Cats come and go without ever leaving.

Martha Curtis

The Ghost Cat and Mouse Magic: Animal Spirits and Strangeness

Of course, a haunted house wouldn’t be complete without a resident ghost cat, and apparently one lives in my house alongside the real cats who spend their days curled up on the radiators and watching birds from the bay window in the kitchen. The ghost cat is white and has been seen by two psychics on different occasions—Robert Baca (who also tuned in to the mentally ill ghost and the ghost girl Sarah) and Maria Shaw, the psychic and astrologer who writes a column for the National Enquirer. Maria, who stopped by for a tour of my house when she was in town, informed me that this house has always been a cat house. I’m inclined to think that the ghost cat lived here at one time, and like many of the people who once lived here, just likes to stop by for visits every now and then.

Two friends of mine who are not psychic, Derrick and Dallas, were actually the first people to see the ghost cat when they spent the night several years ago. Derrick and Dallas not only saw the white ghost cat fighting with my cat Sugar, but they heard it yowling, and it even bit Derrick’s toes. The next morning, my friends didn’t believe at first that the white cat wasn’t real, until we walked around my house and did a tour of cats. Only after they scrutinized all of my cats and ruled them out as the culprit did they accept that the white cat must have been a spirit.

My cat Sugar.

I’ve had many unusual experiences with real animals throughout my life, like when our cat Patches had a kitten in my lap. I was in fifth grade, and my brothers and sisters and I were watching TV. Except for the flickering light from the television, it was dark in the living room. I was on the floor holding Patches when I felt something warm and sticky on my leg. I yelled, and someone turned on the light. A tiny newborn kitten was wriggling around on my thigh. We got a cardboard box for Patches to use as a delivery room while giving birth to the rest of her kittens, but I always felt special that Patches trusted me that much.

When we lived in Ottawa, a neighbor’s Shetland pony kept running away from her owner and coming to our house. My dad finally just bought the horse for ten dollars, and we named her Old Paint because of her coloring. My most vivid memory of Old Paint is going out to the pasture to pet her and her pulling off my cap and trying to eat my hair.

When we lived South Dakota, a mountain goat wandered into our yard, and a family of spray-happy skunks moved into the crawl space under our house. An abused dog that was part German shepherd and part wolf also made her way to our house. We already had our boxers Duke and Duchess, but we kept the wolf dog, too. My mom named her Lobo, which is a play on loup, the French word for wolf. Lobo was very loving to everyone in our family but usually bit anyone else who came on our property.

In Hudson, Wisconsin, living right in town, my kids and I tried to catch a young runaway pig in our neighborhood, a broken-off piece of twine still tied around her neck. Here in Sibley, also right in town, I discovered a black sheep in my back yard one afternoon. It turns out the sheep was an escapee from a pageant of some sort. And we had a three-legged bunny in our neighborhood for one entire summer. The rabbit was notorious for her unusual boldness. I’d see her lounging all stretched out by my birdbath or calmly munching clover out in the open yard in the middle of the day. I liked the three-legged bunny but my neighbor Tabitha did not. She said the rabbit stared at her in an odd way.

When my beau Levi and I first met, he commented on how my refrigerator magnet of a friendly yellow lab mutt looked exactly like a dog someone had given him in the 1970s.

“My mom gave me that magnet because it looks just like a dog someone gave me in the seventies!” I told him.

In talking further, we discovered another coincidence—both of our dogs had been killed by wild animals in northern Minnesota. My dog, Sandy, was killed by a bear while saving someone’s life. Her new owner, a truck driver friend of my dad’s, told me Sandy had saved his life by alerting him to the bear’s presence in his yard and fighting the bear while he ran for his gun. Levi’s dog, Floep (named by Dutch friends he had met while living in Africa), was killed by a pack of timber wolves.

During the 1980s and ’90s, my mom’s dog George would come to stay at my house every now and then, while my parents were traveling. George didn’t like spending time with my cats, and he didn’t like the way his toenails clicked on our hardwood floors. But most of all, George didn’t like being away from my mom, whom he adored. Still, in his quiet, worried way, George was a trooper.

