Baby-Sitters’ Fright night (Baby-Sitters Club) vs. The Sleepy Hollow Mystery (Boxcar Children) vs. (Surprise bonus) The sleepy Hollow Sleepover (A to Z Mysteries)

Baby-sitters’ Fright Night (1996) “by” Ann M. Martin (ghostwritten by Nola Thacker who was previously referenced for her brilliant pen names, which include D. E. Athkins and Tom B. Stone) is the third “Super Mystery” in the Baby-Sitters Club series. This one has a killer premise, with most of the BSC (Kristy, Mary Anne, Stacey, Mallory, and Abby) heading to Salem for a four-day long class trip at Halloween time to learn about the witch trials. (First note: This is already a wild premise. I would find this whole story much more believable if it was happening at any other time of year. I cannot imagine how much it costs for our girls to stay in a historic inn in Salem at Halloween). The book provides a b-plot of Halloween happenings back in Stoneybrook, CT, where the rest of the crew is doing boring and almost completely unrelated things. While the b-plot typically ends up connecting in some way to the main plot, there is absolutely no payoff here. I judge this book a bit for its irrelevant and boring b-plot and as such, I shan’t waste your time by speaking of it again. Anyways, we get to the cool inn that I could never afford, and OMG aspiring author and sixth grader Mallory spots one of her favorite authors, Martha Kempner, at the inn (I like to imagine that this is the grown-up form of Martha from Trick-or-Treat; ToT does mention that Martha likes to write, so it tracks). Martha is wearing high heels which we make enough of a big deal of that I suspect it has to be important…somehow. We also already have some Stoneybrook Middle School shenanigans. Teens Alan Gray and Cary Retlin are up to their respective low brow and high brow pranks, and Cokie Mason (and to a lesser extent Alan) are bullying this poor nerdy girl named Eileen (who to my knowledge is never heard of in this 200+ book series before or since this novel). The author makes some sort of allegory about how bullying nerds is like witch hunts and racism, and while I appreciate the attention to the topic, I’m not sure that they fully stick the landing there. It doesn’t take long before chaos ensues—Holy smokes, the Witch’s Eye, a potentially cursed diamond housed at a nearby museum, HAS BEEN STOLEN! I’m not actually really sure why the BSC decides that this is their problem, but our girls have got to crack the case (C’mon, you’re staying in a very expensive hotel for a class trip; focus on your learning please). Abby buys a ceramic pumpkin at the gift shop and the way this pumpkin gets discussed suggests to me that we need to add it to the list, next to author lady’s high heels, as something to keep our eyes on. Our girls start to accumulate clues, including a piece of paper they find at the museum prior to being evacuated due to the theft that lists a sequence five numbers and wig in the bushes near the crime scene. The main suspects are: Mrs. Moorehouse (owner of the diamond; it sounds like she might not have insurance, so I’m not sure what her motive would be); Mrs. Moorehouse’s nurse (maybe revenge? Mrs. Moorehouse seems like a pill to work for); Author lady, Martha (she’s writing a book about the diamond; stealing it would be faaaabulous for publicity); Sean Knowles and Harvey Hapgood (Some dudes; I can’t tell them apart for most of the book, but I’m sure they both would have their reasons for stealing it). During all of the spooky festivities, someone steals Abby’s fanny pack, which contains her room key, and then they ransack her room, though nothing is stolen—Very mysterious!). There’s a big ole storm on Halloween night—I love this kind of shit—and all the lights go out—I’m extra into the vibes now. Stacey figures out that the sequence of numbers is probably a safe combination (that’s a safe bet, Stacey!). Since the electricity is out, some of the electronic locks aren’t working, so the girls decide to snoop around all of the guests’ rooms and try to open their safes with the combination. This doesn’t get them super far, but by this point, we’ve ruled out a few suspects (Mrs. Moorehouse would not have been physically able to commit the crime; Nurse already had long black hair so the wig wouldn’t have been a disguise; Sean is an insurance agent who is insuring the diamond so prolly isn’t the thief). Spoiler: Abby runs into author lady and Hapgood (who still doesn’t really have any personality traits). Author lady swipes Abby’s pumpkin, throwing it to the ground. The pumpkin shatters and out falls the Witch’s Eye! Abby, famously sporty, uses her sick soccer moves, seemingly injuring both Martha and Hapgood in the process. So wait, what happened? Author lady became obsessed with the diamond and tried to buy it, resorting to the lengths of having Hapgood pose as an insurance agent claiming that he couldn’t insure the diamond any more due to the curse (hell, for all I know, Hapgood is an insurance agent; I still know nothing about this guy). Author lady wore a disguise to steal the Witch’s eye from the museum, discarding the disguise in the bushes. We know it must have been her because… she was wearing sneakers, not her signature high heels, on the day of the crime (no other possible explanation for changing up her footwear; I mean, why would you wear sneakers if not to sneak???) Author lady stuffs the diamond into the pumpkin and for reasons that don’t make a ton of sense to me leaves the pumpkin in the gift shop so she doesn’t get caught having it; though she plans to retrieve it later. Ope, Abby bought it before she could retrieve it.  What are the chances?! (Two points for Briana for spotting both Chekhov’s high heels and Chekhov’s tiny pumpkin). Special thanks to my Goosebumps book club who supported me with this comprehensive analysis.

