Matt sits up and finds himself face to face with a burned figure, he asks the spirit what it wants from him and the ghost begins to move towards him. Later the rest of the family comes home and Sarah rushes into the front room at the call of the children. All of the furniture has been stacked in the middle of the room and Matt is found shirtless with his fingers bloody from scratching at the wall. Sarah and Peter take him to Dr. Brooks (D. W. Brown) who assures them that his strange behavior is not due to the cancer or the treatment he is receiving.
The family is beginning to crack under the stress of Matts illness and increasingly bizarre behavior. Sarah tries to pray for him but breaks down in tears. Peter is also shown to be increasingly tempted to fall back into the bottle and we see that he finally has started drinking again when he is away from the family during the week and is seen watching slides of Matt when he is younger and crying. The next day Mary and Billy declare that they are bored and ask Wendy who is reading nearby to play with them. She tells them to go and hide and they rush off.
Billy decides to hide in the dumbwaiter and closes the doors before his cousin Mary can join him. Mary decides to hide in the attic. As Wendy begins looking for them Billy turns to find himself sharing the dumbwaiter with the burnt ghost and begins to shriek in terror. Mary tries to run out of the attic but her leg falls through a rotted section of the floor. Wendy helps Billy out of the dumbwaiter and they and Matt rush upstairs to find Mary stuck in the attic floor.
Matt helps her up and then realizes that there is something in the hole he reaches in and finds a metal box and a bundle of photographs. Later he and Wendy are sitting in the kitchen examining the box and the photographs. The photographs show Jonah at the séance emitting ectoplasm, inside the box is another one that contains strange strips of material that neither Matt nor Wendy can identify. Matt puts the box away then asks to see the photographs and Wendy sees the look of recognition he gets when he sees them.
She convinces Matt to talk to her and he admits that hes seen the boy in the photos every day since they moved into the house and Wendy suggests the house may be haunted and they should check out its history. She researches at the library and finds out that the funeral home was run by a man named Ramsey Aickman (John Bluethner) who was the sinister bearded man that Matt has seen in his visions. Aickman also conducted psychic research and would host séances with Jonah as the medium.
But most disturbing is the fact that at one of the séances all those attending, including Aickman, were found dead and Jonah disappeared. Later, in the 1950s, the state was building a new road that would run through part of the cemetery near the house and when the coffins were exhumed it was discovered that many of the bodies had disappeared and were never buried. Matt and Wendy then contact Nicholas to seek his help.
Nicholas examines the photos and the box and realizes that the smaller box contains the eyelids that Aickman cut off of the corpses in the course of his processing the bodies. He theorizes that Aickman was practicing necromancy in an attempt to control the dead and binding them to the house. He realizes that Aickman did this in an attempt to magnify Jonah's medium abilities. He asks Matt and Wendy to take his hands and pray with him for the souls of the missing bodies and for Jonah.
When Matt takes their hands he again is drawn into a vision of that final séance. As he is watching Jonah begins to painfully emit the ectoplasm from his mouth as Aickman looks on. The table shakes and the ectoplasm glows bright and seems to turn to fire. He is broken from the vision when Sarah comes home and demands to know who this stranger is that is in her house. Nicholas attempts to explain and warn her about the spirits in the house and their intentions toward Matt because he is near death.
She again asks that he leave and he does, but gives her a card and tells her she is not alone. That night the family is asleep when Wendy is awoken by the sound of birds in her room and a loud thud when it seems one has hit the window. She hears it fluttering on the floor and she looks down to see the sheets on her bed moving as if the bird were fluttering underneath them. She begins to creep closer when she suddenly sees a man's feet by her head; she jumps up and sees a figure standing over her.
She grabs her lamp, but the figure is gone when she shines the light where it was. Sarah is asleep when she woken by footsteps, she sleepily calls for Peter, then Matt and realizes that it is neither. She sits up only to come face to face with one of the withered corpse figures and screams. Outside, Peter's car jumps the curb and drives across the yard and he unsteadily gets out and is disgusted to see that every light in the house is on. He slams the door and begins to loudly shout at everyone for having the lights on and costing him even more money.
Sarah quickly gathers the family together in one room and locks the door but Peter bashes it open and yells at them while he removes the light bulbs from the room and then goes around removing all the light bulbs in the house and then smashing them in the kitchen sink. Sarah follows him outside and angrily tells him that he was acting childishly and all hes done is frightened his family. She tells him that if he gets drunk again to not bother to come home and storms back inside.
After Peter leaves, the family is again asleep when all of the electronics in the house go haywire. The cacophony terrifies the family and in desperation Sarah contacts Nicholas. As Nicholas searches the house he explains to her how spirits can become trapped and he goes into the basement where Matt is curled up in his bed seemingly in pain. As Sarah comforts Matt, Nicholas looks into the morgue and sees the burnt figure of Jonah. He goes into the room and tries to examine the furnace but is unable, as the doors slam shut.