George was a Jack Russell terrier mix. We thought of George as a small dog, since my parents usually had big dogs like boxers, labradors, and, of course, Lobo, who was part wolf. But as far as Jack Russell terriers go, George was big. At the time, pot-bellied pigs were popular, and George reminded me of one, with his short legs, stout body, and black and white coloring. But when I made that observation to a truck driver friend named Bud Shekalowski, who was at my house replacing the old two-prong outlets with new grounded ones, he told me George didn’t appreciate the comparison. Bud had been struck by lightning once and electrocuted another time and told me that ever since, he had been able to read minds. He also told me George had some sort of problem with his left eye. I apologized to George for saying he resembled a pot-bellied pig and mentioned to him how smart pigs are. When my parents came to pick up George, I told my mom what Bud had told me. A week later, my mom called to tell me that she’d had to bring George to the vet because his left eye was red and sore. Hearing what George was thinking made me curious about what my cats might say if they could talk. (At the time, Theo and Sugar, along with Jack’s cat, Boo, were living at my house.) It also made me wonder if I could check in with the spirit of our dog Rascal, whose parents were Lobo and Duke. I did some searching and found an animal psychic named Mary Stoffel. I tried to get my then-beau Rex to ask Mary about some animal in his life, but he said since he didn’t have any companion animals, he’d have to ask about the spiders in his basement, and he didn’t care what they thought.

When I called, the first thing Mary said to me was, “Your house is filled with spirits. Are you okay with that?” This was before my book came out, and Mary had no idea who I was or where I lived. I told her I was okay with it, and we continued on with the reading. I asked Mary if she could connect with animals in the spirit world. I wanted to get in touch with Rascal. Rascal had died nearly twenty years earlier. Mary said she had never gone back that far in time, but she would give it a try. She asked me for his name, and then she tuned in. “Is Rascal a big dog, rangy, with strong masculine energy?” she asked.

“Yes,” I said.

“Hmm …” Mary paused for a minute. “I’m not sure this is your dog. This being has a touch of the wild in him, like he’s not completely a domesticated animal.”

“No, that’s Rascal!” I said. “His mother was part wolf.” Mary then told me that one of Rascal’s chosen tasks for his lifetime was to learn how to live peacefully with humans. She said he was doing fine and was glad he had spent time with our family.

With that bit of communication taken care of, we moved on to the fun of hearing what the three cats had to say. Mary was so taken with Theo’s peaceful and wise vibe that she said she just wanted to soak it in for a moment. Theo told her when we moved into this house, he didn’t know if he could deal with all the ghosts and astral stuff going on. Mary told me that Theo not only learned to deal with it, but he was acting as sort of a sentry for the astral realm of the house. She said that he would let me know when weird stuff was going on. I thought of how when we first moved in, Theo had started to display the really odd behavior of standing on his hind legs for no apparent reason. It was very disconcerting to walk into a room and see a cat standing in the middle of it. Mary said Theo was like a familiar for me, in that he was a partner in keeping our home’s vibe clear and positive.

Mary next tuned in to Sugar Plum. She said that while Theo watched over the astral realm of our house, Sugar was in charge of the physical realm. Sugar told Mary that we had people coming and going all the time, which was true. Between kids, family parties, friends, and foster care clients at my house one or two weekends a month, our household was usually bustling. Mary said Sugar was like a social ambassador—she greeted visitors and was the most outgoing of our cats, which was true. My favorite Sugar quote was when she told Mary, “I’ve got my paws full taking care of all the people that she has coming and going.”

Boo was last, and Mary said Boo wanted a clearly defined role in the household since Sugar and Theo were both doing important tasks. Mary said Boo was a natural hunter and wanted to hunt something. Mary asked if we had any mice in the house that Boo could take care of for us. I like the idea of cats scaring mice away rather than killing them, but at the time, we had never seen a mouse in our house. I was really impressed that Mary had tuned in to each cat’s vibe so well. We had gotten Boo from our neighbor, and I knew that Boo’s dad hunted bunnies and her mom was a bird killer.

