Here, Kitty, Kitty

I’m a cat person.

So when I first started at Shaker’s and heard that one of our resident basement shadow people was a cat, I was more enthralled than put-off. With Michelle, our tour supervisor, reporting that she even felt it rubbing up against her legs on certain occasions, I was beyond excited to have my own interactions with said “ghost kitty.”

Throughout my time here I’ve caught my glimpses – thinking I see it scurry past or feeling like there’s a small presence lurking around in the basement. At some points, I’ve even thought I heard a little mew. With my admitted skepticism, though, I’ve wondered if it could be my mind playing tricks on me, or if the presence could be something else. Perhaps something malicious.

On a tour of mine the week following New Years, our little resident ghost cat decided to make himself or herself far more known than usual. Maybe it’s because I spent a little more time talking about him/her, or maybe because I had a lot of cat people present in my tour group.

My tour group was enamored with this cat when I mentioned it in the basement portion of the tour. They tried looking for it, calling to it and trying to coax it out. I didn’t think too much of it, until I noticed that while I was walking through the basement, I kept feeling like I needed to watch where I was stepping, like I was trying to make sure I wasn’t stepping on something. I kept looking down at my feet as I walked, trying to avoid catching my foot on this presence that seemed to be scurrying along with us. I noticed other people in my group doing this as well. If you’re a cat owner and your cat tends to run around the house a lot, you know what this feeling is like.

Following the tour, conversations about the cat continued between members of my group. There was a woman who believed she might have been somewhat clairvoyant, and so I took her and her friend back down to the basement to see what else may happen with her down there. She got a read on some names – felt a presence whose name was something like Jeremiah or Jerry. As she’s telling me this, she stops mid-sentence. She was looking at the ground behind me and her face went stark as she gasped. Experiences like this, especially with people in my tour group, get me excited. Although this woman looked terrified, I couldn’t help but smile in anticipation of what she was going to tell me she just freaked out about.

She saw the cat. “It was just a shadow, but it was definitely the cat. He ran across the entire floor behind you.” She pointed to the spot. The shadow of the table down there was cast behind me, and she explained that she saw it run across that shadow.

Though upset that I missed it, I was giddy about the fact that it had been so close to me. When we got back upstairs, we told the rest of the group about this occurrence. They were all still around comparing the pictures they had taken.

One of the girls in the group showed me a picture she took in which she noticed something interesting. It was two glowing dots – next to each other and symmetrical. They could just be glowing orbs, but there positioning made them look like a pair of glowing eyes. I asked her to turn up the brightness on her phone.

There was the cat. The ears were clear as day. It looked like tufts of fur sticking out and framing the eyes.

Furrier than I had imagined in my head.