When 23-year old Dimitri's parents were killed in a car accident, he failed his college finals and ended up taking the only job he could get—writing obituaries for a newspaper in a decaying New England town. Tasked with covering the traditional Halloween feature, staying overnight at the "haunted" Aspinwall mansion, Dimitri thinks he's in for the standard paranormal cliché—creaking staircases and psychic babble provided by Maddy, a polyester-wearing channeler. He's joined by his nemesis Nate, the idiot weight-lifting son of his boss who spends the night trying to hit on his friend Lisa, who he can't quite bring himself to ask out on a date. He wishes something supernatural would happen if only to distract Lisa from Nate's playbook. The spirits obey him. Maddy starts to convulse, the floor gives way beneath her, and she crashes to the basement below. While attempting a rescue, Dimitri steps on the rotting cover an old well and he plummets into its dark, watery abyss. When he tries to kick his way to the surface, something inhumanly strong clutches his leg, pulling him back down. Dimitri is sure he's going to die.But he doesn't; instead he regains consciousness in the morgue. The creature in the well was just a hallucination, the result of his brain slowly atrophying from a lack of oxygen. Or so he hopes.Because from that point on, nothing is the same. People in Goshen start to die, torn to pieces by a vicious serial killer. He's haunted by dreams of Poe, the dangerous female entity from the well who hints at a mysterious connection between his parents, the legendary Rasputin, and Aspinwall. His nightmares bleed into his waking life, and he knows that either he's having a psychotic break, or something truly evil has been unleashed.