After a falling out with her roommate Judy Adams, a friend from home and her only real friend in Los Angeles, Cheryl Stratton, a teenaged runaway from Cleveland, searches out the Kingston Hotel, operated by her maternal Uncle Orville and Aunt Martha Atwood neither who she's ever met but of who she's only heard stories, for a place to stay temporarily instead of going home. In Cheryl finding the rundown hotel and her uncle long deceased, seemingly puritanical Aunt Martha reluctantly allows Cheryl to stay for a few days. Cheryl, who tries to be more grown up emotionally than she actually is, is ill-prepared for living at the Kingston, being scared not only of the things that go bump in the night, but those that go bump in the day as well. After meeting a few of the rather odd cast of long term residents of the hotel, Cheryl discovers that one of them anonymously has an interest in her and is thus watching her. In Cheryl secretly going on a search for her admirer, one-by-one she discovers some of the many secrets of the hotel, but not the full meaning behind those secrets. As she befriends fifteen year old Jeff from the neighborhood, he who has some history with former resident Alice Rogers, Cheryl, growing up quicker than Aunt Martha would like, may stumble onto the meaning of those secrets, but perhaps after it's too late.