Let me begin by saying this is the worst horror title since "I Still Know What You Did Last Summer."
In this "true story," two psychic sisters and a psychic girl (in the sense that they see ghosts) relocate (not from Connecticut) to a former Georgia plantation with one sister's redneck husband, who is some sort of police officer/security guard. Each of the women begin having visions of ghosts, presented in the typical paranormal reality show manner (black and white, slow motion, fast motion, random shots of insects, shots of mouths agape). The girl's mother, for a woman who sees ghosts, is at first surprisingly hostile to her daughter's notions that there is an invisible man living on the property.
The property turns out to have been an underground railway station run by a morally dubious station agent/taxidermist, and as anybody knows all taxidermists are evil. The townspeople, including the pastor, are well aware of the property's history, but in spite of the South's obsession with this time period and the fact that the lot was abandoned for twenty years, no one has excavated or explored the property or hauled off its historic artifacts. The ghosts attempt to communicate a dastardly secret to the girl, and this inspires the zombie/poltergeist/demon (?) station agent to emerge from hiding and wreak havoc in his underground chamber, which was lying in plain sight waiting to be found.
This has some promise as a ghost story, but could have been condensed into a half hour reality show, using the same shots and techniques (meaningless dates are presented to lend accuracy, just like in the shows). The acting is a bit forced, especially the accents, and Chad Michael Murray's attempt to butch it up as a backwoods redneck. Clichés abound: as all haunted house families, there is a piano that is only played by ghosts, meaningful stuffed animals and dolls, Victorians, a preference for baths over showers, a preference for long, flowing robes among the women. Some of the most realistic elements of the story are the most far-fetched. I've already mentioned the historical artifacts waiting to be found, but the redneck father seems far more a danger than the station agent when he tears out of his house with a gun tracking his daughter, or drives crazily through the woods in the dark without looking behind him.
The ending has clearly been exaggerated, and we are left to wonder how much has been a hallucination, especially since the mother was already revealed to be on medication for mental illness (or accurate ghost visions, if you prefer). Apparently the real family left the property a few years after the events here, I wonder why they didn't use the ghost story and the historical monuments to build tourist attraction.
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