Nightmare Fuel / Wait Till Helen Comes

• Helen Harper is the ghost of a seven-year-old girl who died when her house caught on fire and she ran into the pond behind her house and drowned. For a hundred years, she has been haunting the burned-out ruins of Harper House, befriending lonely little girls and then luring them to drown in the pond in hopes of keeping them with her forever.
  • For a more realistic kind of horror, the way Helen manipulates Heather by convincing her that her stepmother and stepsiblings hate her and her father would too if he knew the truth about what happened to her mother, so that Heather feels totally isolated and dependent on Helen as her only friend. This is something abusers often do in real life: cut the victim off from their family and friends so they have no one else to support them and are unable to leave even if they want to.
  • Helen promising to take Heather to a beautiful kingdom full of magic if only she'll step into the waters of Harper Pond is eerily akin to a child kidnapper or molester luring their victim with candy.
    Helen: It's time to go, Heather. The mermaids in the crystal palace are waiting to welcome us, to make us one of them. We'll ride on enchanted seahorses in a kingdom where the rain never falls and the rose never dies. Unicorns, elves, dragons—you'll see all the creatures I've told you about. We'll be so happy there, two princesses in our glass tower.
  • In the graphic novel, when Mr. Simmons talks about a young girl who drowned three years ago, her body is shown floating at the bottom of the pond.
• Heather's mother died in a fire when she was three, but we don't find out the truth about how it happened until the climax of the book: little Heather was playing with the stove and accidentally caused a fire that got out of control.
• Molly and Heather finding the long-decayed skeletons of Helen's mother and stepfather in the basement, who were never found after their house burned down.