50 Fun Facts About Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children

What unusual illustrations, gathered from collectors, fill the first Miss Peregrine novel?

Vintage photographs from collectors' archives shaped the story, which was first planned as a picture book until an editor suggested a novel.

Which director made the 2016 Miss Peregrine film, a number one US box office opener?

Tim Burton directed it and gave himself a cameo as a funfair visitor who has a skeleton thrown at him.

Jacob Portman and his father go to an island off which country in the first Miss Peregrine novel?

Wales is home to the fictional island, where Jacob's grandfather grew up in a children's home during the war.

What can Emma Bloom conjure with her bare hands in the first Miss Peregrine novel?

Fire springs from Emma's hands, which first glowed red and grew painfully hot when she was ten years old.

What would destroy Miss Peregrine's home each night in 1940 if she did not reset her time loop?

An air-raid bomb is due to hit the house on September 3, 1940, so Miss Peregrine winds the day back just before it lands.

What lives inside the stomach of Hugh, a ward in the Miss Peregrine novels?

Bees live in Hugh's stomach, and his peculiarity lets him talk to them and send them out on command.

In the Miss Peregrine novels, what fate awaits long-time loop residents who linger in the present?

Rapid aging catches up with them within hours, as all the years they skipped inside the loop arrive at once.

Which actress plays the time-bending headmistress in the 2016 Miss Peregrine film?

Eva Green won the part in 2014, after Mischa Barton, Lucy Hale and Alison Sudol had also been considered.

Wights pass for ordinary people in the Miss Peregrine novels except for which telltale feature?

Blank white eyes with no pupils betray a wight, which is why the one hunting Jacob hides behind contact lenses and sunglasses.

In which US state does Jacob Portman live before going abroad in the first Miss Peregrine novel?

Florida is where Jacob lives with his parents, and where his grandfather is killed in the story's opening chapters.

Which former film student and Mental Floss blogger wrote the Miss Peregrine novels?

Ransom Riggs wrote the first as his debut novel and went on to add five sequels about the peculiar children.

Which peculiarity lets Millard Nullings of the Miss Peregrine novels trail a fleeing wight unseen?

Invisibility is so complete for Millard that he goes about without clothes, dressing only for supper on Miss Peregrine's orders.

What does little Claire Densmore hide beneath her curls in the Miss Peregrine novels?

A second mouth with sharp teeth sits at the back of Claire's head, which makes the youngest ward shy about eating in company.

Which peculiarity led Miss Peregrine's ward Bronwyn Bruntley to kill her stepfather by accident?

Immense strength let ten-year-old Bronwyn snap the abusive man's neck without meaning to, and her older brother shared the gift.

Which psychiatrist sends Jacob Portman to Miss Peregrine's island and is later unmasked as a wight?

Dr. Golan had stalked the Portman family for years under other identities before he began treating Jacob's nightmares.

Which organ does Enoch O'Connor of the Miss Peregrine novels transplant to bring the dead to life?

A heart taken from an animal lets Enoch revive a murdered islander just long enough to be questioned about his killer.

Which actor plays Barron, the shapeshifting leader of the wights, in the 2016 Miss Peregrine film?

Samuel L. Jackson plays Barron, who disguises himself on screen as Jake's psychiatrist and, later, as Jake himself.

What is the name of the fictional island where Jacob Portman finds Miss Peregrine's home?

Cairnholm is a bleak fishing island whose only telephone sits inside the pub where Jacob and his father stay.

What were Miss Peregrine's brothers seeking in the experiment that created the hollowgast?

Immortality without the limits of time loops was the goal, and hundreds of peculiars joined the brothers' cause.

Which actor plays the American teenager Jake Portman in the 2016 Miss Peregrine film?

Asa Butterfield plays Jake, as the film calls Jacob, and also plays the villain whenever he takes on Jake's shape.

Few can see the hollowgast in the Miss Peregrine novels, but which trace of them can anyone spot?

Their shadows are the only sign most peculiars get, which is why Jacob's rare ability to see the creatures matters so much.

Hollow City, the 2014 Miss Peregrine sequel, sends the children to which wartime city?

London is hailed in the sequel as the peculiar capital of the world, and the children search St Paul's Cathedral for clues there.

Miss Peregrine, a delicate woman who adores her wards, enjoys which habit in the first novel?

Smoking a pipe is Miss Peregrine's indulgence, an odd match for a headmistress who runs her house by strict rules.

Where do the children corner the escaping wight and save Miss Peregrine at the first novel's climax?

A lighthouse is where Jacob finally kills the wight with the villain's own gun, while other wights wait offshore to collect him.

With which farm tool does Jacob Portman kill a hollowgast in the first Miss Peregrine novel?

Sheep shears, grabbed during a scuffle, give Jacob his first kill and prove he can fight the creatures his grandfather hunted.

