A group of friends is having a dinner party to say good-bye to one of their members, Fenwick, before he leaves to travel Asia. One of the friends’ niece, Nora, brings up the ouija board she and her friends used at school, which prompts another woman, Mrs. Medford, to talk about her attempts to communicate with her dead brother Jack Hilles through a medium. After Nora leaves, the friends decide to play a game in which they allow a spirit to use their hand to write a message. A man named Gregory decides to keep the time, and when they finally finish, he finds that his hand has written, “Ask Fenwick.” Another woman’s paper says the same. They turn to Fenwick, and he has four pages of writing before him. The group eagerly crowds around to hear what it says, and they only get as far as the first line before seeing that the message is from Jack Hilles. With the room in an uproar, Mrs. Medford snatches the first page and locks herself in a telephone closet to read it. The group decides not to read the rest while they wait for her, and eventually a skeptical woman named Mrs. Conway coaxes her out. She claims that evil spirits had written the message, which Mrs. Medford says contains slander of her brother, and takes the rest of the pages in case Mrs. Medford wants to read more. Together, the two women leave. Other members of the party take their leave as well until only Fenwick, Mr. Allis, and Gregory remain. They argue over what the source of Fenwick’s writing really was; whether he tapped into someone’s subconscious, or Jack Hilles really wrote through him. Whatever it was, the glimpse they got of the papers revealed the many bad things that Jack Hilles had done before he died. Without arriving at a clear conclusion as to the source of the information, the friends disperse for the night.