When a typical English mansion is sold, it turns out that an American ambassador is buying the castle with an unusual inhabitant - a 15th-century ancestral ghost, the husband of the original owner, Eleanor de Canterville. The ghost is serving a sentence for a violent act committed against his own wife. And only romantic love, in this case a poetic young man's love for Virginia, the ambassador's daughter, will free the ghost from the curse and the castle from the ghost.