There are two kinds of haunted houses: those haunted by the supernatural, and those haunted by everything else. The lines between hauntings and imagination are rarely as clear as we think. People search for excitement and meaning in life. Sometimes, they find it. Sometimes, they wish they hadn’t.

Over the course of a single podcast interview between an unnamed male paranormal investigator and Anne, a precocious young woman who wishes to finally to open up about all she’s seen, a chilling, suspenseful haunted house story unravels.

Anne first realized her house wasn’t like other homes when, at five years old, she lost her favorite doll, and her beloved house returned it. As Anne sees it, her house has always looked out for her – returning lost items, punishing those who hurt her, keeping her safe in family turmoil, slowly revealing its history of dark and magical secrets. The Interviewer, a longtime investigator of such phenomena, sees it differently: a lonely, confused, woman manipulated by something dark and unsavory, whether her own imagination or a genuine paranormal event. Within the story of Anne’s house—perhaps within the story of every house—dozens more stories are intertwined: the history of the building itself, the development of Pasadena, the relationship between the occult and academia, the challenge of raising a daughter in an era of so-called equality, and, most of all, the story of an American family as it falls apart.