This chapter applies the rich scholarship produced in the wake of the ‘spectral turn’ to the field of children’s literature. The depiction of ‘childhood’ in children’s books has long been contested and debated by scholars. Traditionally, childhood has been seen as biologically finite, developmental and thus chronologically linear. However, in recent years, scholarship has started to investigate how childhood may exist outside such ontological binaries. Hauntology offers a contrary understanding of childhood, where both children and adults are governed by memory, repetition and return. Spectrality and hauntology offer the potential for scholars to reinterpret the traditional limits of what may constitute a children’s ghost story. Furthermore, the ghost story as a form is integral to demonstrating how the boundary between adulthood and childhood may be more diffuse than has been typically assumed. This chapter takes Philippa Pearce’s Tom’s Midnight Garden (1958) as a case study text to explore how the children’s ghost story renders childhood fluid by presenting both protagonists as ghosts in the garden.