This was one of my favorite books as a kiddo, so much so that when I moved to Rhode Island, I absolutely could not wait to take a road trip to Salem. There’s some attention to accuracy here. Even as a casual Salem visitor, I could identify some of the landmarks. I connected with the Baby-Sitters’ attempts to count the gables when they visited the House of Seven Gables (to this day, I cannot figure out exactly which points on the house count as gables as opposed to other types of pointy bits). As someone who couldn’t stop laughing with my mom at the campiness of the wax museum dedicated to the witch hunts (despite appreciating the gravity of the historic event), I enjoyed the description that the attraction was not too scary. I remember cozying up in my closet with this book and a flashlight during a thunderstorm and feeling so excited when the weather in the book matched the weather outside my house. I think the execution of the book is mid and arguably worse than many other BSC mysteries, which typically at least feature a satisfying connection between the A and B plots. The crime and its resolution make very little sense to me, the baby-sitters’ involvement in the crime make little sense to me, and the reasons that we need so many chapters dedicated to an irrelevant, boring b-plot also make little sense to me. The book drags a bit and could easily be 100 pages shorter without losing any substance or intrigue. That said, seeing my beloved Baby-Sitters solve a crime in a thunderstorm in Salem at Halloween is such a nostalgic gift that I will look past my many critiques. I still love this book.

Alan and Cary both commit to lives of “pranking” throughout the book. Alan is a bit of a plebian prankster, engaging in actions such as dropping spaghetti down Kristy’s shirt and leaving out ultra salty chocolate for her to try. Cary is more of a sophisticate, leaving Kristy a fake clue that entices her to sneak into the museum and rigging the door so that she can enter but not exit. Kristy ultimately seeks revenge on Cary by convincing him that she’s the police, about to arrest him for trespassing into the museum. As such, this book joins the rich Parthenon of texts we’ve explored so far that situate Halloween as a site of rampant pranking and revenge.

Upon finishing my reread of this book, I again found myself overwhelmed with the need to find the perfect comparison book. In the initial iteration of this blog, I had planned to compare books with the same title, regardless of their other similarities. For example, in this parallel universe, R. L. Stine’s Fear Street book Halloween Party would have been put up against Agatha Christie’s Hallowe’en Party. You get the idea. As such, I had planned to pair Baby-sitters’ Fright Night with the Goosebumps book Friiight Night (close enough). But then I just really, really wanted to compare books set at Halloween. As such Friiight Night went back on the shelf and I kept digging.

