In a sleepy Northern Californian town there is one nightmarish house, the Old Mortuary, where the mortician's wife has spent four decades alone - and some would say insane - harboring terrible secrets and sleeping in an alcove off one bedroom where she believes the evil spirit of the house cannot get to her. As a child, Emily visits the Old Mortuary one Halloween, and later befriends the mortician's wife, Ada, who recounts the recent history of the house where there was once a steady flow of dead bodies through the basement while murderous events took place upstairs, mostly the work of one man, Horace Carpenter, whose eternal soul will never rest in peace.