Follow the Rules: Mary Downing Hahn’s The Old Willis Place

Diana and Georgie have been living near the old Willis place for as long as they can remember. Though their parents are not with them, they live by several rules that keep them from leaving the farm, prevent them from going into the old manor, prevent them from talking to anyone or revealing their existences. These rules are ostensibly intended to keep them safe.

However, the rules say nothing about “borrowing” things from the caretakers who come to look after the property and the abandoned old manor. This has been their source of things for some time. Caretakers come, and they seldom stay for long, so while the items get borrowed they have a habit of never actually being returned.

Diana and Georgie have been content living together under these rules, following them out of a dread that even one infraction will summon forth a terrible ghost that hates them, will hunt them, and may well harm them.

However, the newest caretaker to arrive is something special. Mr. Morrison is a single dad, accompanied by his twelve year old daughter Lissa. Also a twelve-year-old, Diana yearns for a friend, and that desire will lead her to break the hallowed rules, will lead to the very thing she and Georgie have been dreading, and will lead to something neither of them could have dared hope for: an end to this exile and the curse that holds them forever at the ages of twelve and eight. However, taking the first step will not be easy …

Mary Deborah Hahn has been writing spooky mysteries for young readers for going on five decades. The Old Willis Place is a ghost story turned on its head, a mystery that will charm those middle grade readers looking for a story with heart as well as chills. It’s a cleverly constructed novel, telling the story mostly from Diana’s perspective and giving us diary entries from Lissa’s views on events and characters. It has mysteries to explore and plays the cards close to the vest, doling out information in lovely drips and drabs. As a long time reader of this sort of stuff, I suspected the answers well before we got them, but it’s the kind of book that has more to offer than mysteries, and that’s what makes it worth visiting and re-visiting.

Diana yearns and dreads, Georgie is a loud and brash boy, Lissa is a curious sort. The dynamic between these characters is good, leading to plenty of drama without the intrusion of the ghostly material. However, the ghost story elements are baked into the matter, making it an essential component in the witches brew.

The book has a charming classic quality to it, which also stems directly from the perspective of the protagonist. Diana’s strangeness includes no real sense for technology, a blissful ignorance of modernity. She and her brother live in a cave, wear tatters, need no shoes, never seem to age, and have a first hand knowledge of some of the things that went down in the haunted house back before it was haunted by the ghost of the wicked Miss Lilian. Are they cursed or is it some other, weird affliction that holds them at these ages?

Typically, a book like this would use Lissa as the protagonist. She is the new girl who comes into a weird situation, whose very presence threatens to upset some kind of cosmic balance, whose untamed curiosity releases the ghastly spook, and who must somehow help out her new friends and learn something about herself along the way. Hahn does not write her book using this expectation. Lissa is the helper/guide instead of the protagonist, an enabler who jumpstarts growth for the other characters. Of course, even a helper can have desires and a small bit of growth …

Instead, we get it all from Diana, the character who has been here all these years but not allowed to grow up or to make a mark. She is our protagonist, our point of view character who must find the courage to face up to a terrifying situation and overcome internal as well as external challenges. She’s the one who manages to grow, dragging her brother along for the ride.

With three characters like this (and perhaps too much education in critical theory), there’s an urge to read them in the classic Freudian tripartite sense. Georgie as the id, Lissa as the superego, and Diana caught in the middle as the ego. To some degree this critical approach to the characters works, but it’s not necessary to enjoy either the book as a pure storytelling vehicle or Hahn’s approach to the writing of it. Still, this positions the book as a layered work, one that can be appreciated by the audience it is aiming for as well as an older one—as a parent myself, I feel we have a right to be entertained while vetting the materials for the younger people in the family.

Hahn’s style aims for cleanliness and clarity. Paragraphs are short, individual sentences are punchy. The two first person points of view are effectively written, doling out information that is ripe with foreshadowing and suggestion that also gives us a clear view of the characters whose eyes we are looking through as well as those they are observing. Consider this section where, while exploring the Willis house, Lissa makes the mistake that forces Diana’s story onto a different, unwanted path:

I ran down the steps after Lissa. In a panic, I jerked her hand away from the knob. “Don’t open that door!”

“I want to see where she died.” Lissa reached for the knob again. Miss Lilian’s hat hid her face, but her voice was shrill with excitement. The rustling sounds grew louder, as if someone in a silk dress was crossing the room. The floor creaked, and the air turned so cold my teeth chattered.

As clearly as if she was standing beside me, I heard Miss Lilian’s voice in my ear. “Get out of the girl’s way, Diana. Let her open the door.”

Instead of obeying the old woman, I pressed my back against the door and pushed Lissa away with all my strength. She staggered backward and crashed against the wall.

