Poltercat

by Ray Hager
(Louisville, KY)

My story is not so much fiction as a trick of the imagination... or something else. A few years ago my wife, my two young daughters and I lived in an apartment. One night as I was sitting on the living room couch I thought I saw a black cat, plain as day, walk across the kitchen floor and disappear into the cabinet under the sink. Thinking one had somehow made its way into our apartment from outside I got up to go look. The cabinet door was shut.

I opened it and looked all around inside, feeling sure I would see a cat inside. There was none. I looked all around the apartment and didn't see a cat anywhere. I thought maybe I had just dozed and imagined it. I forgot about it for a couple of weeks and then one night my oldest daughter, who was around seven, was sitting on her mother's lap and she leaned back to look down the hallway.

My wife asked her what she was looking at and she said, "I thought I saw that cat again."

My wife asked her, "What cat?" to which she replied, "I keep seeing a black cat going into my toy box or in the closet but when I look for it it isn't there."

This greatly startled my wife who told me later that she herself had also seen a black cat going under the dining room table! We were completely freaked out, but didn't make a big deal out of it because we didn't want to scare our daughters.

Eventually we moved into a house. My wife and I each saw the black cat two different times, even in that house! The last experience any of us had was when I stretched out corner to corner across the bed to take a short snooze and suddenly felt a sensation travel from my legs up to my chest, as if something was under the bed moving around. I jumped up and looked. There was nothing there. I layed back down the same way and felt it again!

It was the weirdest thing I had ever felt! We had our own cat by then, so I thought maybe she was under there hiding, but I doubted she was strong enough to make me feel her scooting around under the bed. I called to her. She did not come out from under the bed. She came from down the hall and looked at me from the doorway. "Meow?" she said as if to say "Yes? What do you want?"

I only felt the sensation those two times and we were never visited by our mystery cat again, but it was enough to make us never forget. And wonder...