Synopsis

Filomena Quarta—a forty-year-old former journalist, recently orphaned—suddenly finds herself broke and left with a cumbersome inheritance: Dimora Quarta, a huge house that has belonged to her family for generations. She is forced to leave Milan and her former life behind to reach Palude del Salento. The plan is to turn the house—"perfectly modernized, ten bedrooms, a few kilometers from the Ionian Sea"—into a sumptuous B&B. That is, if only the house weren't part of the problem: it has always been haunted. After all, Filomena, as a child, saw a ghost within those very walls. The malumbra, the angry specter of a dark nun, is the reason why Filomena, at the age of six, was nicknamed by the inhabitants of Palude la stria ca ite li muerti, the girl who sees the dead. And while her peers shunned her and the adults made unlikely demands (interviews with deceased husbands, attempts to contact her deceased sister-in-law, who surely knows where the land registry file is, and even the demand for the winning numbers in the football pools), the Quarta family took advantage of the situation to further conceal their guilt. But today Filomena is no longer a lost child, and she is no longer alone. With her are the ghosts she had unwittingly conjured: Mary Shelley and Shirley Jackson, the queens of terror, who will prove to be indomitable and trusted advisors.