While out exploring on his bike, twelve-year-old Joey Jenkins discovers the ruins of a school and a remote old schoolhouse. There he meets and flees from Nora Carter, in her youth a glamorous pin-up star of the variety theatre called Naughty Ninky, now a battling old lady with dyed hair, a wide vocabulary of swear words and a warm heart, breaking out into her old music-hall songs at any opportunity. They become friends. Nora shares her rambling old house with four ghosts aged seventeen to seventy who befriend Joey and support him in some very alarming adventures and his burning ambition to become an actor. Nightmare Castle, a scary mystery play, features largely in the story. Joey has a loving family and one close friend, Leo, a stocky red-haired boy forever getting into fights. But soon Joey must confront more dangerous characters, including a teenage gang leader, Boris, a man-mountain ex-wrestler obsessed with knitting, and violent criminals with plans to force Nora from her house, destroy protected wildlife and smash the surrounding wood to open a quarry. Even more frightening, on a stormy winter’s night, are the massed ghosts of plague victims buried nearby who do not wish their bones to be disturbed.