Three lost children stumble across an abandoned orphanage in the bush. They become trapped in a timeless world, haunted by spirits from the past. They are tormented, too, by the Black Skirt, a cruel governess who floats up and down the orphanage corridors wielding enormous scissors. But as the stories of these forgotten children are told— from pick pocketing incidents in the eighteenth century to the tragedies of the Stolen Generations in the twentieth— their spirits are released, one by one.