Either children are braver now or they are so afraid of the real world that they escape into ghost stories. AL: In your stories children are firm believers in ghosts while most adults are skeptics.
Do you find this true in the real world? Now I think adults are just as likely as children to believe in the unseen. Many librarians and teachers at the schools I visit share eerie experiences with me—but not when children are present.
Children also tell me stories about their own experiences with ghosts. I must say most of the stories I hear are very convincing. I also know many adults who do not believe in ghosts. In a story, I like to cast the adults as skeptics.
Without the help of grown-ups, children must rely on their own courage to save or banish restless spirits. AL: In your latest ghost story, All the Lovely Bad Ones , the spirits of tormented children and their abuser, all of whom once occupied a nineteenth-century poorhouse, are awakened. Where did you get the idea for this tale? Was any research involved in the writing process? She loved aloud to read to them and began to make up stories to keep them entertained.
When she and her husband divorced, the girls were still small. There's some of the pain from the divorce and another visit from a frightening grandmother figure reflected in her book, The Time of the Witch. After the breakup, she went back to school to get her Ph. While there, Mary became more interested in children's literature and took a job as a children's library assistant.
Instead of working on her dissertation, she finished her first novel, The Sara Summer. This first book had a lot of the elements you would find in her later works: pre-teens in serious trouble who are lucky to have found good friends. Mary remarried in to Norman Pearce Jacob, a librarian.
By , her income from writing was steady enough so that she could leave her job at the library and devote herself to writing full-time. Mary Downing Hahn has written many excellent stories of suspense. Check out the top picks below. View more books by Mary Downing Hahn. These writings discuss Mary Downing Hahn's life and works and are drawn from the following reference works:. Skip to main navigation Skip to main navigation Skip to search Skip to search Skip to content.
After a few weeks, however, my taunting and teasing backfired. In the interest of peace and quiet, I was exiled to a day camp run by the Girl Scouts. At Camp Conestoga I spent two miserable weeks sitting in the hot sun making misshapen pot holders.
When my session at Camp Conestoga ended, I was sent even farther away, this time to Misty Mount, an overnight Scout camp near Thurmont, Maryland, where we made more pot holders, swam in icy cold water, ate burned food, and sang dumb songs about little red cabooses. The only part I liked was eating s'mores, a dessert you made by melting marshmallows over a fire and mashing them between two graham crackers and a few squares of Hershey chocolate.
When I tell you what happened at the end of my two weeks at camp, you'll be convinced I'm rewriting my life to give myself a happy ending, but I assure you I'm not. My parents bought the house, and we moved back to Guilford Road. Ann was still my next-door neighbor, and, when school started, I was in Miss Perry's room, right where I wanted to be.
I remember far too much of my elementary-school years to include it all in this essay. In addition, Barbara had two brothers, Alan two years older and Curtis one year younger , and Mary had a sister, Sally also one year younger.
At the lowest end of the scale were "the little kids": my sister Connie, Ann's brother Butch, and Natalie's sister Carol Jack being too small to count. We quarreled over rules, split into warring factions, made up, and quarreled again. We also played Cowboys with cap pistols, climbed trees, built forts and clubhouses, explored the woods in forbidden territory across the train tracks, risked polio by wading in the creek, belonged to Girl Scouts, dug for treasure in remote places, roller-skated down Beechwood Road, and cost our parents a fortune in Band-Aids for all the skinned knees and elbows we suffered.
At night and on rainy days, I read, fueling my imagination. During the height of my interest in the "Nancy Drew" books, my friends and I followed people, wrote down license-plate numbers, spied from trees and bushes, and made, no doubt, pests of ourselves.
Although we never found any evidence of criminal activity in College Park, two of us once came close, we thought, to catching a Russian spy.
Several blocks away lived a man who "looked" Russian and had a ham radio tower in his backyard. What else could he be? This was in or , a time when people far older and wiser than we imagined they saw Russian spies everywhere. One Saturday Mary S.
