The Room Upstairs — Monica Dickens

When a six-lane highway is built to carry the traffic to and from Cape Cod, it slices through a farm and leaves the old wooden yellow farmhouse on one side and the barn on the other, with the only means of communication a tunnel just wide enough to allow a cow to pass through.

In the house, above which the cars roar and screech there lives a widow of eighty. Sybil did everything she could to hinder the building of the road. She used to pull out the stakes put is by the surveyors, but the road won. Once it is there, with cars ripping by at fifty a minute, all she can do is to stand at the window and make faces at them.

Perhaps the absence of her husband was making her unduly sensitive, but whatever it was, young Jess Brookes was suddenly and terrifyingly certain that an evil force in the old house on the dunes was trying to destroy her. She knew it, for she had seen it!

But who would believe her? Who would listen to her?

Laurie, her husband, was still away. His dear, scatter-brained grandmother had retreated from reality. Even young Dr. Montgomery, who loved her, was convinced that she was hallucinating.

That left only Dorothy, the eerie housekeeper -- Dorothy, with the near-human talking bird, the sinister home-brewed herbals, and the weird fancies that had always been a joke -- until Jess discovered the terrible secret of the room upstairs…