A cynical young reporter sits alone in the dark shadows of Trinity Churchyard, nursing a broken heart after the woman he loves marries a wealthy nobleman for title alone. As midnight approaches on a mild May night, he discovers that the graveyard is waking up and the dead are rising to hold their annual subterranean convention, banquet, and ball. Befriended by a talkative, pipe-smoking phantom captain, the journalist is invited to descend into the vast, beautifully illuminated marble halls beneath the church where historical figures, colonial merchants, and societal ghosts mingle.
Throughout the strange evening, the reporter observes the ghostly inhabitants engaging in card games, reliving old arguments, and bitterly attempting to scrub away the over-flattering and untruthful epitaphs carved onto their headstones by surviving relatives. He encounters eccentric spirits ranging from a 5,000-year-old Egyptian princess taken from a museum exhibit to a giant whose legs were crudely shortened during a hasty nineteenth-century cemetery relocation. Amidst the lively discussions about life, death, publishers, and the true meaning of morality, the journalist gains a profound philosophical shift regarding human vanity, true friendship, and the illusion of earthly heartbreak.
As the night unfolds, various ghosts achieve their long-awaited purification and vanish into impalpable dust toward their final spiritual rewards. The reporter is offered glimpses of a higher cosmic order that challenges his orthodox views on divine judgment and the afterlife. When dawn finally breaks, he finds himself alone on the flat tombstone, his flask empty and tobacco gone, but entirely cured of his personal despair. He departs with a transformed outlook on mortality and a quiet resolve to honor his unusual spiritual experiences when he returns the following year.
