Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Unavailable
    Ghost Girl: The true story of a child in desperate peril – and a teacher who saved her
    Unavailable
    Ghost Girl: The true story of a child in desperate peril – and a teacher who saved her
    Unavailable
    Ghost Girl: The true story of a child in desperate peril – and a teacher who saved her
    Ebook369 pages5 hours

    Ghost Girl: The true story of a child in desperate peril – and a teacher who saved her

    By Torey Hayden

    4/5

    ()

    Unavailable in your country

    Unavailable in your country

    About this ebook

    A stunning and poignant account of an extraordinary teacher's determination from the author of the #1 Sunday Times bestsellers The Tiger's Child and One Child.

    Jadie never spoke, never laughed, never cried. She spent every waking hour locked in her own private world of shadows. But nothing in Torey Hayden's experience had prepared her for the nightmare Jadie revealed to her when finally persuaded to break her self-imposed silence. It was a story too painful, too horrific for Hayden's professional colleagues to acknowledge.

    But Torey Hayden could not close her ears… or her heart. A little girl was trapped in a living hell of unspeakable memories. And it would take every ounce of courage, compassion, and love that one remarkable teacher possessed to rid the "Ghost Girl" of the malevolent spirits that haunted her.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins UK
    Release dateJul 10, 2012
    ISBN9780007370825
    Unavailable
    Ghost Girl: The true story of a child in desperate peril – and a teacher who saved her
    Author

    Torey Hayden

    Torey Hayden is an educational psychologist and a special education teacher who, since 1979, has chronicled her struggles in the classroom in a succession of bestselling books. She currently lives and writes in North Wales. Find her on MySpace at www.myspace.com/torey_hayden

    Read more from Torey Hayden

    Related to Ghost Girl

    Related ebooks

    Relationships For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      Let Him Rot!

      Dec 20, 2022

      Let Him Rot!
      4 min read

    • Article

      My Family, My Science: One girl’s scientific coming of age.

      Mar 3, 2016

      There is nothing in the world more perfect than a slide rule. Its burnished aluminum feels cool against your lips, and if you hold it level to the light you can see God’s most perfect right angle in each of its corners. When you tip it sideways, it g

      20 min read

    • Article

      A Room in August Town

      Sep 12, 2023

      A Room in August Town
      25 min read

    • Article

      It’s Come to This

      Sep 1, 2021

      It’s Come to This
      16 min read

    • Article

      When I Was a Girl I Wrapped Books

      Nov 30, 2017

      When I was in high school I worked as a Christmas gift wrapper at the Chinook Bookshop in Colorado Springs. I can remember everything about the job except how I got it. I don’t remember an interview or even an application. All I remember is that ever

      5 min read

    • Article

      A Delta Housewarming

      Jan 10, 2019

      Since I was twenty-five, by which time I’d been away from home for almost ten years, I’ve fantasized about building a house, a retreat of sorts, in or near my hometown in the Mississippi Delta. I hadn’t realized how long I’d actually had this particu

      7 min read

    • Article

      Two Years Of Solitude

      Dec 31, 2021

      Two Years Of Solitude
      12 min read

    • Article

      Lill’s Story

      Mar 6, 2018

      Lill’s Story
      12 min read

    • Article

      The Open Door

      Mar 26, 2022

      The Open Door
      4 min read

    • Article

      Challenger

      Dec 1, 2019

      BEFORE DEGREE or meter or mile, my first unit of measurement was the cord: a portion of wood cut for fuel, four by four by eight, or one hundred and twenty-eight cubic feet. Eight cords equaled twenty stacks, six months, the winter buried within the

      17 min read

    • Article

      Oh! The Boardwalk

      May 30, 2023

      Oh! The Boardwalk
      3 min read

    • Article

      The Long Way Home

      Mar 21, 2023

      The Long Way Home
      11 min read

    • Article

      The Littlest Wren

      May 31, 2018

      The Littlest Wren
      14 min read

    • Article

      My Old Kentucky Store

      Sep 12, 2019

      My Old Kentucky Store
      5 min read

    • Article

      Two Men, Mary

      Dec 5, 2023

      My first job was at a frozen yogurt shop called TCBY. This was 1987, in Tucson. The shop was on Speedway Boulevard, in a strip mall between two car washes—the first TCBY franchise in the city, though within a year there would be two more, plus a Greg

      24 min read

    • Article

      A Waking Dream

      Sep 19, 2019

      A Waking Dream
      7 min read

    • Article

      The Portrait

      Mar 1, 2018

      I WAS BORN almost completely deaf, and by the time I was seven I had already become a prisoner to my education. In the morning, I had speech therapy and tutoring with Mr. Bishop. We sat at my family’s long dining-room table, which was always covered

      9 min read

    • Article

      Crossing the Border

      Sep 19, 2019

      Crossing the Border
      7 min read

    • Article

      My Flight From The Real

      Mar 22, 2022

      My Flight From The Real
      3 min read

    • Article

      The Reading Room

      Jul 18, 2018

      The Reading Room
      3 min read

    • Article

      Talk Of The Town

      Aug 12, 2021

      When I was a kid, my understanding of North Creek was mostly shaped by what it wasn’t. While lakes abound across the Adirondacks, my town had apparently forgotten to acquire one. (I probably complained about this geographical oversight while sitting

