~ Spooky Season Special ~ Betty Ren Wright, the Bad Bitch of Tween Ghost Stories
If you read these books, please let me know.
One of the purest pleasures in my life in the last year has been discovering the corner of Instagram where people talk about their memories of America Girl dolls, books, and especially, magazines. Every single image of a photospread featuring tweens giving advice and craft ideas that serve absolutely no purpose other than to wile away an afternoon is so familiar. It feels like unlocking access to a secret club - of which I was always a member but never knew.
The things we’re Very Into as children and teens hold a special place in our sense memory. This is especially true, I think, if it feels like something you enjoyed almost exclusively by yourself at the time. I didn’t read American Girl Magazine with my friends. I didn’t talk about it at school. It was just for me, in my room, practicing making a stamp out of rubber bands and wishing that there was a Pier One Imports in our town.
Like, I don’t think kids who read Harry Potter or watch Paw Patrol will have quite the same level of delight when discovering another oddball who was so deeply into what they were into as kids.
In addition to practically memorizing every edition of American Girl Magazine through repetitive reads and a near forensic evaluation of the text, I also read a lot of paperbacks.
As a young weirdo with a library card and literally nothing to do all summer other than pine away for a Bug Juice-like experience, I absolutely devoured the books I could find in the Young Adult section, trying a little bit of everything before I stumbled on the author who would basically define my entire taste in fiction for the rest of my life.
Enter Betty Ren Wright
Despite being hugely prolific and very successful, Betty Ren Wright’s history is pretty patchy. But here’s what I’ve learned: Hailing from Michigan and born in 1927, she graduated from college and entered into writing and publishing. She ultimately became the chief editor for Western Publishing, a position she held for 30 years. During this time, she remained unwed, finally marrying at the age of 49 to a many who already had children. She became a stepmother and grandmother later in life, but continued to write.
She lived to be 86, dying just 10 years ago, and published more than 50 books. Many of her books were mysteries and ghost stories written for children and young teens, often dealing with family secrets and unusual circumstances. At least one was turned into a TV movie.
And yet, to this day, I don’t think I’ve ever met another person who has read or remembers having read one. But I remember them because I read them so. Many. Times. And because there were so many!
I believe the first one came to me from the Holy Mecca of Childhood Literacy, the Scholastic Book Fair. Then some came from the library. And every now and then, I’d find one at a used bookstore. And because it was before the internet was provided easy answers to specific questions, every new BRW book was a treasure because they seemed to just keep appearing on the shelves. How many books did this woman write?! I’d wonder, desperately hoping I never stopped finding more and more.
“I wanted real ghosts”
There was a lot for me, a weird, creepy little girl from the woods of Oregon, to love about Wright’s books. Most of the books featured a young female protagonist, which set them apart from books like The Hardy Boys, and were slightly more modern than, say, Nancy Drew. Plus, they were literally books about ghosts - not circumstances that might be believed to be ghosts. Which is exactly what Wright said she loved as a girl.
Here are a few of the Library of Congress descriptions of her titles:
Christina's summer in a spooky, isolated Victorian house with her grumpy uncle turns into a ghostly adventure.
A dollhouse filled with a ghostly light in the middle of the night and dolls that have moved from where she last left them lead Amy and her sister to unravel the mystery surrounding grisly murders that took place years ago.
While visiting his friend Jeannie's eccentric Aunt Rosebud in a boarding house that may be haunted, ten-year-old Chad comes across a mystery involving a missing diamond bracelet.
A man who died in a car crash after allegedly stealing $50,000 from a bank, tries to communicate with the family through Meg's dreams.
Reader, I could not read these books fast enough.
Not only were they ghost stories, they were also stories about children investigating and fact-finding. They were about secrets and cover-ups and how grown-ups were untrustworthy. They were books that felt like they were written just for me.
In an undated interview with her publisher, Wright described her interest:
I loved family stories, animal stories (no matter how sentimental!). I did not care for fantasy; I craved ghost stories, but I wanted the ghosts to appear to ordinary people like me.
THIS IS EXACTLY WHAT I WANTED, TOO.
In her stories. Wright depicted young people who were confronted by a scary thing and then not only did they figure it out, they vanquished it or set it free. And for me, as a kid who had problems that felt intractable (being lower-working class, not feeling the same as my peers, having undiagnosed ADHD, among other issues), the idea that something as potentially terrifying as a FREAKING GHOST could be handled by GOING TO THE LIBRARY AND DOING RESEARCH was massively powerful.
Wright’s books also made me feel like I could write my own. These were the kinds of stories that I wanted to read, yes, but they were also the type I could imagine plotting out (pretty sure I did end up writing a novella that was fully derivative of BRW and is mercifully lost to time and crashed hard drives).
Ghosts as metaphor
What’s interesting is that there’s not a ton of information about Wright’s life - a life as an unmarried working woman well into her 40s. I’m curious about what her childhood might have been like, especially considering the fact that BRW described using a similar ideation process to Stephen King. Which as an adult (and a person who graduated straight from BRW to King) makes a lot of sense:
Each time, the finished story is very different from what actually happened, because as I start writing I constantly ask myself, ‘What if . . .? What if that dollhouse were haunted? What if I were ten years old and had to spend the whole summer with a bachelor uncle who didn’t like children? What if my dreams actually came true, and I was afraid to tell my family what was happening?’ I consider lots of different what-ifs for each book; and by the time I’ve chosen my favorites, the book has begun to take shape.
She also described drawing on “experiences and the experiences of friends…I remember feelings I had in childhood.”
And like, maybe her childhood was normal and happy and she just had a creepy imagination but like, if writing this newsletter has taught me anything, it’s that people who write ghost stories - especially stories where the ghosts are real - there’s something else to that.
As I’ve written about before, ghosts and interest in ghosts is often a proxy for something tangible in life. We see Scary Moms in horror because moms with mental illness are extremely traumatizing and people write about the experience through the horror lens to work it out. We see disembodied voices and figures appearing in corners as a metaphysical expression of the scary stuff in our brains.
Because let’s be honest, if most of us (not me, my mom is a literal witch) had come to our parents and said “Hey there’s a ghost in the attic” they would have called 1-800-MY-KID-IS-NUTS from the wall phone with the cord that was very very tangled.
But as a kid, doesn’t everything feel a little bit haunted? Like every time you had to go to a strange adult’s house and had to find the light for the bathroom? Or when you were the first one awake at a slumber party and you just laid there like a little mummy in your sleeping bag, praying someone else would get up, too, so you didn’t have to talk to Ashley’s Dad because…he was someone else’s dad?
The thing I like best about the catalog of BRW now is how much I think genre books - like horror! For children! - can actually be really amazing at a young age, because they meet you on your same weird kid brain level.
And while there is no sign of any oddities in Betty Ren Wright’s brain or personality, there’s just something about these books that makes me stand up and cheer ONE OF US! ONE OF US!*
So shout out to BRW, a woman who absolutely had a hold on me as a young person, who wrote books that freaked me out and made me feel seen, and who was not afraid to let kids imagine that ghosts are real and that your uncle has secrets and old houses are full of mysteries and you’re not crazy for being afraid in places that are obviously very spooky.
*By which I mean “a crazy person”