Boston top lawyer George Wickersham returns to his ancestral summer house on a private island in rural Maine, which he dislikes for memories's sake, intending to sell it quickly. However he lets his wife, a petty painter, persuade him to keep it at least one year to try turning it into a sumer home for young artists. She gets her way, but an alleged curse seems to come trough. George's fatal accident there is only the first of many people around her to be hit hard while she develops a theory it all races back to his ancestor Jebidiah Wickersham, who built it from the profits of the slave trade.