Inside were stacks of newspapers and magazines. Mary and I looked at each other. Without a doubt, those were Russian papers and magazines, the evidence we needed. Taking a quick look at the silent house and the empty street, we dashed into the garage.
Engrossed in our search, we didn't hear the spy enter the garage behind us. Fortunately, she was much quicker than I was. Staring the spy in the eye, she said, "This is National Fire Prevention Week, and our teacher told us to search the neighborhood for fire hazards. Just look at all this newspaper! Don't you know how easily a fire could start here? Without hesitating, Mary gave him a false name and address.
Swerving around the spy, she took off running with me at her heels, not daring to look back. I'd like to be able to tell you we found Tass and other Russian-language publications, but all our spy had in his garage were old National Geographics, Lifes, Saturday Evening Posts, and Washington Evening Stars, the same thing you would have found in almost any garage or basement in In addition to Nancy Drew, I read dog stories by the dozens. These books gave me an idealized concept of the noble dog, a loyal companion who would stay by your side even after your death.
I begged my parents for a dog, pleaded, cajoled, all to no avail. No matter what I said or did or promised, my father steadily refused to consider my request. He did allow me finally have a cat, a beautiful little black kitten he insisted we name Pete after a cat he once owned, but NO DOG! I happened to be the sort of girl whom strays recognized from afar.
No doubt encouraged to do so, they followed me home. Despite heartrending scenes on our front porch, my father chased off every dog and sent me to bed to cry myself to sleep. One dreary afternoon, I rebelled against my father and ran away with a shaggy, friendly little dog I'd found in the park. With Max at my heels, I dashed off through the rain, refusing to heed my father's order to come back. If my little sister hadn't followed me, I might not have gotten into so much trouble.
When Daddy found the two of us, soaked to the skin and sharing a candy bar with Max behind a neighbor's garage, he dragged us home.
In the kitchen, he pulled off his belt and whipped me. I'd had plenty of spankings with switches and hairbrushes but never one like this. He was so angry he actually broke his belt. A month or so later, Daddy brought home a cocker spaniel named Binky, the biggest surprise of my life.
I think he felt bad about the Max episode, and Binky was his way of saying he was sorry. Unfortunately, Binky did not live up to the noble dog image. He bit the mailman and terrified the garbagemen, was frightened of other dogs, and loved my father best ironic touch, that , but I adored him anyway. In addition to mysteries and dog stories, I loved orphan stories. Although I dreamed of being showered with gifts like the little princess and had an imagination to match red-haired Anne's, I identified most strongly with the heroine of The Secret Garden.
Mary Lennox not only shared my name but most adults disliked her. Like her, I struck people as cold, selfish, and not very well-behaved. Tall, skinny, and painfully self-conscious, I avoided my parents' friends and my aunts and uncles, sure they would either ignore or criticize me.
The loneliness I felt as a child probably drew me to stories about girls like Anne, Jane, and Mary. The happy endings gave me hope that someday I too would be loved and valued.
Acting out my orphan fantasies, I pretended the dollhouse my grandfather made for me was an orphanage. The little plastic dolls who lived in it were orphans, of course, and Ann and I spent hours making up adventures for them in which they ran away and sailed down the creek on rafts made from Popsicle sticks or lived in the hedge or under the forsythia bush.
We built little stone houses for them, like the ones I used to make for the fairies. Once we got in trouble for almost catching a field on fire; we'd built a village, and, in the interest of verisimilitude, we lit little fires in the houses.
Obviously books played an important part in my life. I didn't just read them, I lived them. I became the hero or the heroine. I read with an absorption that deafened me to the real world and its demands. I read in the bathtub, I read under the covers with a flashlight, I read in school when I was supposed to be learning geography and often had my book taken away by angry teachers. When asked to set the table, bathe, or go to bed, my most frequent response was "Wait till I finish this page.
Second in importance to books were the radio shows I listened to faithfully. Every weekday afternoon beginning at five thirty, I sprawled in front of our big Philco to follow the adventures of Jack Armstrong, Sky King, Terry and the Pirates, and Captain Midnight. Three nights a week, the Lone Ranger and Tonto galloped into our living room, their arrival signaled by the thrilling chords of the William Tell Overture and the announcer crying, "A fiery horse with the speed of light, a cloud of dust, and a hearty hi-ho Silver!
