After getting a video camera for her fourteenth birthday, Kasey Madrid enters film contest and chooses her town's 300th anniversary celebration as a subject. All is well until the town's time capsule is unearthed empty, prompting Kasey to investigate. Things get even stranger when she begins to see someone in her camera no one else can see. That "someone" turns out to be Marion Gibson, the town's former historian, who went into a coma-like state when the time capsule was buried and whose memories are now trapped in time. Kasey researches the town historians and reveals their 300 year-old secret: a wooden chest that gives them the ability to see other people's memories and visit the past. She also finds that Marion's successor, the real town historian, is missing. Using her film footage, Kasey discovers the chest is passed on to each new historian every generation through time capsules. When the chest is stolen, Kasey and her camera go back to save Marion, find the identity of the next historian and solve the mystery of the empty time capsule.