Dr. Patricia Reed, an ambitious psychiatrist, accepts a job at Wickham Mental Hospital where she takes on the strange case of Dr. James Baker - a catatonic patient who worked at the hospital in 1952 before he became ill. Reed inherits Dr. Baker’s office and finds letters written to him by his devoted fiancée, Fannie Wilson, who increasingly fears that Baker is falling under the spell of his catatonic patient – an uneducated farmer named Charley Miller. Dr. Reed meets Fannie, who faithfully kept Baker’s letters to her. After reading those letters, Reed is bewildered as to why they progressively get more difficult to read. With each missive, more letters of the alphabet are missing and Baker soon becomes unable to communicate. Despite Fannie’s insistence that the supernatural is at work and that Reed herself might be in danger, the doctor is more determined than ever to find a rational explanation for Baker’s condition. But when she is confronted with the simple truth, it’s what neither of them expected.