When he goes to spend the summer with his great-aunt in the family's old house, eleven-year-old Drew is drawn eighty years into the past to trade places with his great-great-uncle who is dying of diphtheria.
Andrew can feel the presence of his ancestors in Great-Aunt Blythe's old house. His fantasies of ghosts and the past become all too real when another Andrew, who lived at the beginning of the century and died young, appears.