When Johnny --- a filmmaker and grandson of the famous Black actress Mazelle Washington --- brings his family to Mazywood, the secluded California mountain lodge left behind by his grandmother, he expects a quiet retreat. Instead, he uncovers a legacy of rage, secrets and terror that has haunted his family for generations. As a young Black actress, Mazelle brushed shoulders with giants like Lena Horne, Clark Gable and Hattie McDaniel. But beneath her public appearance, she carried a secret she had kept and nurtured since she was a child, when a dark wish came true and changed the course of her life forever. Now, 50 years after Mazelle’s death, Johnny finds himself confronting the truth she buried --- and the consequences she left behind.

Twelve-year-old Robbie Stephens, Jr., is sentenced to six months at the Gracetown School for Boys, a reformatory, for kicking the son of the largest landowner in town in defense of his older sister, Gloria. So begins Robbie’s journey further into the terrors of the Jim Crow South and the very real horror of the school they call The Reformatory. Robbie has a talent for seeing ghosts, or haints. But what was once a comfort to him after the loss of his mother has become a window to the truth of what happens at the reformatory. Boys forced to work to remediate their so-called crimes have gone missing, but the haints Robbie sees hint at worse things. Meanwhile, Gloria is rallying every family member and connection in Florida to find a way to get Robbie out before it’s too late.