Sunday, 11:00 AM
The King’s Head was unusually quiet—a rare Sunday lull in what was normally Enfield’s busiest corner. I sat near the window, where the afternoon light slanted through the glass and caught dust motes dancing in the still air.
Two staff members leaned against the bar behind you, voices low. The rest of the room held nothing but empty wooden tables and the ghost of yesterday’s laughter.
Then—movement.
Not from the door. Not from the kitchen. From the alley beyond my line of sight. I glanced toward it casually, expecting a delivery driver or a stray cat. What I saw made me freeze.
A shadow passed across the market square outside—but wrong. Too fluid. Too deliberate. It had shape, contours that suggested fabric sweeping across cobblestones. A woman’s silhouette, Victorian perhaps, or Edwardian. Long dress, high collar, hair pinned beneath some headpiece you couldn’t quite see.
She didn’t walk so much as drift, her form flickering between visibility and absence like a candle flame in a draft.
Before I could even speak—the shadow was gone. Vanished into the narrow passage beside the pub, leaving no trace except the echo of what might have been a gasp.
The staff at the bar hadn’t looked up. The drink in my glass remained undisturbed.
But for weeks afterward, whenever I passed The King’s Head on a quiet Sunday, I couldn’t shake the feeling that something waited just beyond the windows. Something patient. Something old. And that sometimes, on days when the market was nearly empty and the light fell at just the right angle, she would drift past again—watching, always watching, from the space between then and now.
Via Email – A. Baillee