We were off to a “rosy” start!  Although we the viewers were not yet permitted entrance  to the haunted mansion (flashback/backstory scenes not included), we got to take in its enormous exterior. This vine-ridden mansion in Seattle, behind locked gates, has countless rooms. The number of rooms changes by day, for the house is said to expand on its own accord.

Professor Joyce Reardon, over summer break, plans to spend a weekend at Rose Red in the hopes of obtaining verifiable psychic phenomenon.  When all is said and done, she hopes to prove, once and for all, the legitimacy of parapsychology.  She proves to be quite confident in her pursuits, very determined, if not obsessed, and, perhaps, slightly unbalanced.

Rose Red in its current state is a “dead cell.” It has not been active in over thirty years. Joyce plans on using a team of psychics to help rejuvenate the house. They will be the electricity.  She hopes for six team members; she has five – a precog, (see events before they happen) a touch sensitive (picks up information from touching an object), an automatic writer (spirits communicate when the writer writes) a post cog (gets warnings from the past) and a jack-of-all-psychic-trades psychic. Who Joyce really wants is Annie, an autistic teenager girl whose powers are off the charts. She has been known to bring showers of  boulders down from the sky upon neighbors’ houses and tear apart her own house by willing plates to shatter, glass to break, shelves to fall. Her father forbids her to be part of the team. He says “Taking Annie to a genuine haunted house is like taking a  lighter to see how full your gas tank is.”   Perhaps he’s right.

Like Annie’s father, there are others who do not look to kindly upon Joyce’s upcoming Rose Red expedition. One is Professor Carl Miller, the head of the psychology department at the university. He scoffs at the field of parapsychology and thinks that her attraction to Rose Red will harm the reputation of the department. He hires a student journalist Kevin Bollinger to spy on Joyce’s group and bring up dirt on them.

Despite these setbacks, Joyce marches on.  Will Part 2 finally show this team in the house? Will Annie be able to join this group after all? Will Carl Miller somehow sabotage this experiment? We shall see.

I hope Joyce knows what she is doing. This is dangerous. Over the years, Rose Red has killed five men and “disappeared” eighteen women. It has a complicated history, and Joyce herself says that is “born bad”.  Will her obsession get in the  way of the safety of her group? Again I say, we shall see.

Next Sunday – Part 2 at my Facebook page Haunted Houses of Film and Literature