Unwanted library discard that deserves another chance

This book — The Great McGoniggle's Gray Ghost — has a sad-looking exterior but is perfectly fine on the inside. It was super cheap and I feared it was headed for the dumpster. So I picked it up, will spiff it up a little, and hope I can weave some Bradbury-esque October magic and put it in the just-right Little Free Library for someone's future happy discovery.

It's not the spookiest children's book in the world, but it certainly has enough Halloweeny elements for this month's theme. Published a half-century ago in 1975, The Great McGoniggle's Gray Ghost was written by Scott Corbett (1913-2006) and was the first of four books featuring Mac McGoniggle. 

It was illustrated by Bill Ogden (listed as William Ogden on the copyright page), but I'm fairly certain that's not the Bill Ogden who was a famed surf artist. The illustrations in this book remind me a little of the early Choose Your Own Adventure books, which were illustrated by Don Hedin under the pseudonym Paul Granger.

The plot is described succinctly on the copyright page: "Two boys attempt to recover a balloon bearing a valuable prize certificate which has become attached to the eaves of a mansion inhabited by a disagreeable couple and a ferocious dog."

The two boys are a bit insufferable, too, so I suppose who the reader empathizes with might depend on their age and point of view.

That said, it seems like a great book for kids. Writing a review for Amazon in 2016, Carl Anderson states: "I recommend it. There's funny parts, spooky parts, and for the age group its intended, exciting parts."

Here are some other illustrations and images from this once well-loved library book that hopefully will have another chapter ahead...

October 18, 2025, postcard & shelfie

The spookiness of "Candy and Andy" (but mostly Candy)

Long before Annabelle, Chucky and M3GAN (but after The Twilight Zone's Talky Tina in 1963), there were some creepy dolls named Candy and Andy bringing trauma to late 1960s Britain.

Candy was a short-lived weekly children's magazine that began in 1967 and featured, as described by this 2024 CNN article "two life-sized mannequin children and their 'parents' — a pair of humanoid pandas." (The pandas are Mr. and Mrs. Bearanda.) If the mannequins look familar to some of us from Generation X, that's because they're from Century 21, one of the companies under the umbrella of Gerry Anderson, who gave us the heroic marionettes of Thunderbirds.

Candy and Andy was the hardcover annual tied to the Candy magazine — an end-of-year volume designed for Christmas gift-giving in the UK. The one featured in this blog post is the 1968 annual.

Much has been written about these blond siblings, because lifelike dolls are unsettling and stick in the memory, even if the magazine and annuals were mostly failed ventures back in their day. 

Writing for Four Corners Books, Val Williams stated of the Andy and Candy photos: "These are mysterious photo tableaux, some of which adapt a simulacrum of the everyday – eating, playing doing small tasks – others of which make no sense at all and some which give a sense of impending crisis and danger. While bright colours and cheerful settings appear throughout, Candy and Andy’s bleak stares and awkward gestures conjure up a macabre puppet theatre, while the Bearandas plod and fuddle and struggle to comprehend it all. 

"Bleak stares and awkward gestures" is putting it nicely. In an article on It's Nice That, Alan Dein states: “They dressed in with-it 1960s fashion lines and inhabited a familiar landscape of every-day Britain, but they also looked like the spooky alien children from the film Village of the Damned, based on John Wyndham’s terrifying sci-fi book The Midwich Cuckoos." 

Here are some additional photos (some cropped for dramatic effect) from the 1968 annual. It's Candy that I find most disturbing; she seems like the one you would never want to cross.

Hans Holzer's "The Spirits of '76"

It wouldn't be Halloween and Spooktober without at least one Hans Holzer book. See the bottom of today's post for a directory of Papergreat's past Holzer posts...

• Title: The Spirits of '76
• Subtitle: "A Psychic Inquiry into the American Revolution"
• Author: Hans Holzer (1920-2009)
• Publisher: The Bobbs-Merrill Company
• Publication date: 1976, to tie in with the bicentennial
• Format: Hardcover
• Pages: 177
• Dust jacket designer: Ingrid Beckman
• Dust jacket price: $7.95 (via other sources, as mine is price-clipped)
• 
  Chapter titles: The Peace Conference That Failed; Charlottesville and the Revolution; Michie Tavern, Jefferson, and the Boys; A Visit with the Spirited Jefferson; A Revolutionary Corollary: Patrick Henry, Nathan Hale, et al.; The Philipsburg Manor Ghost; Major André and the Question of Loyalty; Benedict Arnold's Friend; The Haverstraw Ferry Case; A Visit to Oley Forge; and The Lady from Long Island.
• First sentence: In this age of peace conferences that go on for years and years without yielding tangible results — or, if any, only piecemeal ones, reached after long deliberation — it is a refreshing thought to remember that a peace conference held on Staten Island between Lord Howe, the British commander in America, and a congressional committee consisting of Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, and Edward Rutledge lasted but a single day — September 11, 1776.
• Excerpt from the middle #1: Perhaps General Edward Hand is not as well known as a hero of the American Revolution as others are, but to the people of the Pennsylvania Dutch country he is an important figure, even though he was of Irish origin rather than German.¹
• Excerpt from the middle #2: Even though Ethel would normally be quite tired after a trance session, I decided to have a look at the second story and the attic. Ethel saw a number of people in the upper part of the house, both presences and psychometric impressions from the past.
• Excerpt from the middle #3: All of a sudden he saw a heavy iron saw fly up into the air on its own volition.
• Contemporary mention #1: In a July 5, 1976, Time magazine article headlined "The Voices of ’76: A Readers’ Guide to the Revolution," Timothy Foote mentions in passing: "This month a parapsychologist and ghostwriter named Hans Holzer (Haunted Hollywood, The Phantoms of Dixie) is bringing forth a new ectoplasmic epic full of patriots and poltergeists called — what else? — The Spirits of 76."
• Contemporary mention #2: A short review of Holzer's book by Paul Dellinger in the October 3, 1976, edition of The Roanoke Times is scathingly headlined "Best Thing Is Title." It goes on to state: "The best thing about this book is its rather clever title. If the ghosts interviewed by the various mediums used by author Holzer in this series of seances are any indication, spooks must be a rather dull and confused lot."
• Contemporary mention #3: In a July 4, 1976, review for the Jackson (Tennessee) Sun, Phyllis Shelton writes: "A 'psychic inquiry into the American Revolution' is an interesting idea for a book. This is what Hans Holzer has attempted in The Spirits of '76. The book is somewhat like Tennyson's account of the jousts between knights in 'La Morte d'Arthur.'² The same thing happens over and over again, almost word for word. The only differences are the names of the antagonists. The accounts of hauntings are almost identical with only the locations of the inquiries and the mediums accompanying Holzer differing. The book may have a mild and passing vogue for ardent ghost story fanciers. Others may intend to take it even more lightly since 'methinks the gentleman doth protest too much.'" 
• Contemporary mention #4: Finally, let's just take the word of Phyllis C. Irshay who, in her short review for the June 19, 1976, edition of the Redlands (California) Daily Facts, concludes: "Read it for entertainment."

