The Search for Judd McCarthy

In the fall of 1926, an itinerant labor named Judd McCarthy disappears with a company payroll while traveling between two small towns in the Midwest. Thirty-three years later another man, lawyer Joel Hampton, thinks he is going insane. Victimized by nightmares and blackouts, Joel slowly assumes a different, almost psychopathic personality. Psychiatrist Ned Finley, who becomes involved in the case, believes that Joel’s problems defy traditional psychological explanations. Convinced that Joel is being possessed by another man’s spirit, Finley journeys to the dying small town of Danvers, where he believes this man once lived. As Finley struggles to learn what happened to Judd McCarthy and why his spirit seemingly lives on in Joel Hampton, his own life is threatened by some menacing presence in the small town. Meanwhile Joel, who has fully assumed the persona of Judd McCarthy and has been committed to a psychiatric institution, ponders how to seek revenge and find the mysterious Katharine who lives in his memories.