Mr Murphy's tales of ghosts and ghouls had been rife throughout the village. No one believed him. However, the children of the village grew up on the tales, and often tried to locate the ghoulish screams of Mr Murphy's claims, to no avail. Steven, one of those children, now grown, had moved away from the village and upon returning and finding Mr Murphy had long passed away, and his "haunted" house a derelict remain, buys it in hopes of renovation. What he finds instead leads to the unearthing of a buried mystery, shrouded in supernatural occurrences. Ann Thayre's The Haunted House blends together the detective genre and the gothic to create a spooky and complex mystery, exploring why the past comes back to haunt the present.