Special unrelated birthday wishes

Today, Orange (our indoor, formerly feral mama cat) and her sister, Mamacita (still an outdoor feral cat) turn 4 years old, by our reckoning. We first met them in December 2021, when they were just kittens of long-gone Mama and now-indoors Big Boi. I'd like to bring Mamacita inside some day to live alongside her sister, because the desert summers have put a lot of wear on her. But she'll still bonded to her dorky son Creamsicle, who I don't think would be happy without her.

Above: Orange (left) and Mamacita this morning

Above: Creamsicle (left) and his mother Mamacita with an afternoon snack 

of tuna and cheese, for Mamacita's birthday

  Previous posts about Hans Holzer books

• The Witchcraft Report
• The Psychic World of Plants
• Window to the Past: Exploring History Through ESP
• Charismatics
• The Psychic World of Bishop Pike
• The Vegetarian Way of Life
• Ghosts of the Golden West
• How to Cope with Problems

Footnotes

1. Hand was also an enslaver, as detailed responsibly by Historic Rock Ford.

2. This is a little confusing, because Le Morte d'Arthur is by Thomas Malory, not Alfred Tennyson.

Halloween newspaper snippets from 100 years ago

Here are some Halloween clippings from the October 31, 1925, edition of the Winston-Salem (N.C.) Journal. This is the "Women's Page," filled with recipes, party ideas, etc. A headline states of Halloween: "The Mad Hour When Witches Ride and Black Cats Stalk on Fence Tops May Be Celebrated With an Eerie Party." It includes a recipe for "drop doughnuts," which is included in an image below. And there's an advertisement for Merita bread, which claims that it's great for Hallowe'en sandwiches.

Kid lit horror: "The Night the Scarecrow Walked"

Kids' media didn't pull any punches when it came to scares in the 1970s. The boogeyman didn't care how old you were. Edges weren't softened, and not everything was infused with winking humor to remind you it was all make-believe. Many books, movies, TV shows, public service commercials (especially in Britain), and amusement rides had real fangs. As just one example among many, talk to someone whose parents plopped them down in front of the movie version of Watership Down at age 8. Look, bunnies! 

Which brings us to today's book: The Night the Scarecrow Walked, written by Natalie Savage Carlson (1906-1997) and eerily illustrated by Charles Robinson (1931-2014). On what was known as Twitter back in the day, author R.J. Crowther Jr. called the "intricate scribble drawing mixed with traditional line work" by Robinson "really beautiful."

The 32-page children's book was published in 1979 by Charles Scribner's Sons and presented by Weekly Reader Books. Infused with folk horror dread and coming across like a children's version of the 1976 horror movie The Town That Dreaded Sundown, it tells the tale of two children who keep revisiting a lonely, creepy scarecrow in a field. 

The illustrations below give the bare outline of the tale. Imagine reading this under your blanket as a kid and then trying to get to sleep. Was that a branch tapping the window, or...?

The book has a 4.7 rating (out of 5) on Amazon but oddly only a 3.97 rating (out of 5) on Goodreads.

Here are some of the reader memories from those two websites:

• "I bought this book because I used to read it with my grandfather, and I have very fond memories of reading it with him. It's very spooky! The illustrations are creepy."
• "I have been reading this story to my second grade students for almost 20 years."
• "I loved this book as a child. When I was very young, my grandmother used to babysit me after school for a few hours each day and often would read me stories. The Night the Scarecrow Walked was my absolute favorite. I would asked her to read it to me just about every day from late August through Halloween! The story even inspired me to make my own scarecrow one year. The book still sits on my bookshelf today."
• "Another phenomenal Halloween book for children! The illustrations capture Halloween perfectly, and the story is a rare one in which the possibility of a scarecrow coming to life might just be true!!!"