In 1951 Steve Clark accepts a teaching job in a one-room school in the Missouri Ozarks and moves with his pregnant wife Lacey to the colorful backwoods community of Indian Glade. There they are surrounded by Ozark characters who are absorbed with old customs and beliefs and school children who speak in Elizabethan terms. The Clarks move into what they consider an ideal house, but are forewarned by the locals that, The last folks lived there claimed it weren t natural... Steve and Lacey encounter their unnatural inhabitant and attempt to unravel the mystery of the fiddler s ghost , who becomes more lifelike as they discover his time-travel connection to music.