Stir of Echoes

Tom Witzky is a phone lineman living with his pregnant wife Maggie and young son Jake in a working-class Chicago neighborhood. Jake talks quietly to people no one else can see, which Tom and Maggie attribute to imagination. At a neighborhood party, Maggie's sister Lisa offers hypnosis as a party trick. Tom drunkenly challenges her, convinced it's nonsense. She guides him into a trance using a movie-theater visualization and plants a post-hypnotic suggestion: be more open-minded. It works far beyond what she intended.

After the hypnosis, Tom begins experiencing flashes — a young woman being attacked in his house, a girl with dark hair and thick glasses, blood and broken furniture. The visions escalate into nightmares and waking intrusions. He learns from neighborhood posters that the girl is Samantha Kozac, a seventeen-year-old with an intellectual disability who disappeared six months earlier. Her family and neighbors all repeat the same story: she ran away. Jake, meanwhile, is clearly seeing her too, speaking to her as casually as he would a neighbor.

Tom starts asking questions. His landlord Harry Damon, Harry's son Kurt, his friend Frank McCarthy, and Frank's son Adam all close ranks around the runaway story. The neighborhood men give off something defensive and guilty that Tom can feel but not yet name. Maggie, alarmed by Tom's deteriorating sleep and erratic behavior, is taken to a gathering of sensitives by a local policeman named Neil who recognizes what is happening. Neil tells her plainly: the spirit wants something specific, and the longer it goes unmet, the worse Tom's condition will become. The word that has been forming in Tom's mind, arriving through visions and compulsions and Samantha's silent stare, is a single command — dig.

Tom rents a jackhammer and tears up the backyard. He works nights, sleep-deprived and driven, convinced her body is out there. It isn't. Maggie is furious and frightened, watching her husband destroy their property on what looks like a breakdown. Tom, half-ashamed and half-certain, tells her this is the most important thing he has ever done. Samantha's ghost grows more hostile as the yard turns up nothing. One night Tom stumbles against the back wall of the basement and notices the brickwork — newer, cheaper, wrong. He breaks through. Behind the wall is a sealed space. Samantha's remains are inside, still dressed in the clothes she was last seen wearing.