Florida’s Gracetown.

June of 1950.

Robbie Stephens Jr., 12, is given a six-month term at the reformatory Gracetown School for Boys for kicking the son of the town’s biggest landowner to protect his elder sister, Gloria. Robbie’s voyage into the horrors of the Jim Crow South and the actual horror of the school they name The Reformatory begins at this point.

Robbie is gifted with the ability to see haints, or spirits. However, what used to console him following the death of his mother has now turned into a window into the realities of what occurs at the reformatory. The haints Robbie observes suggest worse things, but the boys who were made to work to atone for their alleged sins have vanished.