Buy The Secret of Crickley Hall

Eve Caleigh has a telepathic connection with her 5 year old son Cam though this is lost when he suddenly disappears. A year later,in line with husband Gabe's new job the family - daughters Cally and Loren - moves up country and into rented Crickley Hall,a grim mansion run as an orphanage in the 1940s by sadistic siblings Magda and Augustus Cribben. Young teacher Nancy Linnet was shocked by their religion-motivated cruelty but powerless to prevent it. Elderly Percy Judd,who also worked at the orphanage,visits the Caleighs and explains that in 1943 the nearby village was flooded, with huge loss of life,hence the many gravestones in the church yard. Inexplicably Percy steals the Caleighs' dog. All the family starts to see ghosts from the orphanage especially violent Augustus Cribben. Everybody wants to move out except Eve,who believes that Cam is trying to reach her again.
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Though all the family have seen ghostly evidence Eve persuades them to stay a little longer to locate Cam. She visits Percy and learns the orphans drowned because the hall was built over a river but two corpses were not recovered - those of German Jew Stefan,the object of most of Cribben's cruelty,and the older Maurice,who was seduced by Magda Cribben. Nancy was sacked for her efforts to help but when Percy returned from war service he never found her. A flashback shows why. The Caleighs find a ledger in which Cribben recorded the punishments inflicted on the children after which Eve persuades medium Lili Peel to help find Cam but Lili is overwhelmed and injured by the ghost of Cribben,whose spirit is stronger than those of the children. Gabe meanwhile seeks the intervention of paranormal expert Gordon Pyke.
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Lili tells Eve that she has heard through Cribben that Cam has drowned and,after a child's body is dragged from a canal,Gabe goes to London to identify it. Lili meanwhile visits Magda,now old but just as evil,and deduces from holding a photograph of the orphans that Nancy was murdered,a fact of which Percy becomes aware for the first time. However in 1943 Percy informed the local vicar of Cribben's violence and he visited the hall. Appalled at what he saw he threatened to inform the authorities,the deranged Cribben's response being to gas all the children - except Stefan,who kills Cribben before being rescued by Percy and Maurice,who,with Magda,escapes the flood that engulfs the bodies. But the past is not wholly buried as a figure from seventy years earlier returns to the hall for a final sacrifice - before the ghosts of the innocents are laid to rest and the family dog returned.
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