When you find yourself trying to remember a show (or any works) that's on the tip of your tongue but just out of reach, come here - the collective brain of the TVTropes community can probably help. Post all the details you can remember (examples help). If you're looking for a trope, head over to Trope Finder. Have general questions about tropes? Visit Ask The Tropers!
- Show Spoilers
- Night Vision
- Sticky Header
- Wide Load

This was a story that was read aloud to us in school by the teacher, sometime before 1980.
I am not sure if it was a short story or a longer book.
A family move into an old house, and the kids discover somehow there is a way that they can see back into time and watch some people who lived in the house a long time before. This is because of some aspect of the house itself (i.e. it is not a special power or artifact). Watching these people they see some issue come up, I don't remember the details. But by watching them, the kids in the modern day figure out the solution to the problem, and that there is an important clue hidden behind a tile. At first, they struggle to figure out how to communicate with the people in the past. They consider using telepathy, and all concentrating on the phrase "Look behind the tile! Look behind the tile!", but I don't think they actually try that. But somehow they are able to find a way to help the long ago people. But then they lose the ability to see the people in the past, they realize that by changing the past they have severed the house's link to the past. Then they find some clue that indicates that the people in the past were saved.
I think there was something about a portrait. Maybe of a female? Maybe the portrait was hidden in the attic, but after they changed the past it had moved to a visible place. Like the person in the family had been disgraced and thrown out of the family in the first timeline (which is why their portrait was hidden in the attic), but after the kids changed the past the person instead became an honored person in the family.