Young widow Eleanor Millard leaves her teaching job in the city and buys Jackdaws cottage, an isolated and faintly mysterious house in the country. Eleanor's interest in its history develops into an obsession to learn all she can about the farmer who built it in the 1500s, but the local records yield little information. She is on the point of giving up her search when one evening the front door clicks... The neighbours would shake their heads and suggest that she had been meddling with the spirit world... Yet how else could the extraordinary death that followed be explained?