He first made his presence known in October 1966, and since then he has continued, at irregular and infrequent intervals, to clump down the hall, slam doors, rock in a chair, frighten the family cat (now deceased, through no fault of Jeffrey), move heavy pieces of furniture, cause electronic equipment to malfunction, and hide objects. He frequently accompanies Mrs. Windham on her travels, and tales of Jeffrey's antics are widely recounted.

    Cadet Barstow would wake then, and the gray shape would be there, the llights of its eyes shining on them with infinite sadness. Barstow sthought he was going crazy. One morning, visited again by the dream and its spectral attendants, he disappeared.When faculty psychologists Sam Bondurant and Liam FitzDonnell are consulted in Barstow case, their job is to keep the episode quiet--at least until the Army-Navy game--and to find some reasonable explanation for whatever is really going on in that room. Sam and Liam are friends who rarely see eye to eye, but together they're fit for the task--Sam withhis rationalism and faith in sophisticated equipment, Liam with his own painful grasp of the demons to which the mind is vulnerable. Their investigation is wilolfully joined by Sam's scholarly and fanciful wife, Maggie, who gradually uncovers evidence of not one ghost but several, bound together in the warp of time to a fatal fire in 1830.What none of these protagonists realizes is the awesome power of the supernatural--the power to clutch at the living from the other side of death. Shades ofGray offers the reader many satisfactions: a colorful and amusing portrait of West Point and the people who spend their lives there, a resonant psychological theme, stylish and intelligent writing. But most of all, Timothy O'Neill's novel makes the power of the supernatural real...and terrifying.

    When she looks out, there is nothing there. Are these bell sounds really coming to Sadie from the past, from a time when horses regularly traveled the old coach road? And why is there a mysterious scent of perfume in her room? Why do the ghostly figures of a man and a woman quarrelling appear there at night? The eerie messages Sadie is receiving soon involve her whole family in a treasure hunt that solves a mystery which began one hundred and fifty years ago.