Plot

The Winchesters try to stop a family from moving into a haunted house.

Dean reads in the newspaper about the mysterious death of a man who was slaughtered inside a locked room in a farm in the countryside of Stratton, Nebraska. The Winchester brothers travel to the house, believing it to be a typical ghost case. They expect to find the house empty but meet the Carter family who has just moved to the country expecting to rebuild their lives after a tragedy. They discover that the victim had lost his wife in childbirth and his daughter hanged herself in the attic twenty years ago. When the family is attacked by the same mysterious creature, the brothers protect the family with a circle of salt; however, she easily crosses this protection, and they realize that she is not a ghost or demon. What is the creature? Can Sam and Dean rescue the young son trapped with the creature within the walls of the house in time?—Claudio Carvalho, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

THEN!

Sam and Dean help a fallen angel find her grace and return to Heaven, ticking off Uriel and Castiel; Dean tells Sam that has was sliced and diced for 30 years in Hell until one day he took the demon Alastair up on his offer to take him on the rack, and began torturing souls himself. All the while, Lilith keeps on truckin' and a-breakin' those seals.

NOW!

The scene opens on your standard issue isolated home in the countryside, nighttime. A grizzled old guy watches a history special on the teevee while eating dinner on his teevee table when the lights go out. He grumbles to himself, and get up to fix the fuse...but the door won't open. A door on the opposite side of the room does, however, and out comes a very pale and psychotic looking woman with dead eyes.

"You?" he gasps. "It's impossible." The haint smiles. ''You stay away from me!" he screams, still trying to open the door as the grinning wraith closes on him. Off-camera we hear him scream, and see blood spatter across an embroidered "Home Sweet Home" sampler on the wall.

Welcome back to "Supernatural"!

Elsewhere, Sam and Dean are in the Metallicar, Sam sleeping and Dean holding a flashlight over some files, searching for a job. Sam wakes up, bitching that they just finished a job two hours ago, but Dean's raring to go (and to do anything but sleep, we bet) and asks Sam to take his pick of burgs: Cedar Rapids, Tulsa, Chi-town? Sam reveals that Dean's had them chasing cases non-stop for a month now, without much sleep. Brother's running on fumes, but Dean insists he's fine. Sam suggest that Dean might be trying to escape the memories of what happened to him in Hell. Dean responds by selecting the site of their next adventure: Stratton, Nebraska. Where our mystery man bought the farm at the hands of what appears to be a ghost.

Or, rather, put the farm back on the market. There's a "for sale" sign visible as the boys drive up to the empty house. Inside it's dingy, but clean. "Boy, three bedrooms, two baths, and one homicide," says Dean. "This place is gonna sell like hotcakes!" While Dean's gettin' Shecky with it, a perspective shot shows us something's watching them from the walls. They knock around the kitchen and discover a slot where a dumbwaiter used to be. Sam pulls out the spirit detector and tells Dean that the needle's all over the place, but Dean notices there are power lines not far from where they're standing -- could be messing with the reading.

Then they open a closet and see....ick ick ick...a dirty baby doll head, sitting up on its neck and staring at them. Super disturbing. Before they can contemplate why their grizzled murder victim would have had a thing for doll heads, they see a car and a mover's truck heading up the road to the place. Guess somebody snapped up the house of the damned after all! Sam and Dean head out to meet the (un)lucky family: A clean cut yupster, his blue-collar brother Ted, his Martha Stewart of a wife, young son and wise-cracking teen daughter complaining about the lack of cell reception. Sam and Dean come out and introduce themselves as agents Babar and Stanwyck (Barbara Stanwyck? Whuh?) from county code enforcement. They tell the family there's asbestos in the walls and a gas leak, making it uninhabitable. They threaten the fam with a fine and jail time, and tell them to head to a motel down the road. The teen gripes.

Once the family appears to have stepped off, Sam and Dean make the rounds to find out a little more about the murder and chat up the housekeeper, who informs them that she found the body "everywhere" and that the victim, a Mr. Gibson, was a bitter old man...then again, if your wife died in childbirth and your kid hung herself in the attic, you'd be a bitter old goat too, right? They ask her if she noticed anything odd in the house when she was cleaning it -- lights going on and off, things not being where she'd left them? She offers that there were times she heard rustling in the walls, but she never saw anything. Sam and Dean ask where the mom and daughter were buried, and she informs them that they were cremated. They leave with pictures of the Gibson family.