Ultimately, I landed on the Boxcar Children book The Sleepy Hollow Mystery (2015, 2016, or 2025, depending on who you ask; I’m really needing someone to find me a preteen detective to crack these cases; ETA: The book was originally published in 2015, the audiobook in 2016, and rereleased as a holiday special in 2025…I think??) “by” Gertrude Chandler Warner (notably: GCW died in 1979, so this one was definitely ghostwritten, one way or another). This book is about four orphans-turned-detectives who take a Halloween trip to Sleepy Hollow, NY. I was immediately drawn to this as a comparison novel because you have a beloved crew from a middle grade series (probably from Connecticut) traveling to a famously spooky spot at Halloween where they find themselves solving a mystery. Perfect. By this point, the orphans-turned-detectives (henceforth known as the OTDs) have solved over 150 mysteries, so they are considerably more experienced than the BSC, who have only solved a paltry 40 mysteries). They get to Sleepy Hollow with their housekeeper, Ms. McGregor, to visit Ms. McGregor’s old pal, who runs a local shop. Things are almost immediately amiss: The scarecrow’s head has fallen off and renovations at the nearby restaurant have resulted in the shop/house they are staying in losing power. The kiddos are really freaked out by this, which surprises me, given all they’ve navigated (the social worker in me thinks this is some sort of trauma response, but this does not get explored in the book). The shop has fallen into financial troubles and the shopkeeper’s daughters have their own approaches to solving this issue. One sister wants to launch a non-scary ghost tour to fundraise for the shop, and the other sister wants to get Sleepy Hollow on the map as the “scariest town in America” to boost business via tourism (showdown within a showdown: Sleepy Hollow vs. Salem). There is a shocking amount of tension between the sisters over their differences in scariness philosophy on how to address the shop’s financial woes. Oh no! Terror strikes the non-scary ghost tour! A headless horseman atop a glittering black stallion with glowing red eyes rolls on up and throws a haunting white pumpkin filled with red paint at the tour goers. Honestly, that does sound terrifying. The people on this tour are piiiiiiiissed. I mean the tour is supposed to be non-scary and that’s wild. Agitated, the tour returns to the shop, where the frightened tourists are meant to enjoy cookies. But oh no! Someone has put gummy worms and ground up Oreos in the cookie jar and that is also terrifying. I get it, you’ve just been through a scary thing at a supposedly non-scary event, but seriously, everyone in town needs to cool their friggin’ jets. Like, I’ve had the ole gummy worms in “dirt” at gardening themed events. This headless horseman business keeps on happening during the tours, and this becomes a real drag for our non-scary ghost tour guide, though I imagine would be a hit at pretty much every other ghost tour. The Boxcar Children, seasoned detectives that they are, simply must crack the case. So who are our current suspects?: Mr. Beakman, the gruff restaurant owner who wants to buy the shop to turn the property into an inn (not quite a greedy real estate developer plot but similar). Beakman, Jr (Brett), who is just an all-around jerk. His motives aren’t super clear to me, but he’s bad enough of a dude in a middle grade book that I definitely don’t trust him. He also was really good at doing stage lighting for the school play, which feels like such a random detail that it seems important (Chekhov’s Stagehand). Isaiah, the carriage driver for the ghost tour and library employee; the most suspicious thing about him is that he is routinely late or missing and claims to never see important things (like the Headless Horseman was right near him and he claims he didn’t see or hear anything because he was listening to his iPod—Note: this is a powerful clue that the book is set in 2015, not 2025). I get becoming absorbed in your funky beats, but seriously, you don’t notice a glittery black stallion with glowing red eyes galloping past you??? Lastly we have Margo, the sister who wants to secure Sleepy Hollow as America’s hotbed of horror. There’s a wild amount of talk about sugar cubes. OTD’s like them. Horses like them. They keep showing up in weird spots. Definitely Chekhov’s Sugar Cubes. Our plucky crew get ready for the Halloween parade. Weirdly, they choose to assemble their costumes there as opposed to planning ahead (which the Baby-Sitters also did, huh) but in the end, they end up with shit like a “Professor Dog” (which was the tiniest bit hurtful to me. I worked for years to get my PhD and that dog just puts on a vest and everyone is like—Cool, that’s a professor. No questions about that.). Oh no, the Headless Horseman storms the parade! For reasons I don’t understand, everyone blames the non-scary ghost tour guide, who actually seems to be the only person truly harmed by this stunt (everyone, repeat, everyone has canceled their ghost tour reservations because of the known frights!). The investigation really escalates at this point. Some additional sleuthing reveals that someone has placed lasers in the tree that hangs over the trail. COULD THAT BE THE EFFECT THAT MAKES THE HORSE’S EYES APPEAR TO GLOW RED?? (I mean probably. The logistics of pulling that effect off are confusing to me, but heck, I only did spotlight for my high school play). Spoilers: Suspicious of the person with the theater background, they convince Brett to go to the stable and hand a sugar cube to the rascally horse that best meets the description of the Headless Horseman’s Headful Horse (Quadruple H). It’s clear that the notoriously grumpy horse knows and loves Brett (bad judge of character), licking that sugar cube right up (surely this is why sugar cubes have been showing up all over town???). But why, Brett? Why did you do it? He did it so that the shop would not raise the money it needs, and his father could buy the property and turn it into an inn, and then he wouldn’t have to work at the restaurant anymore. I’m not sure innkeeping is any less arduous, but I trust Brett to know his own professional needs. Regardless, that is a dick move. Willickers, he sure is repentant. But how can we enact restorative justice to rectify these wrongs? The cruel irony is that the solution appears to be manual labor (in the stable) and then helping the sisters transform the non-scary ghost tour into a scary ghost tour with his power of theater magic.

