The Ghost in the First Row (The Boxcar Children Mysteries)

The Aldens are visiting Aunt Jane in Elmford. She tells the children that she has tickets for them to see a mystery play at the Trap-Door Theater. A theater patron who loved mysteries left her life savings to improve the theater and to hold a yearly contest with a cash prize awarded to the best mystery playwright in town. The Aldens can't wait to find out everything there is to know about the old Trap-Door Theater. But there is more than one mystery going on. Each day at rehearsal something strange has happened to the front-row seat once occupied by the benefactor―popcorn all over the floor, an old costume laid out, a spotlight shining on her empty seat. Is the benefactor’s ghost haunting the theater, or is one of Elmford’s living residents up to no good? There is only one thing the Aldens like better than a mystery―two mysteries for the price of one!

Gertrude Chandler Warner grew up in Putnam, Connecticut. She wrote The Boxcar Children because she had always dreamed about what it would be like to live in a caboose or a freight car―just as the Aldens do. When readers asked for more adventures, Warner wrote more books―a total of nineteen in all. After her death, other authors have continued to write stories about Henry, Jessie, Violet, and Benny Alden, and today The Boxcar Children® series has more than one hundred books.