Magnolia "Maggie" Crane was always going to be different. Her father's family all come from a long line of people with some type of psychic gift--including him--but he was in denial about it all. He took medication to suppress his gift, and pretended that he didn't know what was going on with his daughter. 

Maggie has seen ghosts all her life. As a child, her Nana Nola taught her all about what they could do, what they were meant to do with their gifts. She was never once afraid of what she could do. Then her parents put her in a mental hospital when she was fourteen, and it all went to hell. 

The hospital staff were all very kind to her, and Maggie got on reasonably well with the other patients. . . The problem was the ghosts. The hospital was haunted by dead patients and doctors from an era where patient experimentation was allowed (if not encouraged), and when they realized that Maggie could see them, they never left her alone. She was misdiagnosed with schizophrenia, the ghosts chalked up to hallucinations, and given pills she didn't need and didn't actually help her. She lived years in a fog, only lucid when she was terrified out of her mind. 

Maggie's older brother, Tucker, knew she was telling the truth about what she saw, despite not having the gift himself, and spent years trying to convince their parents to get her out of the hospital, but they wouldn't hear it. It was only after their parents died in a car accident that he was given legal custody of his sister and finally able to check her out of the hospital and bring her home. 

Now, Maggie is just trying to learn how to face her gift again without fear. She hopes that, eventually, she'll be able to help ghosts the way her grandmother used to.