Front cover of an edition of Winnie's Haunted House.
Winnie's Haunted House (ISBN 0192744062) is a children's picture book of thirty-two pages. It was written by the Australian-born author Valerie Thomas and illustrated by the Zimbabwean-born artist Korky Paul. It was first published by Oxford University Press in the United Kingdom in September 2015. In September 2016, it was republished as Winnie and Wilbur: The Haunted House (ISBN 0192748297) It is the sixteenth book in the Winnie and Wilbur picture book series that began with the publication of Winnie the Witch in 1987.
The story concerns a witch named Winnie and her big black cat Wilbur. After Wilbur breaks some objects and hides to avoid punishment, Winnie comes to the conclusion that the mysterious damages must be due to her living in a haunted house.
Plot[]
One afternoon, Winnie takes a nap in her armchair. While she is sleeping, a bee flies in through the window. Wilbur the cat chases the bee. He jumps to catch it, misses the bee and falls onto a vase. The vase breaks, making a sound that wakes Winnie up. At first, Winnie blames her cat for breaking the vase. She cannot see Wilbur, however, because he is hiding under her armchair. She decides that the cat cannot be to blame after all.
Winnie also cannot find her glasses, not realizing that they are on top of her head, and thinks that somebody might have taken them. She gets up to look for her glasses. At that moment, Wilbur runs out from under the chair to hide behind the curtains. The curtains fall down on top of Winnie. She starts to suspect that her house might be haunted.
In search of a better hiding place, Wilbur runs upstairs and jumps onto a chandelier. The chandelier falls from the ceiling, Wilbur managing to jump to safety on a banister just in time. The falling chandelier convinces Winnie that her house is haunted.
Winnie gets her big book of spells, wanting to find a spell to fix a haunted house. Since she is not wearing her glasses, Winnie is not able to read very well. Nevertheless, she thinks she has found the right spell. She performs some actions, waves her wand and says the magic word "Abracadabra". Owls, bats, huge spider webs with big hairy spiders on them, ghosts and skeletons suddenly appear. Winnie's house, which had not been haunted before, has become genuinely haunted.
Knowing that she must have made a mistake before, Winnie looks at her book of spells again. Her glasses are knocked onto her nose by a passing owl. Winnie notices that the spell she cast before was headed "How to make a haunted house". The spell underneath it is headed "How to fix a haunted house". It tells her that she has to do the reverse of what she did in the previous spell. She performs opposite actions to the ones she did before and says the magic word "Abracadabra" backwards. Winnie then casts another spell to repair her vase, curtains and chandelier.
Returning to her armchair to take another nap, Winnie realizes that she still does not know what caused the damages. Wilbur hopes that she does not find out.