Heart-Shaped Box

Jude researches Craddock on his laptop. From newspaper articles, he finds out that Craddock had a childhood interest in the occult that he made use of while serving in Vietnam, where he learned to see ghosts from a man named Nguyen Trung. After the Vietnam War, he worked as a dowser and ghost hunter in Florida. Jude then takes Georgia to a Denny’s restaurant.

At Denny’s, Jude and Georgia discuss how and why Jude’s previous marriage failed in the wake of his bandmates’ deaths. A waitress spills coffee on Georgia’s injured hand, and she goes to the bathroom to care for it. Meanwhile, an elderly man’s electrolarynx relays cryptic threats to Jude. He realizes that Craddock’s ghost has returned and rushes to the bathroom to check on Georgia. He finds her staring at herself in the mirror. She pushes the mirror and tries to slit her throat with a shard of glass. Jude forces Georgia out of the restaurant, and she runs to an underpass to vomit. A pickup truck hurtles toward them, and he rescues her before the ghost-possessed driver can run over them.

Jude and Georgia get back on the road. He reflects on his and Florida’s breakup: After rescuing her from a depressive episode during which she wandered half naked on the side of the highway at night, he took her home, made her soup the next morning, and told her to return to her parents. She told him to contact Craddock, and that’s when Jude spoke to him for the first time. He took Florida to Penn Station, and shortly thereafter, he met Georgia at a strip club.

Jude and Georgia arrive at the house of her grandmother, Bammy. Bammy is suspicious of the couple’s physical deterioration but lets them inside.

While Georgia rests, Jude talks to Bammy over a meal. He is disturbed to learn that her real name is Alabama, as he once knew a woman with this name years ago. He joins Georgia upstairs, where she has found a Ouija board with which they’ll contact Florida.

Georgia recalls using the Ouija board as a child: She and a friend used it as a joke but once contacted the latter’s brother, who had died by suicide.

Jude and Georgia begin the spirit-summoning process by introducing themselves as Justin Cowzynski and Marybeth Kimball. There’s no response, so Jude calls on Florida using their couple nicknames. Florida’s ghost responds, and the couple tell her that Craddock’s ghost is pursuing them because he believes her death is Jude’s fault. The ghost points to the “no” on the Ouija board and then asks Jude, “Why. Are. You. So. Dumb” (219). He has a revelation, and Georgia enters a trance, muttering about a “golden door” (219). She promises to bring Florida through the door so that she can stop Craddock. The ghost asks Georgia if she has a mirror, and Jude sees Georgia blindfolded with her throat cut in a dresser mirror. Angus and Bon suddenly destroy the Ouija board and end Georgia’s trance.

Bammy knocks on the bedroom door, worried about the noise. Georgia plays it off as though she and Jude were having sex.