The Haunting Of Rose Cottage

Lionel paced the hallway, as he had been for the past half hour, muttering and glaring at the walls as though he could shame them into behaving. Where is that blasted knocking coming from? It had started again about midnight , a steady, maddening tap-tap-tap, as if someone were politely but insistently rapping from inside the plaster.

He had checked all the doors. All the windows. The cupboards, the airing closet, even the old laundry chute Hazel had always said was “haunted in a charming, historical way.”

But nothing. Just the same narrow, familiar hallway of the small cottage he and Hazel had bought for their quiet retirement.

Quiet.

Well. It had been quiet.

Until she died six months ago.

Since then, the house felt cavernous, a place with too many soundless corners and too much absence.

Lionel rubbed a hand over his face and shivered. Where had the heat gone? It was the height of summer, yet a faint chill threaded the air.

He tugged his dressing gown tighter around himself and shuffled back to the bedroom. The bed loomed, wide and uneven: his side rumpled, Hazel’s smooth and untouched. He eased into the left side, his hand drifting automatically to the hollow dip on her pillow. A soft stroke, a quiet apology.

“Night, love,” he whispered into the dark.

The knocking faded. For a moment, he almost believed sleep would come. He woke up with a jolt. The knocking was thunderous now! Loud enough to rattle his teeth.

“Oh! Postman,” he mumbled, relief flooding him. He scrambled for his slippers, nearly tripping over them, and shuffled down the hall calling, “Coming! I’m coming! Hold your horses!”

The postman greeted him cheerfully with a parcel and a stack of letters, flyers, and coupon booklets, useless fodder for the recycling bin. “Waste of a good tree,” Lionel grumbled under his breath as he shut the door.

He dumped the pile on the kitchen table and went to start the coffee machine. His fridge offered a bleak landscape: one shrivelled tomato, a questionable piece of cheese, and milk that was technically still in date if you squinted.

“Muesli it is,” he sighed.

He sat with his bowl and opened the day's paper. The usual: doom, gloom, politicians saying daft things, and a cat who’d learned to play the piano. He rolled his eyes and flipped the page.

Then, a movement at the edge of his vision.

The kitchen door… shifted?

He froze. Watched. Waited.

Nothing.

He shook his head. “Just a breeze,” he muttered, though the windows were all shut.

He turned another page, and the kitchen door slammed so hard he nearly fell off his chair. He shot to his feet, heart thundering, staring at the door as though it might throw itself open again. The silence that followed was a sound all of its own, thick enough to hear his own pulse.

“Ridiculous,” he whispered. “Just… a draft. Or an animal.”

Though what animal shut a door with the force of a teenager in a mood, he could not say.

He cleared his breakfast, humming to himself to smooth the tremor in his hands. He tried to ignore the gnawing sense that something had changed in the house. Something subtle.

Something watching.

That evening, while eating his microwaved meal, something allegedly beef, swimming in gravy, Lionel tried to lose himself in the sitcom on TV. The canned laughter bounced around the room, filling the quiet Hazel used to occupy with chuckles and little comments like, “Oh, you’d do that exact thing, Lionel.”

He smiled at the memory… until a movement caught his eye.

A shadow. Long. Dark. Darting across the doorway like a streak of ink. It slipped down the hall toward the bedroom.

Lionel’s bowl clattered onto the tray. He was up in an instant, chasing the blur with a mix of fear and indignation.

“If that’s a robber, I’ll give you what for!” he barked, though what he thought he’d actually do was questionable.

He reached the bedroom doorway and stopped dead.

The room was empty.

Utterly still.

He checked the wardrobe, nothing.

The window, closed, latched, untouched.

He knelt and peered under the bed, dust, slippers, no intruders.

“What on earth…” he breathed.

Something brushed the back of his neck, a gentle skim of cold air, like a fingertip.

He spun, heart seizing. Nobody there.

That night was the first time he heard it.

“Lionel…”

A whisper. Soft, barely a breath.

He sat bolt upright in the darkness. “Hazel?”

Silence.

He reached for the lamp, but his hand shook so badly he knocked it off the bedside table. The bulb flickered on the floor. In the dim half-light, he saw… movement. A ripple in the corner of the room like heat distortion.

“Hazel? Is that you, love?” His voice wobbled. “Are you… are you trying to talk to me?”

The ripple stilled.

And then,

“Lionel…”

This time it was unmistakable. Her voice. Her exact voice. The tone she used when she couldn’t find her glasses or wanted him to make a cup of tea.

His throat tightened with hope. “Hazel, sweetheart, I’m here.” Tears pricked his eyes. “It’s me. I’m here.”

A beat of silence.

A breath.

Then the whisper again, but colder. Wrong somehow.

“Lionel…”

He reached out into the air, and something icy grazed his fingertips. He gasped and snatched his hand back.

Over the next few days, small things shifted around the house. Hazel’s favourite mug, the one with the cartoon chickens, kept appearing on the kitchen counter no matter where Lionel put it. The hallway light turned on by itself. Her perfume, lavender and vanilla, wafted through the house in brief, heartbreaking traces.

He caught glimpses of someone in his periphery: a silhouette standing in doorways, vanishing when he turned.

He began talking to her.

“Hazel, is that you?”

“Are you trying to reach me, love?”

“Do you need something? A message?”

Sometimes the air grew warmer when he spoke. Sometimes colder.

Once, while dusting her side of the bed, he felt something tug the hem of his dressing gown, a small, light, almost affectionate gesture.

He choked back a sob.

“Oh, Hazel,” he whispered.

The knocking started again, but changed.

It no longer came from the walls. It came from the ceiling. Then the floor. Then, the inside of the wardrobe.

