I can picture exactly where the book sat. The school library I used from first through eighth grade had a central area for gathering students and only a single aisle of shelves on either side. I found the book in the left aisle — that’s where the fiction was — most of the way back, on the right side, at shoulder level. I can see the sunlight streaming in from the window at the end of the aisle. That light faded the spines of all the books except those rarely found on the shelves, like Bunnicula and Sideways Stories from Wayside School. I can’t go back to find the book. With no family or friends in that town any more, I have no reason to visit that library as an adult. I couldn’t even make a special trip if I wanted to; that library burned to the ground years ago, along with the entire school building. Like something out of a grade school parody song set to a Christmas carol, somebody set the principal’s desk alight. The other story with its hooks still in my brain was the scariest thing I’d read in my life at that point, right up there with Poe’s “The Pit and the Pendulum.” It was about a house haunted by a rhythmic thumping on the basement door. One day, the residents opened the door and a red rubber ball flew out, rolling away and disappearing into a shadow. They later learned that a child previously lived in the house. He enjoyed throwing his ball from the bottom of the basement stairs up at the door, and catching it as it bounced back down. He died tragically in a fall down those stairs. Honestly, I’m still freaked out merely typing these details. Once I was off to high school, I ceased thinking about that book entirely. I had required reading to tackle, along with a steady diet of legal thrillers and fantasy novels. (Look, I wasn’t what you’d call a popular kid.) It wasn’t until years later, the summer before I moved to San Francisco, that the book sprang to mind again. I was reading House of Leaves, the baffling postmodern novel about a house that holds an endless staircase among other impossible and labyrinthine features. It reminded me of something I’d read before. That book of scary stories. There was one with a house, growing room by room around the clock until the owner’s death. It also had nonsensical features: windows in the floor and stairs to nowhere… There are plenty of books about firearm fortune heiress Sarah Winchester and her infamous house, but my remembered book never popped up in any search. And trying to find a niche book of scary stories for kids was futile, when the Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark franchise so dominated the landscape. I had to dig deeper, remember more from a book I hadn’t read in well over a decade. Like grief, my curiosity would come in waves over the years. In a fit of pique, I would search a string of terms I hoped would lead me back to the book. “Rubber ball basement haunted house” or “Winchester house red ball book.” But the searches led nowhere, and frustration would force my curiosity to ebb away again for a while. After years of this cycle, I finally got a hit. Someone else enjoyed that story enough to mention it in a review, and I had my title. It was the Dynamite Book of Ghosts and Haunted Houses, a slim paperback from 1980. In retrospect, there are two lessons to take away from this hunt. One is that my tenacity was critical. I never let myself get too discouraged by one failed day of searching. The other is that I should have enlisted others who were eager to help. Right now the Goodreads page for the book includes a discussion topic by someone in the same boat as me, who remembered much more than I did and was also happily reunited with this odd little book. So don’t suffer in silence. We’ve got great advice for finding a book with only vague information.
