How many of us, if given the opportunity, would be willing to travel back one hundred and fifty years and witness the gruesome murder of an ancestor. Thirty-three-year-old Jennifer Donnelly a social worker from Manhattan does just that every night in her dreams. She goes on a journey to an isolated island off the coast of Maine where the murders occurred and visits Rosewood Manor where in 1863 seventeen-year-old Thomas Farrell killed his family and servants. Jennifer in her dream sits at the foot of the ruined staircase and watches in horror as his thirteen-year-old sister Grace Farrell kills him.

It is a story with supernatural undertones, that trips back and forth from the 1800's to the 1990s taking Jennifer along on a surreal journey making her every moment a living nightmare. Together with her fiancé Dan Rogers, a child psychiatrist, they are caught in a web of possession and paranormal happenings.