Roger the Chapman is not a superstitious man.

He hears stories of murders and haunted houses around the market town of Bristol, and chooses to believe the more prosaic explanation every time. But when Roger is himself attacked in the very house where a woman murdered her violent husband thirty years previously, he is forced to admit that something strange is going on – particularly when everybody he encounters in the town denies seeing or hearing anything untoward in the notorious house that stormy night. And when his own wife refuses to believe his story, he starts to worry that he is losing his mind.

An indignant – and instinctively curious – Roger puts his detective skills into action once again to find out who made the attempt on his life. He soon learns more and more about the strange old house and about the people of the market town of Bristol, some of whom have much more to hide than he would ever have believed.