At midnight on Midsummer's Day 1938, a famous Harvard geneticist, Eli Mencken, accepts a challenge to spend the night inside a gloomy old attic room... where the ghost of a madman is said to prey upon human flesh. Next morning, he has impossibly vanished from the hermetically sealed chamber. The only clue to his disappearance is traces of grisly ectoplasm on the bed.

Seventy years on, the vast Gothic house known as Metropolis has passed into the hands of the original owner's daughter and her son, but the strange, unexplained events in "The Nightmare Room" continue...

A housekeeper's assistant working for a celebrated crime writer becomes convinced she is losing her mind following a series of bizarre occurrences in his house. As master of illusion Jonathan and his intrepid sidekick Joey Ross puzzle over the strange events, they realise the mysterious death of a former resident in 1889, who apparently fell victim to the supernatural powers of his Egyptian employee, could hold the key.

Joey Ross draws Jonathan into a complex case involving a secret society, seemingly supernatural events at a girls' boarding school, and the miraculous disappearance of a body.