Excerpt from The Turner House by Angela Flournoy, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Trouble in the Big Room

The eldest six of Francis and Viola Turner's thirteen children claimed that the big room of the house on Yarrow Street was haunted for at least one night. A ghost?— a haint, if you will?—?tried to pull Cha-Cha out of the big room's second-story window.

The big room was not, in actuality, very big. Could hardly be considered a room. For some other family it might have made a decent storage closet, or a mother's cramped sewing room. For the Turners it became the only single-occupancy bedroom in their overcrowded house. A rare and coveted space.

In the summer of 1958, Cha-Cha, the eldest child at fourteen years, was in the throes of a gangly-legged, croaky-voiced adolescence. Smelling himself, Viola called it. Tired of sharing a bed with younger brothers who peed and kicked and drooled and blanket-hogged, Cha-Cha woke up one evening, untangled himself from his brothers' errant limbs, and stumbled into the whatnot closet across the hall. He slept on the floor, curled up with his back against dusty boxes, and started a tradition. From then on, when one Turner child got grown and gone, as Francis described it, the next eldest child crossed the threshold into the big room.

The haunting, according to the older children, occurred during the very same summer that the big room became a bedroom. Lonnie, the youngest child then, was the first to witness the haint's attack. He'd just begun visiting the bathroom alone and was headed there when he had the opportunity to save his brother's life.

Three-year-olds are of a tenuous reliability, but to this day Lonnie recalls the form of a pale-hued young man lifting Cha-Cha by his pajama collar out of the bed and toward the narrow window. Back then a majority of the homeowners in that part of Detroit's east side were still white, and the street had no empty lots.

"Cha-Cha's sneakin out! Cha-Cha's sneakin out with a white boy!" Lonnie sang. He stamped his little feet on the floorboards.

Soon Quincy and Russell spilled into the hallway. They saw Cha-Cha, all elbows and fists, swinging at the haint. It had let go of Cha-Cha's collar and was now on the defensive. Quincy would later insist that the haint emitted a blue, electric-looking light, and each time Cha-Cha's fists connected with its body the entire thing flickered like a faulty lamp.

Seven-year-old Russell fainted. Little Lonnie stood transfixed, a pool of urine at his feet, his eyes open wide. Quincy banged on his parents' locked bedroom door. Viola and Francis Turner were not in the habit of waking up to tend to ordinary child nightmares or bed-wetting kerfuffles.

Francey, the eldest girl at twelve, burst into the crowded hallway just as Cha-Cha was giving the haint his worst. She would later say the haint's skin had a jellyfish-like translucency, and the pupils of its eyes were huge, dark disks.

"Let him go, and run, Cha-Cha!" Francey said.

"He ain't runnin me outta here," Cha-Cha yelled back.

With the exception of Lonnie, who had been crying, the four Turner children in the hallway fell silent. They'd heard plenty of tales of mischievous haints from their cousins Down South?—?they pushed people into wells, made hanged men dance in midair?—?so it did not follow that a spirit from the other side would have to spend several minutes fighting off a territorial fourteen-year-old.

Francey possessed an aptitude for levelheadedness in the face of crisis. She decided she'd seen enough of this paranormal beat-down. She marched into Cha-Cha's room, grabbed her brother by his stretched-out collar, and dragged him into the hall. She slammed the big-room door behind them and pulled Cha-Cha to the floor. They landed in Lonnie's piss.

"That haint tried to run me outta the room," Cha-Cha said. He wore the indignant look?—?eyebrows raised, lips parted?—?of someone who has suffered an unbearable affront.

Excerpted from The Turner House by Angela Flournoy. Copyright © 2015 by Angela Flournoy. Excerpted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.