There’s a Ghost in This House by Oliver Jeffers
Oliver Jeffers’s There’s a Ghost in This House is a clever and inventive picture book that transforms the familiar haunted-house trope into a game of discovery and delight. Its narrator, a young girl (who, in typical Jeffers fashion, is slightly otherworldly herself—green-skinned, green-haired, and dressed in sherbet-lemon stripes), lives in a sprawling old house. She is convinced that ghosts are present, yet she cannot see them. The twist lies with the reader: we can. Through the use of translucent pages that overlay the illustrations, Jeffers invites readers to reveal the ghosts hidden within the house. The result is never frightening, but gently eerie—carrying just enough spooky curiosity to captivate children of all ages with its artistic ingenuity.
Jeffers’s ghosts appear in the classic white-sheet form, but the rooms they haunt are created from found imagery - photographs of old houses, architectural studies, and pages from vintage catalogues. “I’ve always worked in collage,” Jeffers explains. “So whenever I’m at a car boot sale, a yard sale or an estate sale, living in New York, it’s incredible what people throw away. I would collect them, thinking, ‘that will come in handy one day’. They looked like the empty scenes for something, and that’s the backdrop for the tour of this house.”
The book includes over forty-five sources credited in its bibliography, yet the references are only one aspect of its meticulous construction. One of Jeffers’s greatest challenges was to make the ghosts appear—not simply exist on the page from the outset. To achieve this, he experimented with materials and ultimately chose tracing paper, which was affordable and readily available compared to Mylar, a plastic film that proved prohibitively expensive for large-scale production. However, this choice introduced further challenges. The translucency of tracing paper was less effective than hoped, subtly altering the appearance of certain rooms. Jeffers used digital editing to restore the intended effect, and further technical issues arose when the tracing paper wrinkled during gluing. The solution was to fold the sheets into the books instead.
These design decisions—regarding materials, layout, and the timing of each reveal elevate There’s a Ghost in This House beyond a traditional picture book. It becomes a tactile object of exploration, one that readers turn, handle, and experience as much as they read.
Beautifully produced, atmospheric, and playfully conceived, There’s a Ghost in This House is a highly original work. It is an ideal choice for young readers seeking a gentle ghost story at Halloween, or for anyone who appreciates the craftsmanship and imagination that distinguish Oliver Jeffers’s picture books. Through ingenuity and persistence, Jeffers has pushed both the form and materials of the picture book, creating something that feels fresh, surprising, and truly unique.