A young couple flees a Puritan colony and travels deep into the wilderness, building a cabin in the north woods.

An elderly woman poisons three English scouts' dinner with Nightmaid mushrooms to prevent them from massacring a nearby Indigenous village.

The captive girl kills two scouts with an axe, buries all four bodies, and records the events in the woman's Bible.

Apple seeds from a buried scout's body germinate and grow into a wild apple tree in the meadow.

Charles Osgood tastes the wild apple, buys the land, and builds a yellow house beside the original cabin.

Charles Osgood leaves to fight in the Revolutionary War and dies in battle, leaving the orchard to his daughters.

Mary Osgood kills her sister Alice with an axe in the orchard after Alice spends the night with a neighbor.

Terminally ill, Mary places Alice's body in the root cellar and lies down beside her sister to die.

Bounty hunter Phelan tracks an escaped enslaved woman named Esther to the yellow house and follows her inside.

Mary's ghost rises from the root cellar and kills Phelan, freeing Esther to flee north with the old Bible.

Landscape artist William Henry Teale buys the Osgood property, renovates it, and begins a secret affair with author Erasmus Nash.

Both men's wives discover the affair, and Nash ends the romance to protect his literary reputation.

Charlatan medium Anastasia channels the genuine ghosts of Teale, Nash, and Charles Osgood during a séance at the yellow house.

Amateur historian Morris Lakeman collapses from a heart attack while digging for a buried grave on the Osgood property.

Botanist Nora crashes her car into a creek, accepts a ride from Charles Osgood's ghost, and realizes she has died.

The north woods story begins when a young couple flees Puritan Massachusetts and builds a cabin in the wilderness, only for violence to intrude decades later when an elderly woman poisons English scouts to protect a nearby Indigenous village. The apple seeds buried with a dead scout germinate into a tree that draws Charles Osgood to the land, where he builds the yellow house and establishes the celebrated Osgood Wonder apple variety. After Osgood dies fighting in the Revolutionary War, his daughter Mary kills her sister Alice and entombs them both beneath the pantry floor, setting a pattern of doomed paradise that haunts every subsequent occupant. A bounty hunter tracking an escaped enslaved woman named Esther is killed by Mary's ghost, and Esther flees north carrying the Bible that holds the buried history of the place. Landscape artist Teale's secret affair with author Nash ends in ruin, and a charlatan medium later channels three genuine ghosts during a séance at the renamed Catamount Lodge. The cycle concludes when botanist Nora dies in a car crash and discovers through Charles Osgood's ghost that she has become one more spirit bound to the north woods.

The landmark events that shaped the north woods across four centuries.

The young man explains to his companion that everything in the wilderness around them is alive as they travel north.

After a captive young mother grows feverish, Indigenous warriors deposit her and her infant at an elderly English woman's cabin.

The captive girl and the elderly woman read the Bible together, ending the girl's fear that her hostess is a witch.

A scout produces a severed child's hand as proof he found an Indigenous village whose people he intends to slaughter.

A French soldier stabs Osgood with a bayonet, but an apple core on the blade keeps the weapon from piercing his heart.

Osgood's family summons a doctor to cure his apple obsession, but the quack remedy does absolutely nothing.

Alice and Mary Osgood carry on the orchard business and compose ballads together after their father departs for war.

Elderly neighbor George Carter reveals to the sisters that he was the boy who first led their father to the wild apple tree.

Mary cleans and dresses Alice's corpse, props it in a rocking chair, and tells neighbors Alice died of apoplexy.

Teale finds a beaver hat left in the house and wears it without knowing it once belonged to the vanished bounty hunter.

Nurse Ana and the elderly Teale develop a close friendship as he walks the property naming every tree and bird for her.

Farnsworth buys the property, renames it Catamount Lodge, and fills every wall with mounted heads of animals he has killed.

Lillian repeatedly changes her mind about having her son Robert lobotomized, frustrating the consulting psychiatrist.

Helen returns to the yellow house after Robert's death and finds cases of film reels he labeled with the names of past residents.

Alice Osgood's ghost arrives to embrace the dying Morris Lakeman, and the two begin an unexpected posthumous romance.

This pool illuminates the quieter but essential moments connecting each era of the north woods story, beginning with the young man explaining the living world of nature to his companion as they travel deeper into the wilderness. The captive girl's slow journey from suspicion to trust of the elderly woman, sealed when they read the Bible together, reveals how fragile peace is before a scout's severed trophy shatters it. Charles Osgood's apple obsession is treated as a madness by his family, while the Osgood sisters sustain their father's legacy through music and labor even as resentment quietly grows between them. In later eras, Teale finds a mysterious hat with no idea of its bloody history, nurse Ana tends the broken artist back to health, and Farnsworth transforms the house into a trophy-filled hunting lodge. The pool closes with Helen's return to find Robert's cryptic film canisters and, after the death of historian Lakeman, Alice Osgood's ghost offering him the love that always eluded her in life.

The supporting moments that give the north woods its full texture and depth.

The captive girl learns her elderly hostess once fled the Puritan colony with a husband and later married an Indigenous man.

The elderly woman weeps alone in her garden after learning the scouts plan to bring soldiers to massacre the nearby Indigenous village.

One of the scouts shoots the elderly woman dead after she poisons his companions and kills one with her axe.

Convalescing in Quebec, Osgood dreams of a meadow where children offer him apples from a soul-feeding tree, sparking his obsession.

A local boy leads Osgood to an abandoned cabin and the meadow where four bodies lie buried beneath the ground.

Osgood finds the old Bible inside the cabin but never deciphers the tiny handwritten account hidden in its margins.

Mary forces the clearing of Alice's beloved grove of trees, called Brocéliande, to create pasture for Merino sheep.

Alice drinks hard cider pressed from the forbidden Osgood Wonder apples and spends the night with neighbor George Carter.

Mary reads George's letter intended for Alice and convinces herself that killing her sister saved Alice from future heartbreak.

Teale sends Nash a passionate letter confessing his love, and Nash writes back confirming he fully returns those feelings.

Nurse Ana intercepts Nash's letter proposing to rekindle his romance with Teale and destroys it before Teale can read it.

Consumed by guilt, Ana digs a hole in the earth and whispers her secret about destroying Nash's letter into the ground.

Mrs. Farnsworth describes to medium Anastasia witnessing two male ghosts engaged in sexual activity inside the yellow house.

The Nightmaids Letter surfaces in academic circles after a descendant of Esther shares a transcript of the Bible's margins.

Nora's ghost perceives the north woods as they appeared centuries earlier and encounters Teale painting the landscape before her.

This pool traces the pivotal moments when characters face impossible choices or discover truths that alter the course of events in the north woods. The elderly woman's anguished weeping in the garden is the private turning point that seals the scouts' fate, while Osgood's feverish dream of apple-bearing children in a Quebec sickroom plants the seed of his life's obsession. The Osgood sisters' story turns on Mary's destruction of Alice's beloved grove and Alice's one act of romantic freedom, and the letter Mary reads in the aftermath convinces her she did the right thing. Teale and Nash's romance crests when they exchange confessing love letters, only for nurse Ana to later intercept Nash's offer to rekindle their affair and destroy it in secret — a guilt she can only confess to a hole in the earth. The pool closes with the long-delayed academic surfacing of the Nightmaids Letter and Nora's revelation, after her fatal crash, that she can now move through centuries of north woods history as a witness to everything the land has silently held.

The revelations, decisions, and emotional turning points that changed everything.