Marty is a down-and-out jazz musician with colourful dreams of making it big, but right now he's living on the edge and making small money by giving music lessons to people who don't seem to want them. His sometimes girlfriend, Sheila, is a barmaid at the Rose of Sharon, a local pub owned by the hot-tempered Frank. One day Sheila takes an old rocking chair out of the pub's storage and gives it to Marty; he then discovers that the chair is haunted by two ghosts, a middle-aged woman named Lilly and a precocious little girl named Ruthie.
