Wait till Helen comes

Wait Till Helen Comes is a ghost story for young readers by the American writer Mary Downing Hahn, first published in 1986 by Clarion Books.

Molly is twelve and her brother Michael is ten, and neither of them is pleased by their mother's decision to move the family to a renovated church in the countryside. Their stepfather's daughter, Heather, is seven, has been difficult since her mother died in a fire four years earlier, and quickly learns that complaining about her step-siblings is an effective way of getting her own way. The church comes with a disused cemetery, where the children find a headstone marked with the initials HEH and the dates 1879 to 1886. Heather begins visiting the grave, and Molly overhears her talking to someone called Helen when there is nobody there. Then Molly finds her stepsister at the ruins of a burned house wearing a locket with the same initials.

The book deals directly with death and grief, which has made it a target of parents who wanted it out of school libraries, and it has been reprinted steadily since it appeared.