This story is set in a traditional boarding school for boys in 1950. Trubshaw is a bit different. His father believes in learning but not teaching, so the lad has been allowed to educate himself at home. Now he is eleven, and needs the social benefits of a school. This precocious boy is going to be a problem for the teachers. Getting interested in ghosts he decides to invent one as a prank. But he gets more than he bargained for. It looks as though there is a real ghost after all. Even the school chaplain begins to believe in Trubshaw's ghost. Can this actually be a real ghost? Trubshaw finds out the truth.