The Screaming Staircase

The Screaming Staircase is a supernatural thriller for young readers by the English writer Jonathan Stroud, published in 2013 and the first book of the Lockwood & Co. Series.

The London of the book is living with something called the Problem: ghosts that come out at night and kill the people they touch. Agencies have been set up to deal with them and charge the public for the service. Only certain children and teenagers can sense the ghosts, and the ability fades as they get older, so the agencies are staffed by the young. Lucy Carlyle brings her talent to Lockwood & Co., a small outfit run by a teenager, and the work consists of finding the object in the living world that a ghost is tied to and destroying it. The firm's next job takes the team to a house where something on the stairs screams.