On Sunday afternoons, I left the house to avoid hearing Lamont Cranston's eerie laughter on The Shadow, and on weekday evenings, I trembled at the sound of the squeaking door opening to Inner Sanctum. When I was sick I listened to the long string of afternoon soap operas broadcast every weekday afternoon, and on Saturday mornings I tuned in to my very favorite show, Let's Pretend.
By flying carpet? By train, by plane, on the back of a bird? With appropriate sound effects, off they would go, taking me with them, a willing passenger. Probably as a result of reading books and listening to radio shows, I began telling myself long stories while I drew pictures to illustrate them. Many of them, particularly the one about the orphan brothers, are derivative. Like most children, I didn't think of my own ordinary, everyday life as a source for books, so I imitated the authors I loved, rewriting their stories and drawing the pictures I saw in my head.
In seventh grade, I began my first diary, an illustrated account of my daily life, starting with a list of important facts about myself, such as my height and best friends and favorite color. At the bottom of the page, I wrote: "What I want to be when I grow up—a writer and illustrator. In the illustrations, Susan is tall, skinny, freckled, and usually wearing a baseball cap, tee shirt, jeans, and tennis shoes.
She bears a striking resemblance to myself. In its adherence to suburban life as I knew it, the sixty-three-page story reveals that I had abandoned my interest in orphan boys and turned to my own existence as a source of inspiration. Unfortunately, the fictional Susan is much happier than her creator was. At twelve, I was miserably self-conscious. It wasn't just my long, skinny legs and arms that worried me.
I felt uncomfortable around my friends, who were all growing up faster than I was. I didn't share their interest in boys or movie stars or makeup, and they didn't want to ride bikes or climb trees or go to the creek. I thought something must be wrong with me. I was different. Not like everybody else. Well, that was all right, I told myself. Who wanted to be like everyone else anyway? Instead of conforming, I reveled in being different. At home, I wore baseball caps and boy's high-top basketball shoes, and at school I turned my nose up at girls who used lipstick.
They might want to grow up, but I didn't. Like Peter Pan, I planned to stay a kid forever. Anyone with two eyes could see that adults led incredibly boring lives. Going to work, shopping, cooking, cleaning, taking care of kids—why was anyone eager to do that? Eighth grade was even worse than seventh. I grew taller and taller, reaching my present height five feet, ten inches by the time I was fourteen.
I was down to one friend, Mary S. Together we roamed the streets of College Park, feeling like outsiders and looking more like boys than girls. That spring I joined the chorus of our junior high's production of The Pirates of Penzance, not as one of "the sisters and the cousins whom they reckoned up by dozens and the aunts," but as a pirate.
Even though I was still trying to be one of the boys, belonging to a group changed me. I lived and breathed Gilbert and Sullivan during the months we rehearsed, and I fell in love with Clarence, the male lead who, of course, never noticed me. Up on the stage, wearing a red bandana and stamping around in boots, I wasn't the least self-conscious. It was after the operetta ended that I made a conscious decision, one that probably affected the rest of my life. Giving up my earlier ambition to be a rebel, I decided to conform.
Insecure and lonely, I vowed to hide everything about me that was weird or strange or different. Like the smiling girls in the pages of Seventeen magazine, I was going to be just like everybody else. A normal person. One of the first things the new Mary did was end her friendship with Mary S. Imitating them, I rolled up the legs of my jeans, wore thick white socks and saddle shoes, begged my father for his old shirts, bought lipstick, fell in love with movie stars, and swooned over Johnnie Ray, Eddie Fisher, Julius LaRosa, and Tony Bennett.
By the time I entered the tenth grade at Northwestern High School, my disguise was complete. I was a teenager, fifties style. Hidden was my sad, maladjusted adolescent self. I laughed and acted silly, dressed like everyone else, and yearned for a boyfriend. When I saw Mary S. My high-school years slid past in a blur, undistinguished academically or socially. Except for A's in art and B's in English, my grades were mediocre, dropping down to a few D's in unimportant subjects like Latin, chemistry, and geometry.