So: Cremation rules out the mom and daughter. Hmm. Meanwhile, Yupster and Uncle Teddy check out the house for themselves and discover no asbestos, no gas leak, and the probability that Sam and Dean aren't from county code enforcement. As they start unpacking the boxes, teen daughter Kate looks at one of the upstairs windows and thinks she sees something...but Mom encourages her to shrug it off. Later that evening, her kid brother is playing a hand-held video game in his room when the closet door opens...by itself. He creeps forward. "Hello?" he asks? Something peeks out, then hides. Strangely, he's not frightened.

"It's OK. I'm Danny." He tosses it a ball. Unseen thing tosses it back. Danny smiles brightly. "Hi!" What the heck?!? Is the house haunted by puppies?

Next morning, Yupster Dad is pouring his coffee and Martha Stewart Mom is reading about growing conditions for the land, when Dad asks if she smells something. He opens a cabinet. "It smells like a raccoon died up there or something." Martha Stewart Mom complains that he's not listening, and asks what the heck they're doing on a farm. Dad assures her that everything will be different, and Mom replies she hopes so. "I can't put the kids through another year like the last," she says ominously. Yep, everybody knows that the cure for a failing marriage is to move your brood to Amityville.

Sam and Dean drive up and notice that the fam has moved back in, and they curse to themselves, trying to figure out what to do. And they'd better think of something fast, because inside the house, Uncle Teddy calls the 'rents into the living room, where he's found the word "GO" scrawled on the wall in red crayon. Dad assumes it's the son and calls him downstairs for a mega harsh talking-to! The boy informs his parents that the graffiti is the work of the Girl in the Walls, who wants him to stay and everyone else to go. The dad doesn't believe him, and asks for the truth, one last time. The kid insists he's not lying -- that the Girl in the Walls hates grown-ups but likes him (think of her as homicidal Tinkerbell, then?) and if they don't go she's going to get really, really mad. Well, Dad's having none of it, and sends him to his room, mister! Bummer! They're gonna be sorry!

But not as sorry as glum ol' Kate, who's lying in bed and staring up at the ceiling as she confides in her dog, who neither she nor we can see. Kate tells Buster, who is apparently nuzzling her hand by the side of the bed, that she hates it there, too. Then we hear a licking sound, and Kate grimaces, telling Buster he's being gross. That's when the closet opposite the foot of the bed opens and out comes...Buster. Wait, if Buster's there, what's licking her hand? The closet door beside her bed opens and shuts. Kate screams.

Kate gathers the family in the living room with the battle cry, "Ew! Ew! Ew!" When they ask what happens, she informs them that she just got molested by Casper the pervy ghost. "It's the Girl in the Walls!" kid brother declares. Then there's a knock at the door -- it's the Winchesters!

"You two!" Dad cries accusingly, pointing at Dean. "Did you touch my daughter?"

"What? No!" Dean says, before he and Sam explain: They have a ghost. They need to get out of the house, immediately. On cue, we hear Buster bark and yelp... and Dad and Winchesters run outside to follow a trail of gore to the moving truck. Written in blood on the side: "Too late."

It's true. Because now that the family believes them and is ready to leave, they find that the tires of all the vehicles have been slashed -- including the wheels of the Impala. And here's the really bad part: The ghost has taken all of the Winchesters' weapons. "What kind of a ghost messes with a man's wheels?" Dean yells. Oh, it is on.

Not before the girl starts creeping them out: Kate sees her in the fields by the house, and screams...but when everyone turns to look, she disappears. What's a ghost doing outside? Dean wonders. They decide not to stay and find out. Back in the house.

Inside, Sam and Dean make a circle with salt and explain to the barely believing family that they hunt and kill ghosts. "Like Scooby Doo?" Danny asks. Dean smiles. "Better," he says. Sam shows the photos of the Gibsons to the family, and Kate and Danny recognize the Girl in the Walls as Mr. Gibson's daughter, Rebecca, the one who hung herself many years ago. Awesome!

Uncle Teddy is not pleased. He informs Dean that he's not going to be pushed around by some backwoods hillbilly, and he's certainly not going to wait around "waiting for her to go all 'Deliverance' on my ass!" He invites Dean to stop him from leaving, and Dean does so by telling him that he has a gun. Sam pulls Dean aside and reminds him that, actually, he does not have a gun. But Dean's intent on ensuring that nobody dies tonight. So the family camps out in the salt circle.