After the experience with Mary, I tried to use animal communication techniques on some hornets that had built a mean-looking paper nest on my front porch. It was the first time there had ever been a hive on my house, and the hive was on a corner of the house near the Catholic school. This was during the time when a highly charged debate was going on about the school putting up temporary classrooms in their parking lot. The hive was on the corner of my house that pointed right at the school, and I wondered if it represented all the buzzy emotions swirling around the issue. For all my fears of spiders and other creepy-crawly things, I am weirdly unafraid of bees, wasps, and hornets. I decided to try to connect with the hornets. I stood on the sidewalk and tried to tune in. I sent out the message that my front porch wasn’t an ideal location for their nest from my perspective, but I was going to leave their home alone until they were done with it in the fall, then take it down. The response I got was a disdainful “Pfffft”—like, “No kidding, you’re going to leave it alone.” And although I don’t know whether or not that was what the hornets were actually thinking, their hornet friends did not show up to build a hive on my porch the next year.

One of my favorite Sugar Plum stories happened when a film crew was at my house one night. One of the guests was a woman who did automatic writing, which meant she acted as a channel, sitting with a pen and notebook, letting spirits express themselves through her. (The late author Ruth Montgomery wrote several best-selling metaphysical books via automatic writing using her typewriter.) The channel was filmed in the playroom, which is sunny and cheerful in the daytime but at night gets an ominous vibe that is commented on by nearly everyone who comes through my house. (This is the room that we no longer use as a bedroom because of some of the scary haunting things that have happened in it.)

The channel was sitting on the floor with a pen and a notebook in her hand. There was a camera person in the room with her, but most of us were in a different part of the house with Robert Baca and the other camera person. The cameras were rolling, but the spirits weren’t cooperating. Sugar, who loves to be part of whatever is going on, watched with interest. After a few minutes of nothing happening, Sugar apparently decided to take matters into her own paws. She jumped into the channel’s lap, put her paw on the pen, and dragged the pen across the page. We weren’t able to decipher Sugar’s scribble—I guess she just wanted to add some drama to the film shoot—but I still have Sugie’s “automatic writing” in a drawer.

The spirits of both David Grey Hair and Theo, our much-loved family cats, have also visited. Both cats lived to be nearly twenty years old and were the source of a lot of happiness in our family. Both David and Theo were with us while my kids Molly and Jack were growing up, which made their passing even more difficult, as they were a tie to one of the most satisfying and meaningful periods in my life. I wrote about David’s visit in my first book. I woke up one night a few years after he died and saw him, healthy and fine, sitting outside my bedroom window on the roof of the back porch. I was having an out-of-body experience at the time, and as happy as I was to see David, I really wanted to touch him and hold him, too. I realized that in an astral state, I should be able to reach through the window glass. I gave it a try. The glass felt heavy and draggy, but my hands and arms went through the window. I was able to pet David again and tell him how much he meant to us and how much we missed him.

Theo died two years ago. He was eighteen and a half, and his thyroid went crazy. He also had kidney problems. We tried to humanely treat both conditions and keep him comfortable, but his last few months were pretty grim. I believe that if a cat is no longer able to eat, is in extreme pain, or seems not to want to live any longer, it’s time to put him or her down. Otherwise, they get whatever care they need for as long as they need it.

One night shortly before Theo died, he could no longer climb the stairs. He slept in a corner of the living room, and I slept on the couch so I could be near him. The next morning when I woke up, I started to cry when I saw my beautiful Theo, scrawny and weak, still in the exact same spot he had been the night before. Theo looked at me, then came over to the couch. He jumped up on the couch—I don’t know how—and put his paw on my cheek. He looked directly into my eyes. He remained this way for almost a minute. I told him we loved him and thanked him for all the things we had learned from him. I told him to let me know when he was ready to go.

A few days after this happened, I came home from work and it was evident that Theo was dying. I called our vet and asked if it would be more humane to let Theo die naturally or to put him down. The vet, Dr. Filkins, said it could take Theo a day or more to die, and it would be better to put him down. When he got the call to come to my house, Dr. Filkins was out for ice cream with his wife, so they came together. The people at our vet’s office have provided care for our cats for fifteen years, and we consider all of them friends. I called Molly and Jack, and they came over. We said our goodbyes to Theo. It was summertime, and when Dr. Filkins arrived, we brought Theo out to the flower garden under the angel statue. Dr. Filkins gave Theo the shot and, in an instant, Theo was gone.

