debrisoftheages

Here it is as best as I can remember:

Two young men were traveling and stopped at a farmhouse where they asked if they could spend the night. The farmer said they could sleep in the barn, so they lay down. Unbeknownst to them, the farmer's daughter had died the night before and was laid out in the next room.

One man fell asleep, but the other remained wakeful. Deep in the night, he heard a noise. It was the dead girl getting up. Her fingernails were very long, because she was a [some sort of mythological monster]. Terrified, he pretended to be asleep. The girl leaned over his friend and breathed in his face, and the friend inhaled the breath and died. The girl leaned over the man's face, but the man held his breath and only pretended to die.

After the dead girl retreated back to the next room, the man got up and ran. But he moved too soon and she heard him and gave chase. He ran into the woods, and she followed, long nails clawing the air after him. He dodged around a tree but she didn't duck in time, and her nails got stuck in the trunk. There she stayed until daylight, when she crumpled to the ground, an ordinary dead girl once more.

I don't know much more than that, I'm afraid. It's almost certainly a children's book. There's a scene wherein a witch is making gingerbread limbs on her counter. There may be guards made out of gingerbread. Anyone know what book this is?

It's either a short story or a novella; I remember neither title nor author. Here's the plot:

In a department store, a boy finds a short door. He goes through and finds a fantasy land beyond, with a castle etc. At some point, he also meets a girl who's a little older than he. In this fantasy land, he has various adventures which probably include:

A talking pig who only talks about how much he wants to be eaten, but he's really the king, enchanted;

A razor whip which is sharp everywhere but where you're holding it, so if it's dropped, it can never be picked up again but falls through the ground forever;

When each child gets too tall to go through the door, he's too grown up and can't;

A fountain with water that the boy must bring back -- whether for healing or something else, I can't recall.

Anyone know title or author?

This was a children's fantasy book.

The main character was a child who one night met an odd red-headed boy who always wore the same outfit. As it turns out, this boy was a ghost, and lived with his ghost family (another child, both parents) in an abandoned house which was up for sale. The ghost boy could change clothes by concentrating, and it took considerable effort for him to stay visible all the time.

The ghost boy begins to accompany our protagonist to school. Everyone in the class, including the teacher, know the boy is a ghost, and they don't mind. But then the teacher for some reason has to leave and a (female) substitute comes in for the rest of the year. The sub doesn't know the ghost boy is a ghost.

Meanwhile, the abandoned house is going to be sold/ torn down/ something so that the ghost family can't live there. When the prospectives go to the house to take pictures, the ghost family becomes visible for an instant on the stairs, to show up in one of the pictures.

It is very difficult for the ghost boy to stay visible all the time so he doesn't give himself away to the sub, and he sometimes slips up. At the end of the year, the sub drops a piece of chalk behind a cabinet and asks the ghost boy to get it. She figured it out on her own.

Hope you can help me out. I've been looking for this book for years . . . without success. Thanks!