The family is terrified as doors throughout the house begin to slam open and shut and Nicholas decides to try and get at the furnace from outside the house. As he staggers outside Sarah continues to comfort Matt but is unable to see Jonah's spirit, as it looms closer and closer to Matt. Nicholas manages to open the back of the furnace and finds a fragment of a skull amongst the ashes. He removes the remains and as he staggers away from the house, the activity stops.
As he leaves with the ashes, Nicholas tells Sarah that the activity should stop, but there may be aftershocks of strange activity for a couple days afterwards. Sarah thanks him and he drives off. In the basement, Matt looks out the window and sees Jonah's spirit staring at him from outside before he rolls over and goes to sleep. Matt awakens later to find that something has carved Aikman's symbols into his flesh and he begins to scream. Sarah runs downstairs and demands to know what he's done to himself.
Matt is loaded into an ambulance and taken to the hospital where he's placed in a room with a man who is muttering to himself. Matt stares at the ceiling but then looks at the door to see Jonah standing there. Nicholas is driving home with Jonah's remains when he sees Jonah in his rearview mirror, which distracts him, and he nearly crashes into a truck. He runs off the road and as he stares at Jonah he and Matt begin to have simultaneous visions. We see Jonah waking up after the flames had burst from him during the séance.
The attendees are burnt corpses and Aickman is dying from his burns, Jonah runs to him and Aickman gasps for him to run as, Now they'll be after you. Jonah runs as the house comes alive and he is driven upstairs where he climbs into the dumbwaiter. As it descends into the basement he shouts for help but is hurled into the furnace, which comes alight and burns him alive. After imparting this final vision to Nicholas, Jonah's spirit disappears as his ashes float out of Nicholas car.
Peter meets Sarah at the hospital and apologizes for his behavior but Sarah tells him its all right as he is there now. The doctor tells them that Matt is sedated, but they've discovered that his cancer has worsened, as the treatments have had no effect. He tells them that Matt is going to die and he has no idea what is keeping him alive. Sarah asks if they can see him, but when they get to the room they find a hole in the window where Matt has escaped and the disturbed man is muttering the Two Dead Boysrhyme over and over.
We see Matt running through the night back to the house as the doctor calls security. Back at the house Wendy is settling Billy and Mary back in their rooms when she goes to bite into an apple and gags as she finds it has rotted on the inside. She goes downstairs and finds that all the food in the house has rotted and she throws it away outside. After spilling something on herself she decides to take a shower, missing Nicholas' frantic phone call.
He leaves them a message saying that he made a mistake, Jonah's spirit was actually trying to release the bound spirits and now that Nicholas has removed him from the house they are now at the mercy of the bound spirits rage and they must get out. Mary misses the call and as she gets out of the shower she is attacked, the shower curtain wrapping around her and nearly suffocating her. She runs upstairs to get Billy and Mary when she sees Matt enter the backyard carrying an axe.
She panics and runs back in to tell the children to hide as she locks the door, only to have Matt break through with the axe. Wendy runs into the front room and screams as Matt brings the axe down into the wall behind her. As she scrambles out of the way he begins to chop through a false wall revealing the corpses Aickman hid in the walls. Matt forces Wendy and the children out of the house telling her to not let anyone stop the fire. He barricades himself in the house and begins to tear down the other false walls as marked corpses begin to tumble into the room.
As he swings the axe the view switches from Matt to Jonah, who seems to be occupying Matt's body. After he finishes knocking down the walls, Matt gets bottles of formaldehyde from the basement and lights the bodies and the room on fire and crouches in the middle of the room to await the flames as the bound spirits gather around him. Sarah and Peter arrive with the fire department and frantically try to get in to save Matt. Nicholas also arrives and Sarah asks him why it isn't over.
Sarah gets around a firefighter and into the house and grabs Matt and drags him under a table to avoid the falling timbers. The spirits appear again, but then finally disappear, seemingly freed as a firefighter breaks through the wall to pull Matt and Sarah from the house. Outside, Sarah watches frantically as the emergency crew attempts to resuscitate Matt. As Matt slips away he has a vision of himself standing in the graveyard where he sees Jonah, no longer appearing burnt, standing in the distance.
He seems about to follow Jonah when he hears his mother's voice and returns to his body where he coughs and Jonah's spirit leaves him, appearing next to Nicholas before finally disappearing as he can now move on. As Sarah hugs Matt, Nicholas walks away as the family gathers around Matt. As Sarah narrates how God works in mysterious ways, we are told that Matt's cancer disappeared and he made a full recovery and that the house was rebuilt and resold and the new owners reported no further incidents of haunting.
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