 While Peggy strikes up a tentative friendship with a young British man called Pat, who is doing some research in America, her uncle is quick to forbid the two from seeing each other.Peggy is forced to spend much of her time alone in the large, Colonial house, and soon discovers it to be haunted by the ghosts of her eighteenth-century ancestors and their contemporaries.The ghosts relate their stories in first-person narratives throughout the book which are interwoven with the narrative of the present day.