Ghost Squad

Published in 2020, Ghost Squad, by Claribel Ortega, is a fantasy-adventure novel for middle-grade readers. Two girls, one a ghost-seer and the other the granddaughter of a powerful witch, accidentally call forth an attack of evil spirits, and they try to use magic to save their city. The book became a New York Times bestseller and is being adapted for the screen.

Author Ortega has written several books for young readers, including the Witchlings series; all have been bestsellers. Ghost Squad has a Lexile score of 810L, accessible by third graders; the main characters, however, are age 12, which suggests a fifth-grade audience and above.

Content Warning: The story contains horror elements, and one scene describes a bloody wound.

The ebook version of the original 2020 edition forms the basis for this study guide.

Plot Summary

Twelve-year-old Lucely Luna lives in St. Augustine, Florida, with her father and a slew of ghostly relatives. She can see them, but to others, they appear as fireflies. Simon runs a public tour of ghostly historical spots in the city, but lately, it faces stiff competition from a new tour, and if he can’t pay his bills, the Luna house will be lost to foreclosure. The ghost of Lucely’s grandmother, Mamá Teresa, has grown weak, and one night she’s attacked by evil spirits. Lucely wants to do something to help.

She and her best friend Syd Faires decide to hunt for a book of magic spells buried somewhere in town centuries earlier by a group of witches, Las Brujas Moradas, the Purple Coven. They visit Syd’s grandmother, Babette, who lives in a remote house attached to a shop filled with occult objects, potions, and books. The girls rummage through Babette’s library and find an old notebook of spells. They sneak the notebook past Babette and ride away.

Lucely recalls a story about a family whose daughter disappeared, and the family placed some of her items in a mausoleum in the nearby cemetery. Lucely also remembers a set of skeleton keys at Babette’s. The girls pilfer the keys, ride to the cemetery, and find that one key opens the mausoleum.

Inside, they find the daughter’s casket. Within it is one of the missing notebook pages with an incantation to bring back spirits. They recite the spell, but nothing happens. After they leave, though, they see Mayor Anderson enter the tomb; when he re-emerges, he walks strangely, and his eyes glow green.

The next day at the school library, ghosts attack Lucely. Calling her by name, they try to lull her to sleep, but she and Syd manage to escape. On a class field trip to City Hall, the girls sneak in a tape recorder that catches Mayor Anderson in his office discussing a scheme to collect souls, weaken Lucely’s firefly family, and take over the city on Halloween.

Poring through Babette’s book on the history of the occult, Lucely and Syd learn that the Purple Coven lost a member who died during a witch hunt, and the Coven devised a curse that could bring a reign of ghostly terror upon their enemies. They realize the spell they cast at the tomb might be the curse.

Hoping to find the antidote, the girls search another cemetery hoping to find the notebook’s remaining missing pages. As a storm rages, they’re attacked by a giant ghost shaped like Mayor Anderson, but they fend it off. The ghost of a dragon chases them into a church, where it tries to breathe fire on them, but Babette appears and fends it off.

The girls tell Babette about their quest to save the fireflies. Babette decides to help them, but only they can undo the curse. She gives them special ghost-catching devices. She also presents them with black-denim jackets with “Ghost Squad” embroidered on them in purple thread.

The trio visits a cemetery, where they enter a mausoleum and encounter a large ghost that tries to capture them. Instead, Lucely manages to force it inside her ghost catcher. They open a casket and find a skeleton grasping a piece of parchment. It’s a spirit map of the local graveyards with colored dots at several places that glow, indicating the location of things the group needs.

Babette gives the girls special flashlights that emit a powerful ray that stuns ghosts. They head for a cemetery where, from a catacomb, Babette retrieves an arrow called a Finder-Keeper that points to whatever its possessor thinks about. They’re interrupted by a mist monster, but they dispatch it with their flashlights. Lucely uses the Finder-Keeper to locate a small scroll of paper hidden inside a human skull. It’s the incantation that will undo the curse.

They attend the Halloween festival during a stormy night at City Hall. At the party, Mayor Anderson unleashes an army of evil spirits that attack the guests. Syd and Lucely use their ghost catchers to sweep up many of the spirits, and the fireflies fight bravely. Babette challenges the mayor, who reveals himself to be the ghost of Eliza Braggs, the woman who, centuries earlier, banished the Purple Coven from St. Augustine. She wants to exact more vengeance on the witches. Babette reveals that she’s a Purple Coven witch; she unleashes a powerful energy pulse that captures Braggs and the other ghosts and hurls them out through a window.

Lucely realizes that one dot on the spirit map points to the old lighthouse, located at the site of a meeting place for witches that Eliza ordered burned. Only there will the spell to undo the curse be effective. They drive to the lighthouse and climb to the top, where Lucely has a strange vision and learns the ending of the curative spell. Babette calls to her witch sisters, who appear and add their power to Babette’s.

As the lighthouse lamp shines on an approaching cloud of evil spirits, Lucely and Syd speak the complete incantation, and energy emerges from them that augments that of the witches. The massed power reflects from the lighthouse lens onto the ghost storm. The sky opens up and absorbs all the evil spirits.

Lucely awakens two days later in bed. She learns that she and Syd are local heroes for helping during what the public thinks was simply a bad storm. Syd, meanwhile, has manifested witch powers, and Babette will begin training her. The fireflies visit Lucely: All are well, including Mamá Teresa. Lucely’s world is once again at peace.