Charlotte Johanssen’s parents leave town for a few days to look after her sick grandfather, leaving Charlotte to stay with Stacey’s family. An old, reputedly haunted house is getting torn down, and Stacey and Charlotte keep seeing and hearing weird things at the house: random flames; a swarm of bees; a face in the window. Charlotte gets sick, and for some low-key entertainment, she and Stacey do research, trying to find out the history of the house. Stacey visits the house’s former owner in a nursing home, and he tells her an elaborate story about the house’s ghostly history. Everyone turns up for the wrecking, and Stacey vividly sees things no one else sees, including a complex multi-sensory hallucination of the house burning down. She returns to the nursing home and discovers that the former owner is dead, but has left her a letter assuring her that nothing he said was really true; he was just entertaining himself. So it all ends on kind of a note of "huh." And "hm." And "nothing was really explained." If this isn’t the most bizarre Baby-Sitters Club book ever, it gives it a run for its money.
To give credit where it’s due, the Charlotte-at-Stacey’s backdrop is good. I like Stacey as sort of demi-baby-sitter (her mother is actually in charge), Stacey and Charlotte as sisters, and Charlotte not enjoying it because she’s too worried and scared. Charlotte’s illness heightens both her own misery and the family dynamic. I can see a book working where Stacey gets Charlotte’s mind off of her own or her relative’s sickness by giving her a mystery to solve, but this isn’t that book. The mystery is too weird to meld with the mundane storyline; it never seems quite clear what plane of reality the writer wants to be on. The supernatural has no place in the BSC world, a fact about which I felt extremely strongly as a kid. Sure, the ending doesn’t require the supernatural to be real, but it also doesn’t offer a satisfying logical explanation for the "clues." It’s like watching Lost: all clues, no solution. Anybody can write a mystery like that.

Lingering Questions: Has Stacey been eating magic mushrooms?

Timing: Fall or spring, I suppose. The weather is mild, and there are mentions of school (Charlotte missing school when she's sick, etc.) Another thing that frustrated me about this book as a kid is that the previous book was very clearly summer vacation, but this book takes place during the school year with no fanfare about a new year, and everyone is back in eighth grade. I know that's a problem for the series as a whole, but this is the first book where the repeated year continuity was really glaring to me.

Revised Timeline: Early tenth grade.