THE PHANTOM CAROUSEL

A carousel horse come to life. . .a ghostly playmate in the nextdoor garden. . . night sounds of crying from a 200-year-old cradle. . .a dead sailor come back to retrieve his leg from a young bone collector's bedroom: On such common ghost story motifs Ainsworth bases her eleven short tales, most of them ending with some informed adult's background report (the garden girl had lived next door till her accidental death as a child; the cradle had been the scene of a baby's suffocation), and none of them much developed beyond the initial, eerie encounter. Frail shades indeed.