Horace, the snappy dresser among Miss Peregrine's wards, has which peculiar gift?

Prophetic dreams come to Horace only rarely, and mostly as nightmares so horrifying that they leave him in shock.

Fiona Frauenfeld, Hugh's quiet sweetheart in the Miss Peregrine novels, has power over what?

Plants grow and move at Fiona's command, though she rarely speaks and has a thick Irish accent when she does.

The family of Jacob Portman's mother in the Miss Peregrine novels owns 115 branches of what?

Drugstores made the family fortune, and Jacob is at work in one of them when his grandfather's alarming phone call comes.

What has happened to Miss Peregrine by the end of the first novel, after her wards rescue her?

Stuck in bird form and unable to change back, she leaves the children to sail off in search of another ymbryne who can help.

The 2016 Miss Peregrine film swapped Emma Bloom's peculiarity with which other girl's?

Olive traded gifts with Emma on screen, so the film's Emma is the one who floats and has to wear lead shoes.

Which elderly ymbryne, once Miss Peregrine's teacher, arrives after wights attack her own loop?

Miss Avocet trained many of the best ymbrynes and kept a loop in 1860s Derbyshire until the wights drove her out.

The failed experiment that created the hollowgast in the Miss Peregrine novels wrecked which region?

Siberia took the blast, and those caught in it crawled back as soulless monsters that feed on peculiars.

A letter from Miss Peregrine falls out of whose collected works, left to Jacob by his grandfather?

Ralph Waldo Emerson's selected works reach Jacob as a birthday gift from his aunt, who found the book among his grandfather's things.

Jacob Portman's father in the Miss Peregrine novels is an unemployed amateur in which field?

Ornithology is his passion, yet Franklin Portman has abandoned every nature book he ever began writing.

Besides psychiatrist, which job did the wight hunting Miss Peregrine's loop hold at Jacob's school?

A bus driver was one disguise and the family's yard man another, letting the wight watch the Portmans for years.

Martin Pagett, killed by a hollowgast on Miss Peregrine's island, holds which job?

Museum curator Martin befriends Jacob, tells him the island's history and introduces the uncle who remembers the old house.

Which dead ward of Miss Peregrine lies in a locked bedroom, where others sometimes have him revived?

Victor left the loop because he could not bear being trapped, and a hollowgast killed him, so his body stays laid out in his room.

Abraham Portman fled which country as a Jewish boy before reaching Miss Peregrine's home?

Poland was his birthplace, and his parents got him out on a one-way ticket at twelve; he never saw his family again.

What fills the grotesquely stretched jaws of a hollowgast in the Miss Peregrine novels?

Tentacle-like tongues crowd a hollowgast's jaws, a horror Jacob first glimpses on the night his grandfather dies.

Which Dame plays the wounded ymbryne who takes refuge in Miss Peregrine's loop in the 2016 film?

Judi Dench has the role, but her character fares worse on screen than in the book: a hollowgast kills her.

Which publisher of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies released the first Miss Peregrine novel?

Quirk Books published it after an editor there steered a planned picture book toward becoming a novel.

Which island pub do Jacob Portman and his father stay at in the first Miss Peregrine novel?

The Priest Hole takes its name from a hiding place under the floor, where clergy once sheltered from persecution.

The 2016 Miss Peregrine film moves the final battle from the island to which English seaside town?

Blackpool hosts the showdown at its funfair, inside a loop set in January 2016 instead of wartime.

Which band recorded Wish That You Were Here for the end credits of the 2016 Miss Peregrine film?

Florence and the Machine recorded it; singer Florence Welch had long wanted to work with the film's director.

Which fellow young adult novelist did the creator of Miss Peregrine marry in 2013?

Tahereh Mafi, author of the Shatter Me series, married him in 2013, and the couple later had a daughter.

Before Miss Peregrine, its author wrote a handbook tied to a 2009 film about which detective?

Sherlock Holmes was the subject, a job the writer landed through his short films and his blogging for Mental Floss.

Which X-Men: First Class screenwriter adapted the first Miss Peregrine novel for the 2016 film?

Jane Goldman was hired to write the script in late 2011, only months after the film rights to the novel were sold.

Enoch O'Connor of the Miss Peregrine novels first caused chaos at which business run by his family?

A funeral parlor was the family trade, and young Enoch caused endless confusion there by bringing its clients back to life.

Where does Emma Bloom take Jacob Portman on a secret night dive in the first Miss Peregrine novel?

A sunken warship lies just offshore, and the pair explore it underwater while breathing through a tube.

What does Jacob Portman give his friend Ricky for protection at school in the Miss Peregrine novels?

Help with homework is Jacob's side of a bargain that sours when Ricky refuses to believe what Jacob saw in the woods.