Dean and Teddy are trading bitter banter when suddenly the closet door opens...and out comes a very dirty, pale, psycho Girl in the Walls. Dean calms everyone down and tells them she can't cross the salt line. Girl in the Walls hisses and continues to walk towards them. She pulls a knife out of her sleeve -- and steps across the salt line. Crap. The family runs out of the house to hide and Dean, armed with a fire poker, squares off with the now shrieking hillbilly haint. She knocks him down and nearly has him, until Sam shines a flashlight in her face. The girl recoils in horror, flees to the closet from whence she came and disappears. OK...so she's not a ghost after all. But if it's Rebecca, why hasn't she aged?

The boys head back outside and tell the family to regroup and escape, letting the Winchesters take care of it. Everyone comes when called...except for Danny. Mom and Kate yell their heads off and insist they aren't leaving without Danny. Dean tells them to hide in the shed -- one door, boarded up windows -- and let the menfolk put it all on the line. (Wanna bet Uncle Teddy bites it before the hour is up?)

Sam stays with the family in the shed while Dean and Ted head back into the house and search for any clues about their not-a-ghost psycho chick, and Dean correctly surmises that she must be living off something. They find a loose panel that leads into the walls of the house, and he and Teddy head in with flashlights. They encounter a hole in the floor. Dean descends to find..."her kitchen." Specifically, the busted remains of Buster. On the walls she finds stick figures of a girl and boy drawn in blood. Right at that moment, the Girl sneaks up behind Teddy and jams her knife through his neck. Ted's dead, baby...Ted's dead.

Dean heads to the shed to the deliver the news about Ted being dead. (Had to be said!) Dean goes back out to find Danny while Martha Stewart Mom freaks out, revealing that apparently the family lost another child -- Andy, their oldest son -- in the last year. Dad assures her that it's all going to be fine. Meanwhile, Sam is reading something...probably Rebecca's diary? In a bit of exposition shoved into the next scene, we find out that Andy died in a car accident and his death nearly tore the family apart. So dad decided to get a fresh start in the hinterlands. "What could possibly go wrong in the country?" he bitterly jokes with Dean, who vows to get Danny back "if it's the last God-forsaken thing I do." The dad wonders why Dean cares so much, but before the hotter Winchester can answer Sam pulls Dean aside and tell him he needs to talk.

Sam confirms that he was indeed reading Rebecca's diary, and that Rebecca had a daughter. But Mr. Gibson wanted to make sure that nobody knew about the daughter because...well, guess who was the father? Again, ew. Turns out Uncle Ted wasn't that far off. So: Dean and Sam are dealing with a wild child of the inbred psychotic variety. But they notice that her eyes are clouded over -- she's never seen light. So they decide to draw her out. Kid's gotta eat, right? Dad kept her hidden, he had to feed her. He has an idea of where.

Cut to: Danny, trussed up and gagged in what looks like a dark basement. He wakes up and looks around...to see Girl in the Walls crawl in, smiling. She holds up a live rat and he recoils. She looks confused, then shows him what to do with it by taking a juicy chomp out of its neck. Danny howls in horror.

Remember the dumbwaiter corridor in the kitchen? Dean pounds through a panel in the wall and lowers himself down. Once he's at bottom he discovers all their weapons. He picks up a few guns and hears Danny's muffled screams. Dean reaches in and cuts Danny free, removing his gag. "Hurry! He's coming back!"

"He?" Dean asks? Yes, he. Girl in the Walls has a Bro in the Walls with her! And in a flash, he's on top of Dean. Danny gets away while Psycho Boy and Dean struggle, until Dean grabs one of his guns and shoots him twice in the gut.

While this is happening, Girl in the Walls begins attacking the shed where Martha Stewart Mom and Kate are hiding. She rips the boards out of a window and pulls a panel out from the bottom...but before she crawls all the way in and gets all stabbity, something pulls her out. Mom and Kate hear her screaming and kicking...and then, silence. The door to the shed opens and it's Dad...with blood all over his hands.

Next day, Sam and Dean replace their weapons and fix the Metallicar, and thank the family for giving them a head start from the police. Dean asks the mom if they're OK, and she replies that they're the opposite of OK, but they're together. Aww...????

A few miles down the road, Sam and Dean have a tender moment: Dean reflects that he felt for those poor, dear psychos, never having a life or a family. Sam reminds Dean that he was in Hell. "You're not them," he says.

"You're right, I'm not them," Dean tells him. "I'm worse." The psycho twins were animals defending territory, Dean explains. "Me? I did it for the sheer pleasure."

What?

"I enjoyed it Sam," Dean reveals with heavy disgust. "They took me off the rack, and I tortured souls, and I liked it. All those years, all that pain, and finally getting to deal some of it out yourself?...That pain I felt, it just slipped way. No matter how many people I save, I can't change that. I can't fill this hole, not ever."

Next week: Demonic tarot cards!