      4 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for Ghost Girl

    4/5

    234 ratings10 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 2/5
      This was fairly pulp-type reading, I got through the book very quickly. The author is a special needs teacher & has written a whole series of books about the "poor" children she's worked with (but who's stories she doesn't mind using for profit...there's no real educational or informative angle on these things). It didn't sit right with me that this is apparently a real case, but obviously changed to "protect the innocent" to the point where she could have probably made up anything. I also don't like the fact how the blurb makes her out to be some sort of super teacher...its like she's using these cases to stoke the fire of her ego, when its not even clear how much has been altered. But, having said that, it was an interesting read & the case is very sad. She's not a bad writer, & unlike the blurb doesn't seem to really sing her own praises too much in the story even though some of the techniques she apparently used to get the girl to talk are quite interesting. I also liked that the conclusion wasn't a happily-ever-after cop out. I don't think I'll read any more of her books though, the whole Dave Pelzer thing turned me off stories of this type as they're never nearly introspective enough, they just come across as sensationalist to me.
    • 5/5
      good book even though it was both happy and sad
      torey l hayden is a good author
    • 4/5
      Ghost Girl by Torey Hayden3.5 StarsFrom The Book:Jadie never spoke. She never laughed, or cried, or uttered any sound. Despite efforts to reach her, Jadie remained locked in her own troubled world—until one remarkable teacher persuaded her to break her self-imposed silence. Nothing in all of Torey Hayden's experience could have prepared her for the shock of what Jadie told her—a story too horrendous for Torey's professional colleagues to acknowledge. Yet a little girl was living in a nightmare, and Torey Hayden responded in the only way she knew how—with courage, compassion, and dedication—demonstrating once again the tremendous power of love and the resilience of the human spirit.My Thoughts:There is no nice, happily after-after, story book ending to this story of Jadie, a severely traumatized child who had so many different problems they were difficult to decide which was the most severe. It was finally determined that more than one thing may have been responsible for her condition...either separately or together.. She was either psychotic or was being ritually abused by members of an occult group. Torey Hayden was a young professional at the time...the beginning of her career and often found herself being made to feel inadequate by her older, more experienced colleagues who thought that they knew better...and to make mattes worse.... were not open to new ideas about special education and the needs of these special children. Hindsight is 20/20, and we all can look back later and wish we had seen the broader picture. Torey's honesty in writing about her own second thoughts made the story so much more compelling. I don't recommend this book to anyone that would object to reading the graphic...intense... dirty details about the life and treatment of an 8 year old girl...this is NOT fiction. I do however, applaud Torey Hayden's courage in telling the story.
    • 4/5
      I read this book as an elementary school teacher, and remember being really moved by it.
    • 4/5
      One of Torey's best. She has been a favorite of mine for years and this book was my very first of hers, found by accident in a thrift store. I've read all of her books over and over...three or four of them more so than the others.
    • 5/5
      Started this book last night (19/01/09) and finished it this afternoon (20/01/09). What a fantastic piece of writing and handled very tactfully. Torey Hayden is an educational psychologist and a special education teacher, who has worked in special units, where she teaches groups of about 5-8 kids, all of who have varying difficulties with learning and lots with varied behavioral problems-Ghost Child is based on facts of one of Torey's students in a small country school in the US. she has of course changed the names involved, but her telling of this little girls story hits the heart of this teacher!! Having worked in various school settings overseas and in Victoria, this story reminded me of some of the students I have dealt with-I could never write like Torey does, but I certainly loved reading this one and am looking forward to reading the rest of her tales.
    • 5/5
      *possible spoilers*Why do I continue to read true-story child abuse books like this one, when it makes me so upset and frustrated? I have no idea, but this book was certainly one of the most disturbing.Filled with references and memories of perverted ritual abuse, confusing almost hypnotic recounts of blood and spiders and definitely-not-subtle euphanisms for sexual acts, a book like this would freak me out anyway. But then add the knowledge that the victim was an eight year old girl and it's a true story.... Total mental overload.As the author herself mentions at the end of the book, it would be a million times more satisfying and relieving to have an actual end to this case, a cut-and-dry "this is what actually happened"... but real life just can't be that simple. The monsters who hurt Jadie and her sisters were never found, and technically it was never 100% proven that it all happened like she said. Which leaves me one very frustrated reader.
    • 3/5
      Slightly better than average "I taught unteachable/ unreachable children"
    • 4/5
      The things this book describes are horrifying and, by the author's own admission, hard to attempt to stomach or understand. Tory Hayden, a teacher with a long history of working with severely troubled young children in special education and institutional settings, finds herself teaching a child who keeps relating unbelievably horrific stories and memories. Risking her credability, and maybe her career, Hayden has to decide whether to act on the belief that the girl is telling the truth, or is violently schizophrenic. Not shoes that I would like to be in. Thankfully, using patience and courage, Hayden is able to stand on the other side of the story and tell how one little girl literally living in a living hell manages to get at least partially stronger and more stable.
    • 5/5
      This is, I think, the first Torey Hayden book I read back in high school, and, having reread it (and all the others I read) recently, I still find it an engrossing story. Torey is trying to solve a rather puzzling mystery: what has happened to this girl? Why does she act this way, and how can she be helped? This little girl's story is fascinating, and, as the truth emerges, we want to help her even more.