The doll in the garden

The Doll in the Garden is a ghost story for young readers by the American writer Mary Downing Hahn, first published in 1989 by Clarion Books.

Ashley has lost her father and has been moved, with her widowed mother, into the upstairs rooms of a boarding house in a new town. The house belongs to Ms. Cooper, who makes no secret of her dislike of children, and its garden has been left to itself for years. Ashley is told to stay out of it and does not. She meets Kristi, a younger girl from the neighbourhood, and hears what the local children say about the place: that a ghostly white cat walks in the garden and that crying comes from the hedge. Ashley hears the crying herself, and the two girls set about clearing the weeds, which is how Kristi uncovers a box holding an antique doll called Anna Maria and a handwritten apology from a girl named Carrie to someone called Louisa. When the white cat shows itself, Ms. Cooper is more frightened than either of the girls has seen an adult be.

The doll, the cat and the names in the box lead Ashley and Kristi through a gap in the hedge into a world of the turn of the century, and the story they find there belongs to their unfriendly landlady rather than to them.