Socialite and novelist Charles Condomine, invites the eccentric medium and clairvoyant, Madame Arcati, to his house to conduct a séance, hoping to gather material for his next book. The scheme backfires when he is haunted by the ghost of his annoying and temperamental first wife, Elvira, after the séance. Elvira makes continual attempts to disrupt Charles's marriage to his second wife, Ruth, who cannot see or hear the ghost. She finally sabotages his car in the hope of killing him so that he will join her in the spirit world, but it is Ruth rather than Charles who drives off and is killed. Ruth's ghost immediately comes back for revenge on Elvira. With both his dead wives now fully visible, and neither of them in the best of tempers, the situation is only rsolved for Charles when Madame Arcati works out that the housemaid, Edith, is psychic and had unwittingly been the conduit through which Elvira was summoned. She succeeds in dematerialising both ghosts and Charles is advised to go far away – as soon as possible!