“What’s wrong with you?” Lissa rubbed her arm and winced as if I’d hurt her. “Are you nuts?”

“Just stay away from the door. If you open it, she’ll get out!”

“What are you talking about? Who’ll get out?”

In my ear, Miss Lilian’s cold voice froze the very air between us. “Let the girl open the door. You and I have business to settle, miss.”

“Please, Lissa, please!” I flung myself at her. “I beg you, we have to get out of here.”

But Lissa evaded me and reached for the knob. “I have to open the door,” she cried. “I have to!”

“That’s right,” Miss Lilian hissed, “she must open the door. She must, she must.”

Despite my efforts, Lissa managed to turn the knob. The door swung open and slammed against the wall with a loud bang. Out poured a blast of cold air. It spun past us like a small cyclone of ice, taking the flowered hat with it, and whirled up the stairs, leaving us frozen speechless in the parlor doorway.

Suddenly, there she was, Miss Lilian herself, peering down at Lissa and me from the top of the stairs. She was just as I remembered—tall and gaunt, bent with arthritis, wrathful, hateful. Uncombed hair framed her pale face in thorny white brambles. Clutching her hat, she leaned over the railing and directed her gaze at me. “You! You!”

She stood there, her mouth moving as if she wanted to say more but could find no words. “You,” she whispered. “You and your brother. Just wait!”

With a wail of fury, she turned and fled. Her gray silk dress rustled. Her footsteps clicked the way they always had. Then her bedroom door slammed shut, and she was gone.

In the sudden silence, I collapsed on the steps, weak with fear. Miss Lilian was free. Free to pursue Georgie and me, free to hurt us again and again. With her hunting us, we weren’t safe anywhere on the farm. And we couldn’t leave.

I glanced at Lissa. What had she done? I wanted to scream at her, to blame everything on her, but she sagged against the wall as if she’d never move again, her face colorless, her eyes unfocused. While I watched, she drew in her breath, opened her mouth, and began to scream.

Out of pity, I took Lissa’s hand and pulled her to her feet. I ran and dragged her behind me, still screaming, stumbling and tripping and bumping into things as if she were blind.

“Faster!” I yelled, jerking her along. I didn’t care if I was hurting her, I didn’t care if I was scaring her. It was her fault. She’d brought me here, she’d insisted on seeing every room in the house, she’d opened the parlor door.

At last, we plunged outside into cold, fresh air smelling of nothing but rain. MacDuff leapt up from the terrace and bounded ahead across the weedy lawn, as anxious as we were to get away from the house.

Once safe in the trailer, we slammed the door against the wind and rain and whatever else might be out there. Without speaking, we huddled on the sofa, wet and cold and shaking. MacDuff cowered between us, as scared as we were. Mr. Morrison wasn’t back from Home Depot—which was a good thing, considering Lissa’s hysterical weeping.

“Oh, Diana,” she cried, “I saw her, I saw Miss Willis! She ran up the stairs, she, she—” Lissa’s sobs overcame her and she buried her face in MacDuff’s fur.

“Why didn’t you listen to me?” I tried hard not to shout at her, but my voice rose anyway. “I told you not to go in the house, I told you not to open that door!”

Lissa rocked back and forth, crying and moaning. “I couldn’t help it, my hand just went to the doorknob. I couldn’t stop myself. And she got out. She—”

“She didn’t just get out. You let her out!”

“But I didn’t mean to. I told you. It was like my hand, my hand—” Lissa raised her head from MacDuff’s back and looked at her hand as if it didn’t belong to her. “She made me do it, Diana.”

I stared at her. Maybe it was true. Ghosts sometimes possessed people. I’d seen it happen in movies, so maybe it happened in real life, too. “If you’d just listened to me—”

Lissa started crying again. “It wasn’t my fault.”

The Old Willis Place: A Ghost Story, Location: 115-118

Here, we get a good sense of Hahn’s style, the empathy, the touches of gothic horror, and the pacing. It’s good storytelling for the middle grade set, but the writing is evocative for the older one as well.

The Old Willis Place is an entertaining read, targeting the middle grade reader but also appealing to fans of spooky stories with emotional honesty and real heart. The ending may bring a few tears, the journey may bring some shivers, and the overall experience is one that’s worth undertaking.

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The Old Willis Place is available in eBook, paperback, and audiobook editions. As well, it is included in a boxed set collection of eight of Hahn’s ghost stories and mysteries.

Next, we will take a look at Christopher Golden’s Hallowe’en book, All Hallows. This terrific supernatural thriller is available in eBook, hardcover, and audiobook editions.

“Follow the Rules: Mary Downing Hahn’s The Old Willis Place” is copyright © 2023 by Daniel R. Robichaud. Quotes and cover image taken from the Houghton Mifflin Harcourt eBook edition, released in 2004.

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