I still daydreamed, especially in classes which bored me, and I covered my notebook pages with doodles and boys' names. Being in love was a permanent state, and I wasted time hanging around lockers and stairwells and drinking fountains, just to get glimpses of certain boys. Unfortunately, no matter how many boys I fell in love with, not one of them reciprocated. I was tall and clumsy, and I thought I was ugly. I didn't dance well, I laughed too loud and too often, I said stupid things, I never quite understood what was going on, and I was often unhappy.
Down deep inside, I worried about myself. Was I normal? Did my friends really like me? Why did they tease me so much? Was I on the verge of a nervous breakdown? I recorded all of these agonizing questions in the tear-stained pages of my diary, the surest way to remember exactly how you felt at a particular time of your life.
Despite my self-doubts, I ran around with a gang of seven or eight girls. Ann, of course, was one of them, but the leader was undoubtedly Jimmy Harris Jones, a newcomer to College Park. She appeared the year we started high school. Wearing a straight skirt and thick white socks, swinging a purse by a long strap, chewing gum, she sauntered into our lives from a farm near the Chesapeake Bay.
Her face was long and pointed, she brushed her short blonde hair straight up, and she spoke with a Tennessee accent. A hillbilly, my father called her, taking an instant dislike to her. Ann's parents shared his opinion and so did just about everyone else's. Of course that sort of disapproval just made Jimmy all the more fascinating.
Where she went, we followed. In those days, you could listen to records in little booths before you spent your hard-earned baby-sitting money on them. Taking advantage of the owner's patience, we spent hours there, enjoying the air-conditioning and the current top ten hits. Jimmy introduced us to a number of things, particularly the thrill of going to Breezy Point Beach, a small resort on the Chesapeake Bay.
In addition to playing slot machines, swimming in brackish salt water, burning ourselves tan, and ducking the stinging embrace of jellyfish, we discovered sailors and soldiers. I fell passionately in love with one of them, agonized over him for two years, but never managed to make any romantic progress. He insisted on treating me like his kid sister, something my parents had trouble believing when they found out about him.
Like my childhood, I remember my teens vividly, especially the agony of trying to fit in. A typical suburban high school, Northwestern had an elaborate social structure. At the top were the athletes and cheerleaders. Just below them were the Honor Society members. On the third and most difficult to define level was a variety of cliques, not true insiders but not outsiders either.
Among them were the downs, the artists, the actors and actresses, the singers and dancers, the entertainers—kids who were fun to have around. The third level was our place. Wearing identical red jackets, the College Park Gang stuck together. We decorated for dances, participated in play productions, painted posters for school events, attended football and basketball games, hung out at the Hot Shoppe, and joined clubs.
Sometimes we skipped school and went to the beach or took the bus into Washington. Our grades weren't great, but most of our teachers liked us. For one reason or another, people knew who we were. The powerful ones tolerated us because we didn't threaten them. We were neither jocks nor brains—but we were funny.
We didn't care whether the big wheels liked us or not. We had each other, and that was enough. I spent my first summer away from home in , right after I graduated from high school. Considering how strict my parents were, it amazes me that they allowed an eighteen year old to accept a job as a waitress in the Rideau Hotel in Ocean City. Maybe they couldn't face another summer of rock-and-roll music blasting from my bedroom, trips to Breezy Point Beach with Jimmy Jones, quarrels, tears, and slamming doors.
My high-school years hadn't been easy for me or anyone else. After seeing Rebel without a Cause, I wrote in my diary that Natalie Wood's father was just like mine: he didn't understand me, we weren't close, he criticized Mary sitting on roof , Bill Hahn in door , and friends, "fooling around in our tomato-soup Volkswagen Bug at Sherwood Forest, Maryland," me endlessly, and he was almost always angry at me.