I had read in a Diane Stein book that, if possible, you should stay with your companion animal’s body for three hours after they die, as it takes that long for their spirit to completely disengage from their physical body. We had Theo on a soft blanket. We brushed Theo’s fur, which had gotten matted and dull during his illness. (He’d been too frail and sore during his last few months to tolerate being groomed.) We put flowers and sweet-smelling blooms from the trees across the street on his body. It was very comforting to spend some time with Theo and be part of taking care of his body one last time. It makes me think we have really lost an important ritual with our modern-day funeral and burial practices. My kids and I talked about all the ways Theo had made our lives more interesting and enjoyable. We brought Sugar over to say goodbye to Theo, but she didn’t even seem to realize his body was there. After an hour or so, we put Theo’s body, wrapped in the towel, into a clear plastic container with the lid off. He looked like he was sleeping. We left him on the back porch, and the next morning, I said goodbye and petted his head one last time before bringing him to the vet to be cremated. It took a few weeks to get Theo’s ashes back, and I was still having a hard time dealing with him being gone. I put off burying his ashes for a few months, and in the meantime, Molly had moved to Savannah, Georgia, to go to grad school. I finally decided on a beautiful September day that I should take care of his ashes while the weather was still good. Jack was in London on a business trip, so I just did a small ceremony myself, burying Theo’s ashes in the same flower garden where the ashes of our cat David and Itty, Molly’s pygmy hedgehog, are buried. It was difficult, but I felt much better afterward. The next day, Molly called me from Savannah. “Did you finally bury Theo’s ashes yesterday?” she asked.

“Yes,” I said. I hadn’t told either of the kids about the ceremony, since I had decided to do it on the spur of the moment.

“I knew it! Theo came to me in a dream last night, Mom,” Molly said. “He looked healthy and happy, and he kissed me on the nose. I think he wanted to let us know that he is fine.”

Theo’s spirit visited our house on one other occasion. Since my book came out, I have started offering haunted tea parties in order to accommodate all the requests I get from people to see my home. A Girl Scout leader named Amanda sent me an email to see if she could schedule a haunted tea party for her troop. She was going to stop by to pick up my book to read before the party. It was a beautiful fall day, a little more than a year after Theo died. The boulevard maples were starting to turn orange and yellow, and the sky was bright with the blue sunshine of September.

While waiting for Amanda to stop by, I was upstairs in my bedroom. My cats Sugar and Fluffy (both of whom got their fabulous names from young girls) were in the room with me. I was petting the cats, watching the curtains blow gently in the breeze. I wished Theo could be with us to enjoy the perfect shimmering vibe of the day. It was the first time since the burial ceremony that I had really thought about how much I missed him. Suddenly, I felt Theo’s presence. I looked around hopefully. I asked Theo to let me know if he was with us. I waited a few minutes but didn’t see him. I still felt he was with us, enjoying a shared moment on a perfect autumn afternoon, so I told Theo we loved him and missed him and hoped he was well.

Amanda and her daughter Mia arrived a few minutes later. They were so nice that I invited them in for a quick tour while we discussed the logistics of the Girl Scout tea party. While standing in the back hallway of the house, Mia suddenly fell backwards, as though she had been pushed. “What just happened?” I asked.

Mia said, “I don’t know—suddenly, I just fell over!”

I realized that Mia had been standing right in one of the main portals in our house, the doorway between the back hall and summer kitchen. So much weird stuff has happened in the back hallway that our friend Sonya gave us a “ghost crossing” sign to hang on the wall along with the framed house blessing and vintage holy water dispenser that were already there. My friend Cowgirl Josie saw Leon back there one night, peering around the corner, as we finished up the final preparations for a party. Other guests have felt the skin-prickly, supercharged atmosphere that sometimes pervades the area or even felt something brush against them. On two separate occasions, our guests’ cell phones have acted strange in the vicinity of the portal. One phone rang when it was turned off (and continued to misbehave on the way home). Another phone delivered two phantom calls and a text message from nowhere that even the phone company couldn’t explain. I was just about to mention the portal when Amanda gasped and pointed into the hallway behind Mia.

“What?” Mia and I both said at once.

“I just saw a cat, and it disappeared right in front of my eyes!” Amanda said.

“Well, we do have a ghost cat here,” I said. “Was it white?”