Night after night, he lay awake, staring into the dark while something knocked steadily from somewhere in the house.

At times, it was like tapping.

Then like scratching.

And sometimes like a fist pounding in rage.

“Hazel?” he called, trembling. “What’s wrong? Tell me what’s wrong!”

But the whispers changed too.

They grew sharper.

Angrier.

Once, as he drifted on the edge of sleep, a hiss slithered into his ear:

“Li-o-nel…”

The voice stretched, warped, bending his name into something unrecognisable. He gasped awake, and something unseen dragged the blanket violently off his body.

It happened again two nights later.

An icy hand clamping around his ankle jolted Lionel awake. Before he could scream, it yanked him off the bed so hard he hit the floor with a thud that rattled his teeth.

“STOP! STOP IT!” he shouted, clawing at the carpet.

The force dragged him halfway across the room before abruptly releasing him. He scrambled backward into the corner, chest heaving, staring at the empty space where something, something, had pulled him with the strength of a grown man.

“H–Hazel?” he whispered. “Love? Please don’t… don’t do this…”

The silence that followed was so thick and hostile it seemed to press on his ears.

The next morning, he found the kitchen in chaos.

Every cupboard stood flung open.

Every drawer yanked out.

All the chairs lay tipped over, one broken clean in half.

Hazel’s chicken mug sat in the middle of the table.

Cracked.

He touched it with shaking fingers and whispered, “Why… why are you so angry?”

No reply came, but a cupboard door behind him slammed shut with such violence it splintered the wood.

Lionel fled the room.

He barely slept anymore.

But on that final night, exhaustion dragged him under.

He awoke to an unnatural silence, a silence so deep it rang in his ears.

Then, the bed beneath him began to vibrate.

A soft hum at first.

Then a tremble.

Then, there was a violent shake.

“No,” he whimpered. “Please, no…”

The blanket lifted into the air.

Then his legs.

Then his whole body.

He floated above the bed, weightless and rigid, held by invisible hands.

He screamed.

The house groaned.

The wardrobe doors banged open and shut.

Pictures fell from the walls.

The lamp burst into sparks.

He hung there suspended, helpless, tears streaming down his face as he cried Hazel’s name.

The voice whispered in his ear, cold, venomous, mocking.

“Lioooooneeel…”

And then it dropped him.

He hit the mattress hard enough to knock the breath from his lungs.

But he didn’t wait. Oh, no. Lionel was already scrambling, half-sobbing, half-panting, for his dressing gown. He snatched it off the floor and bolted from the bedroom.

He didn’t look back. Not once.

He sprinted through the hallway, down the stairs, out the front door, barefoot and wild-eyed, into the early morning light. He didn’t leave Rose Cottage gracefully, but he ran straight to his son’s house.

His son took him to see the doctor that same morning. Neighbours whispered about how pale he looked, how he flinched when someone closed a door too hard. Doctors checked him, declared him "unsettled but physically sound,” and urged him to rest. His son arranged a modern flat for him by the river, somewhere bright, somewhere safe.

Safe.

He told himself that word every night like a prayer.

But the cottage did not entirely let him go.

At first, it was nothing more than the nagging feeling of being watched. Then, some nights, the faintest tap from behind the walls, so soft he could pretend it was the boiler settling. And once, when he opened his kitchen cupboard, Hazel’s chicken mug was sitting there, though he could have sworn he hadn’t unpacked it in years.

He tried not to think about the cottage. Tried not to remember the whispers that sounded like her voice. Tried not to wonder what else might have been imitating it.

For fifteen more years, until eighty-five, he lived with the quiet dread that something had followed him. Not constantly. Not violently. But in pulses, like distant thunder reminding him the storm had never fully passed.

Sometimes he felt Hazel near him, warm and familiar, the way love lingers in a room long after laughter fades. Other times he felt… something colder. Something that hovered just outside the corner of his vision, retreating whenever he turned.

He began to wonder whether Hazel had been reaching for him… or trying to warn him.

Near the end, weakened and tired, he often asked the empty room softly:

“Was it you I ran from, Hazel… or something else?”

The silence never answered.

When he finally slipped away, one quiet spring afternoon, with sunlight spilling across his feet, there was no terror. Only release, like loosening a tightly knotted rope.

As he rose, weightless, the world fanned out beneath him, the river, the hills, the neat rows of the new-build estate where he’d spent his final years.

And far beyond that, tucked at the village’s edge, was Rose Cottage.

He expected it to look smaller with distance.

But it didn’t.

A heavy shadow blanketed the rooftop, oil-dark and pulsing faintly, as though alive. It clung to the beams, pooled in the chimney, seeped between every stone. Something twisted inside it, as if two shapes struggled within the same mass, merging, pulling, tearing.

One of those shapes… was Hazel’s.

She surfaced from the dark for a moment; her face strained, flickering, reaching.

Before Lionel could cry out, another force swept toward him: warm, soft, familiar. Hazel, whole, unshadowed, appeared at his side, her hand slipping into his with the certainty of forty years.

“Come away, love,” she whispered. “Don’t look at that. It isn’t me.”

But the shape on the cottage roof writhed. And for one awful heartbeat, it whispered his name exactly as it had in the bedroom that night.

“Lioooneeel…”

Hazel held him tighter.

“Let it stay where it is,” she said gently. “Some things don’t follow us. Some things… stay trapped.”

He looked at her, at the light in her eyes, her real eyes, then down at the cottage one last time.

And he realised the truth:

there had never been one haunting at Rose Cottage.

There had been two.

Hazel’s hand warmed his. He turned from the cottage, from the shadow, from the thing that had worn her voice.

He did not look back again.