My mother and I didn't see eye to eye on much either, and I was glad to get away from Guilford Road for a while. In Ocean City, I made friends with the other waitresses, all college girls, and found my first real boyfriend, a piano-playing fraternity boy named Jack. It was a great summer. Lots of sunshine, the ocean to swim in every day, the boardwalk to explore every night, and, best of all, no parents to lay down rules. The job itself was awful, the food worse, but for a summer at the ocean I was willing to tote trays.
I returned tan and happy and started my freshman year at the University of Maryland, a mile's walk from home and rather like grade thirteen. An amazing thing happened to me in college. I discovered I had a brain after all. I majored in studio art and minored in English, and, after completing the required torture of twelve credits of math and science, I spent my time doing what I loved best: reading, writing, drawing, and painting.
I won a few prizes in the art department and published a couple of stories in the campus literary magazine. Hoping I was becoming a sophisticated intellectual at last, I started writing a novel about a tall, sensitive, misunderstood college girl. Although I never got past chapter three, I imagined myself becoming the J.
Salinger of my generation and fantasized about publishing my stories in the New Yorker. In my senior year, my old friend Ann introduced me to Bill Hahn, and I fell in love. By the time I graduated in , we were semi-engaged—no ring, no date set, but definitely thinking about spending the rest of our lives together. I didn't like the petty routines, and I hated being an authority figure. I wanted to be one of the kids, and, in fact, was often mistaken for one of them. I looked so young a cafeteria worker asked me on my first day if I was a student or a teacher; if I'd said "student," my lunch would have been cheaper.
At the end of my year at Greenbelt, I told the principal I wasn't coming back. In the fall, I planned to begin graduate school in the University of Maryland English department. I'd had my fill of public school teaching.
That June, , I went to Europe with three girlfriends. Violet Kelk, an old family friend who worked as a tour guide for Thomas Cook, helped plan our trip, and we spent almost three months traveling around Europe in a rented Volkswagen Beetle, relying on Arthur Frommer's Europe on Five Dollars a Day to find places to stay. It was probably the best summer of my life, the fulfillment of years of daydreaming about Rome and Pompeii and Paris and London.
Everything I saw delighted me. Nothing disappointed me. On October 7, , I married Bill and started graduate school, hoping to earn a master's degree in English. After two years, Bill decided he wanted to go to law school, and, having done everything but write my thesis, I dropped out of graduate school to support us.
All I found were several low-paying jobs; I worked for a couple months at the telephone company, another couple months at Hutzler's Department Store in Baltimore and then for a year at the Navy Federal Credit Union as a correspondence clerk. In I left the credit union to have my first baby. Katherine Sherwood Hahn was born on 18 August She was such delight I could hardly wait to have another one; thus Margaret Elizabeth Hahn was born on 11 May Almost from the day they were born, I read to Kate and Beth.
Through the picture books I borrowed from the library, I rediscovered my love of writing and drawing. While my daughters took their afternoon naps, I wrote and illustrated a number of picture books. Although Kate and Beth loved them, I wasn't able to find a publisher who shared the enthusiasm. Each time a book was rejected, I stuck it in a folder and started again. If one company didn't like a manuscript, what was the sense of sending it to anyone else?
During this time, we were living in a small brick house on Harvard Road in College Park, only a few blocks from my mother's house. While I wrote little books and played with Kate and Beth, the sixties ended and the seventies began.
For a variety of reasons, all of them sad and depressing, my marriage began to fall apart, and, looking for a way to support myself, I enrolled in the Ph.
At the age of thirty-four, I moved into university housing, just across Route One from College Park, and my daughters and I began life is a single-parent family. Look for Me by Moonlight. As Ever, Gordy. Where I Belong. The Gentleman Outlaw and Me. Daphne's Book. Anna All Year Round. Anna on the Farm. Following My Own Footsteps. Time of the Witch. Tallahassee Higgins. The Spanish Kidnapping Disaster. A Ghostly Gathering. Took Graphic Novel. Want the latest Email Address. Yes No I want to receive news, events, offers or promotions related to HMH's and its affiliates' products and services.
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