“No, it was black with a white bib. It came out from behind that hall door and disappeared.”

Now it was my turn to catch my breath. Theo! He had shown up after all. He was black with a white bib, and one of his favorite hiding spots was behind the hall door. I got choked up, and so did Amanda and Mia when they heard the story of me talking to Theo just before they came. Amanda was especially excited by the experience because she had never seen a spirit before.

My very favorite weird animal experience was the mouse miracle. I was watching TV one night with my beau at the time, Rex, and he saw something race across the kitchen floor. At the time, Theo, Sugar, and Jack’s cat Boo were living at home. The cats all ran into the parlor. We followed them and saw they had chased a mouse under the piano. I put the cats in the other room while Rex got a broom. I had the idea that I would grab the mouse by the tail and bring it safely out the front door. Rex seemed a little skeptical of this plan, but I had occasionally held my kids’ pet gerbil years before, so I felt like I actually might be able to touch a mouse long enough to get him out the door. What I really wanted was for the mouse to go to the front door, and I could just open the door and let him out. That is the picture I had in my mind—and that is exactly what happened the next night.

We couldn’t scare the mouse out from under the piano and we didn’t want to move the piano and squish him either. I didn’t want to set a trap, and I didn’t want the mouse to die at the paws of my cats. I closed the parlor doors, and Rex and I went to bed.

The next morning, I opened up the parlor, hoping the mouse might have somehow escaped outside during the night. When all three cats ran straight to the radiator, I surmised the mouse was still in the room. I shooed the cats out. I figured the mouse was probably exhausted and hungry, so I did Reiki to protect the mouse. I tried to communicate with him to encourage him to leave my house the way he came, but I didn’t feel like I connected with him. The impression I got was that the mouse’s consciousness was too small and his stress too great to connect with him in any meaningful way. Then I got the idea that I needed to communicate with something bigger than the mouse, like a guardian or oversoul of mice. So I sent the message out to whoever is in charge of mice to try to encourage this mouse to leave the house the way he came in. I went to work feeling very sorry for the mouse.

When I got home that night, I gingerly made my way through the house, afraid I would encounter the gory aftermath of a cat and mouse game. I breathed easier when I realized the mouse was either outside or in a new hiding spot. I let the cats out on the back screened porch and worked in the yard until dark. When I came in the house at 10 pm, I felt grounded and happy, the way I usually do after spending time in my yard. I turned on the front hall light as I headed upstairs, and there, sitting on his haunches a foot away from the front door, was the little mouse! I thanked the mouse guardian or whoever brought him there. When he saw me, the mouse ran and hid behind a vase of flowers at the base of the coat rack, but he kept watching to see what was happening. (I could see him because there is a full-length mirror on the coat rack.) I ran to the kitchen to get a broom, just in case he ran toward my legs, which were bare. I asked the mouse guardian to guide the mouse toward freedom as I slowly opened the front door. Then I opened the screen door as wide as I could and propped it open with the slider thing on the top. I was just starting to wonder how I was going to coax the mouse around the interior door (which opened inward and would have made it necessary for the mouse to make a wide arc back in towards the interior of the house). But the mouse figured out the most direct escape route before I did. He raced forward, through the inch-or-so clearance between the doorframe and the door, and ran out the door at full speed before dropping out of sight off the edge of the porch. I called Rex and said, “I have just witnessed a mouse miracle. The little mouse has left the building, and he went out through the front door.”

This chapter took a week to write. I had a hard time finishing it for some reason, maybe because I was writing about saying goodbye to Theo. I finally decided that maybe I should set it aside and go on to a different chapter, even though I like to finish one chapter before starting another. I was still debating the matter when I got home from working out with Molly and Jack. As I walked through the front hall, I turned on the front porch light. There, sitting right at the front door, was a big white cat with a heavy winter coat. I had never seen this cat before around the neighborhood. The white cat got up and strode around the porch for a while, then walked down the porch steps and then the front walk, down another set of steps, and finally to the end of my carriage sidewalk.
I took this white cat as a sign from the universe that everything was going to be fine. I was going to start this chapter with a ghost cat and end it with a mouse miracle, but I guess instead the chapter starts and ends with white cats, one a ghost and the other a messenger.