the kind of protagonists I wanna spend my time with. The Twin Terrors (as they dub themselves) particularly love Halloween where they can scare little kids out of their candy. They also claim to be super brave, unafraid of everything. With the exception of the creepy old Hill House. It's the biggest attraction of Wheeler Falls, and it's supposedly haunted. Stephanie and Duane take the tour all the time, particularly any time Otto the tour guide is involved. He's a big, heavy bald man who Duane describes as looking like a dolphin.

The story of Hill House goes that 200 years ago a sea captain built it for his bride, but had to go out to sea. The captain died at sea, but one year later his ghost was spotted in the house, looking for his wife. However, she left the house ages ago due to grief.  Cut to a hundred years later and the Craw family move into the Hill House. The young son Andrew ends up seeing the ghost captain, and the captain, enraged, grabs the boy by the head and tears it off his shoulders, hiding it somewhere in the house.

After torturing some more kids, Stephanie gets the bright idea that maybe they should haunt Hill House. They should go and hunt for the missing head. despite Duane's concerns that this might not be such a bright idea, Stephanie calls him a coward, which is akin to calling Marty McFly a chicken. Duane doesn't have much of a choice as Stephanie drags him to the house. After Otto tells us the story of the sea captain's ghost again (gotta pad this book out somehow), he then tells us of other tragedies befalling Hill House. From Andrew Craw's sister Hannah, the doll loving girl who went crazy and never left the house until her death, to their mother who, grief stricken, accidentally fell down the stairwell to her death.

Eventually, the two kids find their chance to sneak off from the tour to hunt for the head. They enter "the scratching room" which gets its name from guests who suffered a deadly rash. This gives Stephanie a chance to prank Duane again. They enter a toy room where they think they see a head, but it's just a bowling ball. They enter a room filled with cats which scares Duane again. After a few more quick scares, the kids end up hearing someone coming. It's Otto, who scolds the two kids for going off on their own. They return to the tour as another tour guide named Edna is telling the tourists of the story of Joseph Craw, the father. A year after Andrew's death, he warmed himself up by the fireplace and mysteriously burned to death.

The two kids begin to leave when suddenly another boy catches up to them. A blond boy wearing a large turtleneck sweater. This is Seth, who seems shy at first, but perks up when they mention their ghost hunt. He mentions that he snuck into Hill House late one night and saw an elderly ghost sliding down the stairs. He wants to go back in to see more. Stephanie eagerly agrees, and Seth, obviously scared, still joins in. The next night, Stephanie and Duane sneak into the house after the tour wraps up, but they don't find Seth. Oh wait, he shows up and collapses in a heap. Oh wait, that's just a good old-fashioned "gotcha" scare. And surprisingly, it doesn't work on the targets either as both Duane and Stephanie scoff at his amateur antics.

They sneak around in the darkness for a while until they find the kitchen, complete with a dumbwaiter. Seth tells them that it's actually a haunted dumbwaiter. When anything was put into it, it would vanish in between floors. When a young boy named Jeremy climbed inside and went up to the second floor with the help of some kids, something terrible happened. He got caught in between floors like the food. When kids saw the dumbwaiter next, instead of Jeremy there were three bowls. One with Jeremy's heart, one with his eyes, and one with his teeth. Okay, that's actually some creepy stuff there, Jovial Bob. Props on that one. Seth then leads Duane and Stephanie into the pantry and locks the door on them.

He reveals himself to be Andrew, the boy who lost his head. He says that the head he's got now is one he's simply borrowing, and that he has grown quite fond of Duane's. Duane and Stephanie plead to Andrew that maybe if they can find his old head, he'll let them go. Instead, he grabs Duane by the head. Thankfully there's a convenient hidden passage in the pantry that helps the two escape. They try to climb a ladder, but it ends up falling, breaking a wall in the process. And conveniently that well led to a secret room with the head inside. Andrew starts to panic as the head suddenly gains a ghostly body. The ghost tuns out to be the real Andrew, and thanks the kids for freeing his soul. Meanwhile, Seth starts to stammer as Otto shows up. Turns out that Seth is Otto's nephew, and was simply playing a prank on the kids. They tell Otto about the headless ghost, but Otto thinks it's all just made up.

TWIST ENDING

Stephanie and Duane gave up scaring kids after this whole ordeal. A few months after the incident, they decide to take one more tour of Hill House. When they leave, they get stopped by a pair of police officers who ask what they were doing there. When they say they were going on a tour, the two cops tell them that there are no more tours of Hill House. It's been abandoned for months. The kids look at the house once more and can swear they can see the ghosts of Otto and Edna staring at them.

CONCLUSION

I've said in the majority of these reviews that I feel Stine's strength has been the ghost story. When he sits down and gives us something focused on ghosts and haunted settings, it can lead to his best work. Particularly when it feels he has an idea, and, unlike The Barking Ghost, loses it halfway in favor for wacky magic adventure. And that's what you get with The Headless Ghost. What Stine gives us is a good load of creepy ghost stories packed into one book. From all the cursed fates of the Craw family to the dumbwaiter story. You get a book that actually seems to enjoy the idea of telling scary stories and giving us scary settings. Duane and Stephanie are okay, far less annoying than they could have been, and Seth's turn as "Andrew" is a good misdirect. Even down to the turtleneck to really screw with the "Terror Twins". Even the twist is simple and reserved. Though we don't know what led to seemingly the deaths of the tour guides, or what happened to Seth. I guess it's better left implied. Again, a book that on paper I thought would have been mediocre at best wound up being pretty solid. R.L. Stine's witchcraft strikes again! The Headless Ghost gets an A.