Bestselling author Tiffany D. Jackson's new middle grade novel, "Ghost in the Night," comes out in August.
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People always tell writers to “write what you know,” and bestselling author Tiffany D. Jackson did exactly that with her latest book, Ghost in the Night, a middle grade novel about a young Black girl fascinated by ghosts—and who may just have encountered one of her own.
The story grew out of a comment Jackson made to an editor at Scholastic, which will publish the book on August 4. But the experience of seeing a ghost was all too real for Jackson, and it happened, appropriately enough, while she was researching Night, her second middle grade novel.
“I was at a brunch with some Scholastic editors, and we happened to be talking about travel, and I mentioned how I loved going on ghost tours. I sort of made the joke that I was always the only Black girl who was on the ghost tours all the time,” Jackson says. “My editor overheard me and said, ‘That is a good book,’ and so literally, the story came out of that.”
Her own ghostly encounter happened during her first trip to Savannah, Georgia, where the book is set. She took a ghost tour in Taylor Square, formerly named Calhoun Square after John Calhoun, a vocal defender of slavery while serving as vice president in 1825-1832. The square, a onetime African American burial ground, was renamed after Susie King Taylor, a formerly enslaved person who became the first Black nurse in the Civil War. (That context is important to Jackson, who wanted the detail in the book to highlight the choice the city made and that she applauded.)
She didn’t take the tour expecting to experience anything supernatural. She recognized it for what the tours generally are—entertainment. “Savannah has ghosts in every square. Everyone comes to the city to go on a ghost tour, and they give the tours their money, and it’s always so funny to hear the locals talk about it—you’re from here, you don’t think any of this is real, and all of us are going on these tours,” Jackson says.
She took the Blue Orb Savannah ghost tour, and the guide (“he was incredible”) warned the group before walking into Taylor Square that it could be dangerous and to alert him immediately if they felt anything was off. “Alright, this guy is putting it on real thick, like, okay. And we get there, and my stomach started hurting. I just assumed, because I had just eaten all this barbecue, that my stomach was hurting, and I was kind of like, ‘oh, it's fine,’” says Jackson.
Then another person on the tour took a photo and showed it to her. “In the picture was this woman in Victorian garb just staring right at us, and our tour guide took one look at the picture and was like, ‘We need to go,’” says Jackson. “I was still kind of processing it, like, wait, is he this real, am I being tricked?”
Her stomachache had gotten much worse throughout the short episode. “As soon as we left, and we went to the next space, the tour guide looked at me, and he was like, ‘You felt something, didn't you?’ And I realized that my stomachache was gone,” Jackson says.
While she knows it’s hard to believe, she says she’d gone on ghost tours elsewhere, including Philadelphia, Boston and New York City. She’s never had a similar experience.
“That was the first time where I was like, this feels like a theater, but it wasn't theater. It was real, and I was like, ‘Ah, wait a minute,’” Jackson says. And as any great author would do, the Edgar Award-winning writer channeled the encounter for her book.
She returned to Savannah and worked with a ghost hunter, with whom she had a second unexplainable experience. That time, she tried to rationalize what she’d seen—and ended up using that as characterization inspiration for Night.
“I wanted to give the characters in my book that same type of pragmatism, like, this could have been this, it could have been this, it could have been this, or it could have been the easiest answer: that it was a ghost, and you just didn't want to believe it,” Jackson says.
The book’s main character, young Harmony Roundtree, is dealing with trauma when she arrives in Savannah, Georgia (of course), where she takes a picture of what appears to be a ghost—or is it? She and her friends get sucked into a mystery that may be related to a crime. Jackson keeps readers guessing, just as she herself has been since her apparent brushes with the supernatural.
Roundtree is a classic Jackson character. Her nuanced portrayal gives the girl many layers, including a delightful determination. “I’m still getting my sea legs when it comes to middle grade,” Jackson says. “I write a lot of young adult books, so it's a place where I'm comfortable, versus middle grade, where I'm still adjusting to what kids like, what's too adult and too childish for this particular age group.”
She’s excited to write a book that might appeal to a kid like her, who jumped, she recalls, from R.L. Stine to Stephen King. “I would love to have seen more of me on the page back then, more Black girls, because I knew so many Black girls who were like me, who liked reading this particular kind of genre, and we got to see ourselves,” Jackson says. In Harmony Roundtree, a new generation gets the experience Jackson dreamed of—ghost sightings and all.
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