Muscles Tanner, a boxer, gives up the ring after two fatalities and emigrates to Canada and gets involved with two crooked lumbermen trying to evict a landowner from his plot.
When ghosts inhabit an Englishwoman's home, Dyall, a ghost hunter of sorts, takes on the poltergeists. Developments reveal a trio of spirits that includes a sailor, the seaman's late wife, and her lover, whom the sailor had shot.
Jaap van Leyden is in charge of a shipyard in newly occupied Holland. At first he collaborates with the Germans because it is the easiest course to follow. Later a child's rhyme reminds him of his patriotic duty, but how best to resist the Nazis without endangering his wife and fellow workers?