50 pages • 1 hour read
Lindsay CurrieScritch Scratch
Fiction | Novel | Middle Grade | Published in 2020A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 1-7Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 1 Summary
Twelve-year-old Claire and her father are in a bookstore looking for books about ghosts. Her father wrote a mystery novel called Ghosts of Chicago and now runs a ghost tour company. Claire hates everything to do with ghosts and prefers science. She sees her best friend, Casley, with Casley’s new friend Emily and feels a surge of jealousy because Casley did not invite her to hang out. Since she started hanging out with Emily, Casley has changed. She now likes things like makeup and clothes, which makes Claire feel alienated. Claire begs her dad to leave before Casley notices her, but he dawdles. Claire wishes her dad had normal interests. Ghost stories used to scare her, but now she knows they are all fake.
Chapter 2 Summary
On the way home, Claire worries that her dad’s profession will make other kids tease her. She wishes that Casley would ask her to hang out. Her dad drops her off, and Claire walks down the frightening alley that leads to her house. She counts the 54 steps to the back door to keep calm. Her older brother, Sam, comes out from behind a dumpster and scares Claire; she screams. She is annoyed with him and does not want him to know that she was afraid.
Chapter 3 Summary
Inside, Claire’s mom is baking for her online business. She has bad news: Claire’s dad’s employee is sick, and he needs help running the ghost tour. Claire is the only available replacement. Although Claire protests bitterly and begs to work on her science project instead, her mother insists. Her parents will pay her $50 for her help. Claire worries that her crush, Warner Jameson, will somehow see her working on the bus.
Chapter 4 Summary
Claire’s dad shows her the tour bus and tells her what her job will entail. He needs her to take tickets and keep an eye on the time at each stop so that he knows when to wrap up his talk. Most importantly, she has to ensure that no guest stays on the bus by themselves, as it is a liability. He makes Claire put up a big, glow-in-the-dark sign on the side of the bus. Claire is mortified because the bus is now so recognizable. She puts on a baseball cap and hopes that it will hide her face.
Chapter 5 Summary
The first passengers arrive. Claire takes their tickets and hands out brochures. Her dad starts the tour. Their first stop will be the Alley of Death, next to the Iroquois Theater. In 1903, a huge fire engulfed the theater, killing over 600 people. Claire starts to get scared, but when her dad checks on her, she claims that she is just motion sick. They arrive at the alley, and Claire’s dad explains that it got its gruesome name because some people fell from the burning building. They landed in the alley, right where the tour is standing. No one was ever prosecuted for the fire, so all the deaths that day remain unavenged. Claire remembers her dad telling her that ghost legends come from deaths “that shouldn’t have happened but that no one ever paid the price for” (34). She is unsettled and glad when the tour moves on.
Chapter 6 Summary
As the tour bus sits in traffic, Claire’s dad tells the tour about the SS Eastland, a boat that sank in the Chicago River. They are on their way to Hull House, which is supposedly haunted by a demon baby. Claire finds this idea laughable. As everyone files off the bus, Claire thinks she hears someone still onboard. She catches a glimpse of something moving in the window and investigates, suddenly feeling afraid. She checks the bathroom at the back of the bus. The door handle is very cold, and she hears a thump coming from inside. One of the tour guests returns to the bus and asks to use the bathroom. She opens the door and reveals an empty stall. Claire feels foolish for getting scared over nothing. The tour continues toward its final stop: the Couch Tomb. Claire first saw the tomb at the age of nine, and it scared her.
Chapter 7 Summary
At the Couch Tomb, Claire’s dad explains that no one has any idea who is buried inside. Claire asks why the city does not dismantle it, and her dad suggests that doing so could disturb restless spirits. In fact, the whole area used to be a cemetery and there are still around 10,000 bodies buried beneath them. This revelation terrifies Claire. As the tour ends and people file back onto the bus, Claire sees a little boy sitting in the back row. He wears an “old-fashioned-looking white suit” (45) and appears to be dripping wet. Claire has a strong sense that something is missing. She notices something sticky on her hand. The boy mouths three words at Claire, but she cannot make them out. When all the passengers disembark the bus for the last time, Claire does not see the boy get off. She checks inside the bus again but he is gone.
Chapters 1-7 Analysis
At the beginning of the story, Claire is Feeling Left Behind in her friendship with Casley. The two of them have grown distant since Casley became friends with Emily. Casley is now more interested in makeup than science, and she does not ask Claire to hang out as often. At Claire’s age, shifting friendships are common and can be devastating. The narrative implies that being interested in makeup is more grown up than being interested in science: Casley is ready to move on into adulthood, but Claire is not. This section of the novel also sets up Claire’s character flaws in order to make her relatable and allow for her character’s emotional development arc. A main flaw is that she does not like to tell people—even close family—when something is wrong: She does not tell her father that she is scared on the tour, instead claiming to be motion sick. The story shows that her ability to maintain relationships and avoid feeling left out is impacted as she is not able to let people in or talk to them about her feelings. These tendencies foreshadow the development of supernatural elements that will force Claire to share her feelings and ask for help.
Claire’s dad is interested in Uncovering the Real Story of Chicago, even if that means being open to the paranormal. Claire resents this interest and insists that paranormal stories are fake. Her disdain is increasingly revealed to be a cover for her fears, however. She is quick to make assumptions, deciding that ghosts are not real and that her friendship with Casley is over before she really has all of the information. Her thorough disinterest in the supernatural means that when her dad tells the tour about the sinking of the SS Eastland, she is not paying attention. This becomes significant later as this important information will come in handy in the following days when solving the mystery. This means that the reader will know more than Claire, creating dramatic irony and making her actions a teachable moment. Although Claire is not always as open as she might be to discovering the truth, she is interested in science. That means that she enjoys figuring things out, and she knows how to do research and parse evidence. These skills will serve her well as the novel’s central mystery unfolds, especially as her supernatural experiences will encourage her to rethink her attitude to things that she considers “unscientific.”
These chapters show that Claire has formed her own strategies for Overcoming Fear and that these make her relatable to the middle-grade reader. When she has to walk down the alley beside her house, she counts to keep herself calm. When her father’s ghost stories start to scare her, she tells herself that ghosts are not real. In short, she does her best to ignore or deny anything that really scares her instead of facing her fears directly. On a more mundane level, Claire also has to work on overcoming her social fears. She worries that she will be teased because of her dad’s job, and she is especially concerned that her crush will think badly of her for working on the spirit bus. Such social fears are common for 12-year-olds, and the book here touches on common worries of self-esteem, social acceptance, and peer pressure, even though these are unfounded.
The real historical context of the novel is largely provided in this section by Claire’s dad’s deliberately lurid description of past disasters. This creates a supernatural atmosphere and also sets up a number of red herrings for the mystery plot. For instance, the Iroquois Theater Fire was a real disaster but is actually a red herring. It is not related to the haunting that Claire experiences. The real disaster killed 602 people and heralded a new era of fire safety measures. Many people died because the theater had only a few poorly marked exits, no sprinklers, a confusing layout, and inadequate fire extinguishers. These details are part of the book’s educational method of imparting cultural and historical information to the reader in a subtle and fun way.
