In order to research material on the occult for his next book, novelist Charles Condomine and his wife Ruth host two of their friends for dinner and invite the eccentric medium, Madame Arcati, to join them and finish off the evening with a séance. Though the hosts are skeptical of Madame Arcati’s actual clairvoyance, the séance works and the spirit of Charles’ temperamental first wife, Elvira, returns from beyond the grave- at first just her voice, but then she just walks right in through the french doors. Unhappy with the fact that Charles has remarried and remaining only able to be seen and heard by him and not Ruth, Elvira takes the opportunity to disrupt his marriage through a good old classic haunting. Things take an even steeper turn when Elvira eventually makes an attempt on Charles’ life so that he may join her in the afterlife.