Gene Nash

Join Date 12/2003

+24

Could My House Be Haunted?

what will happen tonight?

It happened slightly after 4 A.M. two nights ago.

The cat went crazy. He dashed through the living room, into the kitchen, and flew up into the kitchen window. He started banging at it with his head and clawing at the sill. He hissed like a broken radiator. His tail wagged furiously.

I quickly followed him and snatched him up before he could hurt himself. There was nothing outside.

I carried him back to the living room, his tail beating against me, his hissing continuing loudly in my ears. One claw sank into my shoulder as he held on.

I looked out the sliding doors to the patio. His eyes darted around, then locked on a target. Hiss, claw. Hiss, claw.

There was nothing there.

I eventually set him down. He kept looking out at the patio as if threatening something. After a while he went back to the kitchen window, this time calmer, but still hissing and intensly wagging his tail. I opened the blinds and looked out, but I never saw anything.

Okay, so maybe the cat thought he heard something or smelled something and he freaked out. Not a highly unusual cat occurrence. No big deal.

Or so I thought till last night at slightly after 4 A.M.

As I sat working at the computer in the living room, I heard the refrigerator door open and close behind me. My writing so consumed me that I didn't pay attention to it. It didn't even occur to me I was the only one here.

After the door closed, I heard a chair creek as if someone had just sat down in it.

"Fuzzy must have jumped up on the chair to sleep," I thought to myself.

I turned to look at the chair. No cat. He was in the kitchen sleeping.

Then I realized I had heard the refrigerator door open and close. It finally broke through to me that it was unlikely the cat had gone looking for a late-night snack.

What had gotten into the fridge and sat down in my chair?

Maybe I'll find out soon. It's closing in on 4 A.M. What's going to happen tonight?

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kingbee

Join Date 04/2004

+42

maybe your cat was sensing an approaching colorado river tsunami? i realize that wouldnt explain the refrigerator door unless...dust mites also sensed it and created a biomass ladder in hopes of just once having something less disgusting to eat (one can only graze on flakes of discarded skin and cat dander for so long before one begins to wonder whether that stuff really tastes like chicken) before their world was totally destroyed around them and they were carried on the flood to gila bend or some other godforsaken location never mentioned in 'route 66'.

(yall got coyotes around there?)

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maybe your cat was sensing an approaching colorado river tsunami?

Heh, the dam breaking, maybe.

I am in the curve of the river, so we'd be among the first to float away.

Obviously the rational explanations are that 1) either there really was something out there somewhere or the cat thought there was (as I wrote, a freaky cat is hardly evidence of anything other than there's a cat in the house) and 2) I was so intently working that I heard something without knowing what it was and my mind filled in the refrigerator part. I acknowledge I wasn't paying attention and only noticed moments later what I thought it had been. The chair making noise could be attributed to "settling." Wood makes noises for all sorts of atmospheric reasons.

But what fun are rational explanations? It's ghosts, man! I tells ya it's ghosts!

Did I mention the phone calls from the portals of hell? The tormented demonic voices from beyond left on my answering machine? Okay, so maybe they were wrong numbers from a really badly distorted cell connection. But that's the way the mind starts trying to come up with explanations by piecing together totally unrelated things. (I wish I hadn't deleted them, though. I'd have recorded one to MP3 and shared. That was before the fridge incident last night.)

It easy to see how people get so caught up in things like this.

Despite my predilection for horror stories, I'm not even convinced ghosts exist. I tend more toward the cynical and skeptical and look for explanations to explain phenomena away. I've seen and experienced some weird things, but it's still not hard to find explanations other than "Ghost!" without too much effort.

Darn.

(yall got coyotes around there?)

Coyote was my first thought last night.

I've never seen one over here. The closest one was about 1.5 miles away. But they are certainly about.

He usually doesn't react unless something is within the fence, and I don't think I'd have missed a coyote loping about, but who knows? He could well have been set off by something outside the perimeter, and I still could have missed seeing something.

Still not as much fun, though.

some other godforsaken location never mentioned in 'route 66'.

Favortie AZ place name I never knew existed (so far): Wikiup.

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UPDATE:

Nothing more exciting last 4 A.M. hour than a rattling doorknob with no-one on the other side (of the door anyway...).

My "haunting" is dwindling. Tomorrow night may be nothing more than a strongly worded note.

I didn't know ghosts got bored.

Leave it to me to get a lazy ghost.

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ignore alien orders, gene.

ignore them!

Well there's something I definitely don't believe in -- alien visitation.

cats are insane.

Not only insane, but evil. My cat has clearly been having a spot of fun at my expense. After all, who other than me was present for all these events? The cat!

Clearly he set me up with his pretend freak out. Then he followed it with his little refrigerator/chair trick. While I think he's quietly sleeping, he's laying there snickering at me. And who came calmly from the direction of the rattled door knob? Yep -- you got it on the first guess.

The little S.O.B. I'm probably the laughing stock of the neighborhood strays.

Dumb cats.

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kingbee

Join Date 04/2004

+42

Leave it to me to get a lazy ghost

maybe you can borrow some of the cat's speed (clearly it's been doing too much) and sprinkle it on a plate of cookies or something you leave on the table as a peace offering to the spirits?

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