Content Warning: This section of the guide references sexual assault and rape.

In Mexico City in the 1950s, socialite Noemí Taboada’s life is a round of parties, new boyfriends, uninspiring classes at the women’s school, and piano recitals, but she is eager for something more than husband hunting and marriage. An opportunity arises when her father, Leocadio Taboada, summons her home from a party one night in August 1950 to show her a letter from her cousin Catalina, who claims her husband Virgil Doyle is poisoning her and that High Place, the Doyle house, is haunted. Mr. Taboada promises Noemí she can enroll in university to study anthropology if she discreetly goes to visit and find care for Catalina, who lives in El Triunfo, an old mining town in the rural state of Baja California Sur, Mexico.

After a long train ride north, Noemí arrives in El Triunfo. The landscape surrounding El Triunfo is brutal and wild, and the massive forests that surround it are far different from the magical fairytale forests Catalina and Noemí read as girls. Francis, Virgil’s cousin, gives Noemí’s a ride to