Hey, remember when you went to college and your parents turned your bedroom into a sewing room? Well, Cecilia Matthews did one better. She turned it into a psychic freakout where a spectral brat who never grows up and never talks back finally makes her happy as a mother, unlike her real-life child. In this slice of 80s psychological weirdness (based on a Pamela Sargent short story), we meet Christine (Lorna Luft), who comes home for a warm hug only to get the cold shoulder from her mother, Cecilia (Coleen Gray), who is too busy listening to a ghostly child sing “Three Blind Mice” upstairs to hear her own flesh-and-blood daughter pounding on the door.

It’s been six years. Six years since Christine had a nervous breakdown, likely caused by the very woman now offering her tea while treating her like a trespasser. Cecilia has storage in Christine’s old room, a code word for a pink-hued time capsule filled with pom-poms, horse trophies and a literal ghost of Christine’s childhood.

Enter Chrissie (Virginia Keehne). She’s the girl Christine used to be, or at least, the girl Cecilia wanted her to stay. While Christine is trying to process her trauma and navigate a broken life, Cecilia is upstairs, tucked in with a poltergeist version of her daughter, feeding the thing pure nostalgia.

The second act turns into a battle for maternal territory. We get a visit from Toni (Janet Wood), the Avon lady, who drops the bomb that Cecilia spends an unhealthy amount of time talking to the walls. Then there’s brother Chuck (Lary Gilman), who tries to play peacemaker but mostly just serves as a reminder that Christine is the only one in this family actually living in the real world.

Christine confronts Chrissie, who is basically a sentient World’s Best Daughter trophy with a mean streak. There’s shouting, a shattered mirror, and a tug-of-war for Cecilia’s soul. In the end, the power of a grown-up’s grief beats out a phantom’s playground rhymes, as you’d imagine it would. Chrissie goes poof in a flash of light, Cecilia wakes up from her nostalgic trance, and we’re left with two women holding each other in the wreckage of a childhood bedroom.

Most of Christopher T. Welch’s directing work was on TV, while he has also done ADR and production work. This was written by Julie Selbo, who wrote for this series and Monsters, as well as animation.