The Haunted Homeowner's Survival Guide

* warning: cat story ahead *

This is a tale of two cats, Tuxedo and Gidget. Tuxedo was a neutered, male black and white cat that I adopted at about 10 weeks old from a semi-feral litter. He was the floor traffic director around the house, the playtime toy timer, and otherwise kind of a control freak when it came to Gidget. He often hissed at her for no reason, swatted at her, and generally wanted her to go away.

Gidget is a neutered (formerly feral) 3 year old tabby. She never really paid attention to Tux other than to stay out of his way. Even if he swatted her and hissed, she shrugged it off.

I suspect the tension started because Gidget found herself inside just a few short weeks before she came into season for the first time.  Tux tried his best to take care of the situation, but he came up missing some important bits of equipment. I saw this frustrate him a couple of times, and if I recall correctly, that’s when the swatting started. I got Gidget fixed as soon as I could afford it, but Tux had already had enough.

Tux has been sick for the past couple of years, slowly losing a battle with cardiomyopathy – probably due to feline leukemia. He finally passed away on Friday, Dec 11 this year – only 7 years old. I buried him in the yard right after I got home from work that day.

It was kind of a relief that Tux was finally gone, in a way. It’s hard watching a someone – human or not – struggle.

The next day I was feeding Gidget (about 4:30pm), and for a treat – hey let’s have some tuna fish! I took some of my food to the table while Gidget went face down into her plate. I’ve never seen her go more than 5 feet from a plate of tuna – no matter what may happen to distract her. She’s an absolutely greedy little pig at dinner.

On my way back to the kitchen from the table, I was teasing her, asking if she missed Tux. Yeah, I wasn’t expecting a reply… But, I felt a rush of something like vertigo, and a tingling around my legs. Gidget looked up, and bugged out across the front room and dashed upstairs in about five steps. She hid. I took some food up that was eaten later, but I still don’t know where she hid that night. I saw her briefly once, around 11pm and she had quietly come up onto my bed by 3am.

I did not see or hear anything. No evidence to dissect, and no way to repeat the experiment exactly. Just… odd. So I have to admit that I may be one notch less skeptical about animal entities.  To be honest, I would have dismissed it completely if I had not had an odd sensation at the exact time Gidget got spooked. Cats, like people, are not always predictable. So what if she decided to eat dinner later? Would I have really noticed anything?

This takes me back a year. I did an investigation last winter for the sister of a friend. They reported a lot of dog-like shadows especially outside, activity around the doggie door, and a visible white dog apparition in the hallway.  Well, I couldn’t duplicate the dog-like shadows. I didn’t see any apparitions. I tracked some of the doggie door noises to some stuff getting blown around by the airflow when the furnace kicked on.  There were other issues reported as well, but I wasn’t finding anything resembling evidence. I left it as an incomplete investigation, and their activity died down over the spring / summer.

Now I’m not so sure about all of that. I know something happened right here, but even if I had some evidence, would it really prove anything?  I didn’t really doubt the possibility of an animal presence, but I’ve certainly not experienced one for myself until now.

Comments? What similar stories do you have to tell?

This entry was posted on December 22, 2009 at 11:16 pm and is filed under Haunted with tags animal, cat, ghost, spirit, tingle, vertigo. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed Both comments and pings are currently closed.