These books end up having quite a bit in common: An established (probably Connecticut-based) crew traveling to a famously spooky town at Halloween time stumble into a mystery, spooky vibes enhanced by the lights going out, and somewhat confusing links between clues and solutions. Both books feature Halloween parades, frantic dashes to create the perfect costume, and celebratory autumnal feast once our young gumshoes crack the case. The BSC book makes better use of the lights going out, and the Boxcar Children mystery makes a bit more sense, both in terms of the solution and why the heck the kids are bothering to solve the crime in the first place. The Boxcar Children benevolently spare us a lengthy, irrelevant b-plot, which earns them major points. The Boxcar Children book is also about half as long as the BSC book, which I think is to its benefit, facilitating a much tighter plot. I listened to the Boxcar Children book, which I had not heard of until yesterday, as an audiobook, which was a wild experience. The voices for the children were grating but it was a bit whimsical that so many actions had full-on sound effects (pouring coffee, flipping notebook pages, etc.) Twas a real romp.

Woah! Plot Twist: I’m throwing another book into the mix! Thirdly, I read Sleepy Hollow Sleepover (2010), an A to Z Mystery by Rob Roy. I had not initially intended to read a third book for this showdown, but when I discovered the existence of a book called the Sleepy Hollow Sleepover so shortly after reading the Sleepy Hollow Mystery, I could not possibly resist throwing it into the comparisons. The A to Z Mysteries series is fairly new to me but appears to follow a formula not so different from Sue Grafton’s Alphabet series, where each book is themed around a letter of the alphabet (I see the inevitable rabbit hole this will send me down). This book, however, was a Super Edition (as were both other books in this showdown), so it was unconstrained by dedication to a particular letter. The series structure suggests that these are our most novice detectives, having solved only about 30 mysteries. Anyway, not unlike our Boxcar Children pals, these young sleuths find themselves on a Halloween Trip to Sleepy Hollow. Unlike our Boxcar Children pals, these kids have at least one parent (Spoiler: Ultimately this parent saves the day, so this books really flaunts the joys of having a parent if you are a child detective). Fairly early on, the kids have a weird conversation about the color green and start talking about how much they love money. Around this time, they overhear another guy talking about how much he also loves money, as he gazes fondly at a bank. While this strange coincidence is taking place, a bank employee is activating an animatronic horse/Headless Horsman display. This results in the kids observing that the animatronic horse is literally hollow (though seemingly not sleepy, based on his movements). At this point, I think, there’s no possible way that this money-loving dude is not going to hide money in this horse. But uh oh, when this bank inevitably gets robbed, how will they find the culprit? If only he had some sort of distinctive trait. Great news! He is rocking a pair of shiny, silver-tipped cowboy boots (Definitely Chekhov’s flashy cowboy boots). The kids and at least one parent get settled into their cabin, which is called The Haunted House, when OMG, Holy Smokes, a Headless Horseman gallops on by. Like the Boxcar Children horseman, he also has a pumpkin that appears to be filled with blood. Very scary stuff! The kids appear to be in town to attend some sort of Halloween party hosted by the local cops (Given the poor showing that the police have delivered in so many of the books depicted in this blog so far, I understand why they need the publicity). The kids take a super frightening hay ride to get to the party (like there are bats and witches and the whole thing sounds like a real high budget operation). The cop party also sounds great- bobbing for apples, etc. I would’ve gladly spent more time living vicariously through the kiddos’ adventures at the cop party when horror strikes, cutting that part of the journey short. Someone has set the hayride wagons on fire. The kids try to remember anything that could possibly be helpful, and one of them recalls seeing a man with “sparkling shoes” by the wagon (this could not possibly be the shiny-booted man rambling about his love of money, could it? I mean, that dude sounds like he has expensive tastes and needs to fund his boot habit somehow…). Alas, no one saw