Trying to identify a book...

[TremblingBluStar]

I read this book years ago, and it has been bugging me because I can't remember the title or the author. I remember it was a semi-horror story written by a normally scifi leaning author. The novel was, I believe, set in the 1980's, and about a family moving to a new state where the father works as a programmer.

After they move, one of their boys starts to have visions of children that, it turns out, are missing kids in their new town. I remember that the boy plays a pirate computer game, and sees the missing children on the pirate ship. There is also a subplot involving a conflict between the boy's teacher and the mother.

By the end of the novel, it is revealed that the children the boy has been seeing were killed by a previous occupant of their home, and buried underneath. The killer shows up (as a ghost, I believe) and kills the boy having the visions before being defeated, and the children are freed after being properly laid to rest.

If anybody knows what novel this is, please let me know!

[Enterprise is Great]

Sounds like Lost Boys by Orson Scott Card.

[TremblingBluStar]

Yes, that is it! Thanks!

Glad to see I'm not the only one who felt like The Sixth Sense was very similar to this novel, though neither probably invented the twist of the main character being a ghost.