Hollow Creek, 1907. Everyone in town says Blackwood Manor is haunted - old Mr. Blackwood died there alone under circumstances nobody quite explains, and the grand house has sat shuttered and whispered-about for three years. So when eleven-year-old Wren Ashworth's family inherits it and moves in, the whole town waits for the ghost to drive them out too. Wren doesn't believe in ghosts. She believes in her apprenticeship with Mr.
Pemberton, the town's sanitary engineer, who's taught her to read a house like a doctor reads a patient - the flicker of a lamp flame, a headache that vanishes the moment you step outside, a strange sweetish smell drifting up through the floorboards. When her own family starts feeling the "curse" - dizziness, fainting spells, foul air pressing down in certain rooms at certain hours - Wren suspects the truth is not supernatural at all, but something older, more invisible, and just as dangerous: a hidden fault in the house's own plumbing and ventilation, quietly leaking a poison gas no one has thought to look for.
Racing against a town's superstition, a suspicious estate agent eager to see the house sold quickly, and a mystery that may have already killed once, Wren must prove that some hauntings have nothing to do with ghosts - and everything to do with what you can't see, but absolutely need to breathe. A gripping turn-of-the-century mystery about science, courage, and the bravery of trusting evidence over fear.
Hollow Creek, 1907. Everyone in town says Blackwood Manor is haunted - old Mr. Blackwood died there alone under circumstances nobody quite explains, and the grand house has sat shuttered and whispered-about for three years. So when eleven-year-old Wren Ashworth's family inherits it and moves in, the whole town waits for the ghost to drive them out too. Wren doesn't believe in ghosts. She believes in her apprenticeship with Mr.
Pemberton, the town's sanitary engineer, who's taught her to read a house like a doctor reads a patient - the flicker of a lamp flame, a headache that vanishes the moment you step outside, a strange sweetish smell drifting up through the floorboards. When her own family starts feeling the "curse" - dizziness, fainting spells, foul air pressing down in certain rooms at certain hours - Wren suspects the truth is not supernatural at all, but something older, more invisible, and just as dangerous: a hidden fault in the house's own plumbing and ventilation, quietly leaking a poison gas no one has thought to look for.
Racing against a town's superstition, a suspicious estate agent eager to see the house sold quickly, and a mystery that may have already killed once, Wren must prove that some hauntings have nothing to do with ghosts - and everything to do with what you can't see, but absolutely need to breathe. A gripping turn-of-the-century mystery about science, courage, and the bravery of trusting evidence over fear.
