[1] Carol, a self-reliant teen-aged American girl, is sent to England to stay a month with relatives currently living in a big old rented house on Parchment Street, next to a graveyard in a small village.

Her first encounter with the locals involves a group of delinquent bullies, whom she drives away, only to learn they're the cronies of her cousin Bruce.

The first ghost and another, this one of a young girl, are trapped in a daily reenactment of traumatic events that originally took place during the English Civil War, over three hundred years before.

Only the children seem able to perceive the ghosts; neither Carol's hidebound Uncle Harold nor the more open-minded Father Malory can see them.

Kirkus Reviews calls the book a "satisfying adventure ... just what young readers would order if they had the imagination to dream it up themselves," and goes on to say that "[t]hough the story lacks the intriguing psychological ambiguity of, say, Zilpha Snyder's ghost stories, McKillip blends history, supernatural occurrences, and firm contemporary reality with a sure sense of drama and detail that brings all three worlds to simultaneous life.