Cooking breakfast in the morning, the bottom door of the staircase starts rattling violently, the eggs explode and splatter all over the kitchen; Mother leaves, screaming.
When she comes back, kitchen is perfectly clean, everything is put away (including the pan she was cooking with), and the stove is cold.
Mother has flashback to her own mother's dementia, which came early in life (while Mother was a teenager) -- worries that the same things is happening to her, that she hadn't cooked breakfast in the first place and the whole thing was in her head.
Bobby and Erik (11) are playing with a slinky on the kitchen stairs that afternoon when doors at top and bottom slam shut, trapping them in the dark with some suddenly furiously fluttering shadows until the kitchen door slowly creaks open and all is silent. The boys rush off to tell someone.
Alicia is looking for a place to stash drugs in her room and finds a loose floorboard with things from the house's...
The boys run into her room and though she is initially angry, all are too caught up in learning about the possibility of ghosts, and the death of a btler and maid in an apparent suicide pact.
Kids try to convince parents house is haunted; parents won't listen -- they think the kids are just complaining because they want to move back to the States, Alicia's influence.
Kids confront spirit(s) in the kitchen stairs; sudden evidence of their presence scares them all off -- rattling doors, unintelligible angry male voice.
That night, everyone ends up trapped in the kitchen; it becomes evident that the butler's spirit is evil; he had wanted to murder the family living in the house a century ago; the maid stopped him but both died in the scuffle. Now the spirits are fighting over this family.
The family escapes the house and moves back to the States, with the closing shot suggesting that the good spirit (the maid) has moved with them, always a loyal servant.
