Eel Marsh house stands alone, surveying the windswept salt marshes beyond Nine Lives Causeway. Mrs Alice Drablow lived here as a recluse. Now Arthur Kipps, a junior solicitor with a London firm, is summoned to attend her funeral, unaware of the tragic and terrible secrets which lie behind the house's shuttered windows. It is not until he glimpses a young woman at the funeral with a wasted face, dressed all in black...
that a sense of profound unease begins to creep over him, a feeling deepened by the reluctance of the locals to talk about the woman in black or what happens whenever she is seen. Kipps has to stay on in the lonely house, sorting out Mrs. Drablow's papers.
The mist begins to enshroud it and the surrounding graveyard and the high tide cuts it off from the outside world....