Bag of Bones (2011)

Best-selling novelist Mike Noonan and his wife, Jo, are unable to conceive children; Mike conceals that he has a low sperm count. Jo is killed by a bus while crossing a street. As she dies in his arms, Mike notices she bought a pregnancy test, and assumes that she may have been having an affair. Overcome by grief from her death, Mike develops a case of writer’s block. He suffers a series of nightmares about his wife and their summer home on Dark Score Lake in Maine. On advice from his brother, Sid, Mike takes a trip to the summer house. Once there, he meets a young widow named Mattie Devore and her 6-year-old daughter, Kyra. Befriending them, he earns the ire of Mattie’s estranged father-in-law Max Devore. Max has been trying to get custody of Kyra since Mattie shot his son Lance (Lance was trying to drown the child). Despite the turmoil, Mike begins to write again, but visions and nightmares lead him to believe he isn’t alone. He finds that his wife’s spirit is with him. He also detects the spirit of a 1930s singer named Sara Tidwell who plays records of her music.

Sara also appears in dreams that Mike has of her last day alive in 1939. During his stay at the lake, Mike learns about “Dark Score Crazy,” an apparent form of madness that caused several men in the town to murder their daughters by drowning them. Max and his assistant attack Mike while he is in the lake. Afterwards, Max gives Mike an offer that he will stop the custody battle for Kyra if Mike agrees to leave them alone and not press charges. Mike agrees to it, and Max after that commits suicide. At the funeral, Mike meets Edgar White, an old friend of his grandfather. Edgar confesses to Mike that Edgar, Mike’s grandfather, and two other men assisted Max with the rape and murder of Sara Tidwell and the drowning of her daughter, Keisha. With her dying breath, Sara cursed the boys’ descendants to drown their own daughters in retribution for drowning Keisha. The boys buried Sara with her daughter in the woods.