anything sufficiently suspicious, so they call it a night (this does seem like the cops sleeping on an important clue, though). The next morning, the kids see the bank employee who had activated the animatronic horse sobbing to the police. THE BANK HAS BEEN ROBBED! She is so sad about this that she is insisting that the Headless Horseman setup be removed ASAP (I don’t really see the connection between the Horseman and the robbery, but I guess it’s simply far too frightening now). Well, the dude with the shiny boots shows up to alleviate the bank lady of her horse burden and makes some weird comment about the horse being filled with green candy (again, nothing at all strange or coincidental about any of this). He and his accomplice become overwhelmed with a need to grab some coffee, leaving the kids a chance to see what’s up with the horse (Note: I’ve got a serious caffeine addiction, but assuming this is headed where I believe that it is, I would not leave a hollow horse full of money unattended on the main drag in town to grab a cup of coffee). Spoilers: Welp, the horse is (shockingly to us all) filled with money. The café must have been surprisingly efficient for a downtown café in a spooky town on Halloween weekend because our bankrobbers drive off before the three kid detectives had a chance to escape the truck. This honestly gets a bit terrifying. The robbers discover the kids are in the truck, steal their cell phone, and throw them into an underground crawlspace beneath a barn. The robbers slide a cover over the opening, leaving the kids in complete darkness. One of the kids accidentally bumps into a man who has been bound and gagged in the crawlspace. Holy shit! This book is written for 6-9 year olds. Great news, he’s totally fine. He is the actual animatronics proprietor, and the villains stole his truck to transport their money horse while he was on his way to de-scarify the bank (Note: His business’ name and slogan: “Ride ‘em cowboy, ride us at your next party” make me a bit uncomfortable in this context, but regardless, he seems like a perfectly nice purveyor of animatronic party props). Somehow or another, they all get out of the terrifying crawl space, but OH NO, they are still trapped in the middle of nowhere. Fortunately, one of the children, quick-witted as she is, had called her father before her phone was stolen AND HE HEARD EVERYTHING. The cops come and save the day (again, far and away the most flattering depiction of cops we’ve had so far). We learn that the banker/animatronics activator was in on the crime, and it is confirmed that the shiny toe lead was, in fact, a good one. Everything is all resolved, right? Not so fast! WHO WAS THE HEADLESS HORSEMAN WHO RACED BY THEIR CABIN AT THE BEGINNING OF THE STORY? NO ONE KNOWS! DUN DUN DUNNNNN.

The connections between the Sleepy Hollow books are fairly self-evident: Some detective children (who vary in level of parentedness) from Connecticut travel to Sleepy Hollow over Halloween and get stuck solving a mystery. Both stories feature a Headless Horsman-related mystery, but only for the Boxcar Children is that the primary mystery. I do find it funny that both the BSC and A to Z stories are solved via a shoe-based clue (Note: The A to Z shoe clue is punch (kick?) you in the face obvious, but it does make more sense to me than the BSC clue. The shiny boots were distinctive, and the dude wearing them was suspicious as hell).

Showdown Winner: It’s complicated. It’s hard to fairly judge a book that I loved so deeply as a child (and am somewhat vexed by as an adult; BSC) against a slightly less chaotic and more streamlined story that I have only just encountered as an adult (Boxcar Children). It also doesn’t quite feel fair to pit both against a story written for even younger children that has an incredibly obvious arc (sorry A-to-Z but I’m gonna pull you out of the running for having only one incredibly obvious potential solution; you do, however, get points for that surprisingly harrowing crawl space scene and the most comprehensible and plausible mystery arc overall). The Sleepy Hollow Mystery (Boxcar Children) is marginally more coherent and better paced, but I can’t bring myself to detract from the magic of reading Baby-Sitters’ Fright Night as an 8-year old in a thunderstorm by voting against this book. I just can’t do it. Under that blanket, that book was just so harrowing and profound and introduced me to the Salem Witch Trials, a phenomenon that fascinates me to this day. Ultimately, I’d love to hear other people’s thoughts on this one.