The Hallway Watcher

My brother Finn and I shared a wall in our old house in the Adelaide Hills, a place where the eucalyptus trees pressed close and the wind sounded like something breathing. Our parents had split the house into two wings, and at night, with Dad away on his FIFO shifts, it was just Mum, Finn, and me. Mum would tuck us in, leaving the hall light on, a dim glow that cast long shadows along the floorboards.

We never discussed it, but both of us had the same dream-like awareness of the hallway between our rooms and the bathroom. It was a stretch of wallpapered corridor with a single picture of a lighthouse, and at night it felt longer than it was. The first time I saw it, I was nine. I woke with a start, not from a sound but from a feeling that I was being watched. I sat up, and there, in the hallway, a shape moved from the spare room to the bathroom. It was tall, dark, and fluid, like smoke wearing a human form. I blinked, and it was gone. The next morning, I asked Finn if he’d seen anything. He looked at me, his face pale, and nodded. We agreed not to tell Mum.

A few weeks later, Dad came home for a long weekend. He fixed the creaky step, mowed the lawn, and then left again for the mines. That night, Finn and I woke at the same time, as if someone had called our names. The hallway was not empty. The figure stood at the end, between our doors, and it was looking into our rooms. Its face was a void, but I knew it was watching us. Finn, who’d been doing karate since he was six, got up to face it. He thought he could scare it away, maybe kick it like a bully. He marched into the hall, threw a punch at the shape, and his fist went through it like air. The figure turned to him, and for a moment, it seemed to grow, filling the corridor, and then it vanished.

Finn stood there shaking, his arm still extended. He looked at me with wide eyes and said, ‘It’s not a ghost. It’s something else.’ We went back to bed, but we didn’t sleep. Over the next few months, the figure would appear every few weeks, always when Dad was away. It never approached, just watched, always from the same spot near the spare room. We started leaving the hall light on, but one night we found the bulb shattered, the glass on the floor. We replaced it with a night light, but that too was found broken, the plastic cracked.

We tried to rationalize it: maybe it was a trick of light, a draft, a stress-induced hallucination. But we both saw it, and we both shared the same nightmares – dreams of a long hallway that stretched into darkness, and at the other end, a doorway with a faint light, and something standing just inside, waiting. The dreams grew more intense, and we started to dread the nights when Dad was away.

One night, I decided to follow it. I crept out of bed, ignoring Finn’s hiss from his room to come back. I padded down the hallway, the floorboards cold under my feet, and I saw the figure enter the bathroom. I reached the door, my hand trembling on the handle, and pushed it open. The bathroom was empty, but the mirror was fogged, and written on it in the condensation was a name: ‘Lottie.’ My heart stopped. I had never told anyone that I hated my real name and preferred to be called Lottie, not even Finn. The figure had known my secret name.

I ran back to my room, slammed the door, and hid under the covers. The next morning, the mirror was clear, and there was no trace of anything. But Finn found a change in me. I was silent, withdrawn. He finally asked me what had happened, and I told him about the name. He looked at me with a mixture of fear and understanding and said, ‘It knows us. It knows our names.’

That’s when we decided to set up a camera in the hallway. We used Dad’s old camcorder, the one with the red record light, and we set it on a tripod, pointing at the hallway. We waited for the next appearance, which came two weeks later. The night was windless, and the house was still. We both woke, and the figure was there. It didn’t move. It just stood, and we watched it from our beds. The camera was recording. After it vanished, we rewound the tape. The film showed the hallway, empty, and then a flicker of static. Then the image shifted, and we saw the figure appear, but it was not the same as what we saw. On the tape, the figure had a face – the face of a man, gaunt and sorrowful, with eyes that seemed to look directly into the lens. It opened its mouth, and a sound came out, but the audio was distorted, like a scream trapped underwater.

We took the tape to a local historian, an old man who collected stories of the area. He listened, his face grave, and then he told us about the previous owner of our house, a man named Arthur, who had disappeared in the 1950s, leaving behind a wife and daughter. They said he walked into the bush and never returned. But some believed he was murdered, and his spirit haunted the house, searching for his daughter, whose pet name was ‘Lottie.’ That was the story. That was why it knew our names, because his daughter had been called Lottie, and he was looking for her.

We never saw the figure again, but we still felt it, like a presence in the hallway, waiting. Even now, as an adult, when I visit Finn, we both avoid that stretch of floor, and we never sleep without a light on. I’m writing this because I want to tell someone, to make sure that the story is out there, that the house in the hills has a secret, and that the hallway watcher may still be waiting for his Lottie.