Remembering Ghostwriter

Ghostwriter was a show from 1993 or thereabouts, but I watched it years later on the now defunct Noggin channel that aired old Nickelodeon and PBS shows. The show followed a group of middle school students who find a ghost ball trapped in a book in the basement of one of the kids. At first he's confused as he doesn't know what year it is, and he's asking where "the children" are and if they're all right (not the kids that found him, but some unnamed people who are never spoken of again). He can only communicate by using written words around him to form sentences in midair (as well as type on computers). The group gets involved in solving crimes and other mysteries, and they vow someday to figure out Ghostwriter's true identity (this day never comes and the issue is dropped almost immediately). The show ended on a non-mystery that involved the kids getting together to write a story to enter into a contest while the three oldest kids graduated middle school (and were headed to separate high schools, apparently, so they were given pens to wear around their necks to remember the group by).
Because I am a writer nerd, I really loved this series despite its flaws, perhaps the biggest one being never revealing Ghostwriter's true identity or who the children were (although guesses could be made that it could have been the children from the time travel/flashback episode but I don't remember its ever being made clear if the children he was initially talking about knew him when he was alive or still a ghost). Like other shows of its [original] time (MMPR being one), the cast went through several changes as some characters had to be written off, added, or the actor or actress was replaced assuming no one would notice. Otherwise, you can pretty much pick and choose which mystery was your favorite depending on who was in it, which characters were focused on, or what happened. I remember one of my favorites being the one where Jamal goes to England. Thinking about it now, though, it reminds me of Harry Potter, and hopefully nobody from J.K. Rowling's family gets kidnapped or threatened in real life. Speaking of which, there was also a show from England being aired on Noggin at the same time the Ghostwriter reruns aired called Big Kids, which I found enjoyable as well (kid insults hypnotist, so hypnotist gets even by making the kid's parents act like obnoxious children at a certain trigger word that the kid and his sister have to figure out and avoid saying before the whole family hunts the hypnotist down and makes him stop). By that time, however, Harry Potter was already a well-known phenomenon (possibly around the time Goblet of Fire was published).
Each Ghostwriter episode took a week to tell - four to five days depending on length, told an hour each day. This is what set it apart from other shows, whether that was a good format to follow or not. If you liked cliffhangers it was good, but the recaps at the beginning of the next part were a little annoying. I think I remembered seeing some videos at the rental store as well, but those went out of business around the same time too. Unlike Popples, however, I haven't gone looking for any of these on ebay yet, but I may not bother since I just got the last of the Hamtaro tapes I was looking for and my VCR keeps shorting out and eating them. *facepalm/headdesk*