Van Diemen's Land, 1870. William Morier is a 12-year-old mortician, enraptured by the beautiful, ghost-conjuring sisters Catherine and Annabel White. One day Annabel's corpse arrives at William's funeral home - her death a mystery.

A decade later, William marries Catherine, who confesses to her charlatan conjuring act as a young girl. When she suffers a life-threatening ectopic pregnancy, William is desperate to raise the cash to pay for her operation.

William becomes a fraudulent 'spirit photographer.' He sneaks into morgues and hospitals to photograph the corpses of rich men. He props them up with wooden stakes and uses his mortician's skills to bring them back to life. Then, he visits their widows, promising he can sense their husband's spirit. He shoots the widow using the same photographic plate and superimposes the dead man so he appears to haunt the scene. The widows splurge their inherited fortunes on these 'spirit photographs.'

But when a police officer discovers one of the "spirits" from William's photos alive and working as a butcher downtown, William sinks to grave-digging, body-snatching depravity to keep the scam alive.