At Muggle amusement parks, you could see all kinds of rides: carousels, Ferris wheels, ball pits, and so on.
But those were for "little children." Older children went to places like mirror mazes and haunted houses. The mirrors came in all sorts of distorted forms; because their uneven surfaces made reflections differ from reality, they made people laugh.
Sometimes, mirror mazes were laid out like labyrinths, using reflection and refraction to create all kinds of imaginative, confusing passageways. It was difficult to tell which paths were real and which were mirror surfaces.
Haunted houses, meanwhile, were deliberately arranged to look thrilling and terrifying, complete with eerie music and lighting, as well as staff members who suddenly sprang out from time to time and made people's hair stand on end.
Yet a haunted house did not necessarily have to be somewhere like an abandoned hospital, nor did it have to be a place where a particularly gruesome murder had once occurred. At least, Ben Cooper's home had no such history. The grandparents who had lived there before had been perfectly ordinary old people, and they had passed away peacefully in hospital.
Their home began to be haunted because Ben's father received a music box. Someone had brought it in for repair. Ben still remembered that rainy evening when a very fashionably dressed woman brought the music box into his father's shop. She had never appeared again after that.
The music box played ethereal, beautiful melodies, but music played by a machine could not compare with music played by a person, full of feeling. After listening to it for too long, it became uncomfortable.
However, the ghost did not actually do anything. She merely liked to switch on the music box in the middle of the night. Then the neighbor next door,