A young Puritan man called Goodman Brown leaves his home at dusk, though his wife, called Faith, asks him not to go. She claims to be troubled by bad dreams about what he will do, but he goes anyway. He plans to "cling to her skirts and follow her to Heaven" after "this one night." She seems to be an allegorical figure for Christian faith while Brown is a sort of Puritan Everyman figure. Figuratively, he abandons his faith and, therefore, his God, when he goes into the forest—apparently to sin for the last time—and meets with the devil. As the devil and Brown walk through the woods, Brown sees and hears a number of people from town who he believed to be pious and God-fearing until now. He is shocked to think that these people are not what they appear to be during the daytime. He begins to travel on alone, and when he sees one of Faith's pink ribbons, he panics, thinking that she has joined with the devil in sin too. He runs off through the woods, inviting evil to come out, and happens upon a witches' sabbath, a meeting of all the people Brown knows as good and the people he knows to be sinful. The devil welcomes them all as his "children." Eventually, Brown turns his back on the devil and begs Faith to do likewise, but then everything around him disappears except the forest. In the end, the narrator explains that it could all have been a dream, or not, but it turned Brown into a cynical, distrustful man for the rest of his life. He has lost his faith.