During the 1970s, Morris Lakeman, an amateur historian, prepares to address the Historical Society of Western Massachusetts. He hints at some recent unpleasantness related to his membership in the group but doesn’t elaborate. Instead, he begins talking about an extraordinary document that was first unearthed in 1951. A Professor Jorgenson was given a transcript of a story written in the margins of an old family Bible. The owner was a descendant of an enslaved woman who took shelter in a house in rural Massachusetts on her way to join her husband in Canada. When she continued her journey, she took the Bible with her. Scrawled in the margins of six pages is an extraordinary tale of poisoning and murder that came to be called “the “Nightmaids” Letter.” When Jorgenson and his informant both died shortly after this revelation, the letter sunk into obscurity again until it was incorporated into a 1964 book by John Trumbull detailing the captivity stories of settlers abducted by Indigenous Americans.

The “Nightmaids” Letter immediately stirs up academic controversy. Scholars demand proof. They find ways to discredit the claims of the letter’s author. Lakeman begins to have doubts of his own despite being an aficionado of True Crime! magazine, which featured a story that regular columnist Jack Dunne wrote 15 years earlier: