Ghost cat, part 2

So there we all are, at the old Jacksonville Funeral Home, taking a tour of the location and listening to a description of the paranormal phenomena that the people connected with the theatre guild experience. They would have doors open and close, coffee pots turn off and on, strange electrical things (the wiring goes back to the early days of the building, so you expect it to be glitchy), voices, musical instruments, including an organ, violin and trombone, that are recorded, shadowy figures in hallways and a woman in white.

Downstairs is where the viewing rooms were and also the kitchen, which had been the embalming room - think about that when you’re having your Cheerios, eh? The top floor, which is the third floor, was where the Williamsons lived when the funeral home was there. There was a spiral staircase and a lot of rooms packed with clothing, props, etc.

I’ll admit it, I was drawn to all the clothes. Old, new, wedding dresses, everyday dresses. Shoes, jackets, hats. Wow! My idea was to see if I could mine the clothing for something attached to it. But other than having a good time looking, I was getting a whole lot of nothing. Maybe I expected someone to just yell, "hey, you, stop that!" I don't know.

I was in the hat room, which was just a little room tucked into the corner of the top floor. Next to the hat room was a hallway and the stairs led down off it. The hallway went quite far back to the other side of the floor, and there were costumes hanging everywhere in this space. When I first came up, I could see a couple of women messing around at the other end with a flashlight.

For those who haven‘t see it, what they were doing is playing a trick with the flashlight. You set it so it will just come on if it’s touched and then ask the ghosts/spirits to turn it on and off for you. I don’t make a habit of doing this, nor have I seen it done a lot, I’ll confess, but the only place I’ve ever seen it work is on “Ghost Hunters” and it seems to work all the time for them. Maybe that should tell us something - either we need to get easier flashlights to flip on or smarter ghosts, maybe? I’m guessing it has more to do with former than latter.

Across the hallway was another room packed with - guess what? - more clothing. This is where a guy I know took a photo of a shadowy figure down at the far end. This guy has a real knack for ghost photography. He saw and took a photo of it. So that made it a popular place to hang out to see if the shadow would make a return appearance.

So, there I am, across the hallway and taking photos in the hat room and darned if I don’t hear a cat. The first call was kind of faint, but the second sounded like it was right outside the door. I’m kind of internally rolling my eyes at the thought of all these costumes AND a cat wandering around up there. But I don’t see the cat while looking out through the door, and no one is saying anything about a cat.

(I’ll do my best to write an imitation of the noise: “Mrwargh.” Anyone who has a cat would recognize the kind of hide-and-seek noise it was making.)

Finally, I say out into the hallway, “Did anyone else hear a cat?”

I get several affirmatives to the my question.

Finally someone starts calling “Here kitty, kitty, kitty,” which is, in my experience, the best way to make one hide in scorn. But I heard it cry faintly a couple more times, farther back into the walkway of the room.

There was an open window there, and some people making some noise outside the window. However, I was between the window and where the “cat” was, and the noises were coming from distinctly different directions. And, believe me, the cat was closer.

Then, one girl jumped slightly. She’d felt the cat rub against her. Anyone out there with cats, answer this: Which person out of a room full of people do cats invariably go to? The one who can’t stand them. And it held true here. This cat, although we couldn’t see it, was sticking like glue to this young girl, although one other person in the party also got a rub.

By the end of the night, I was half convinced it was a ghost cat and half convinced it was a real cat. At any rate, we joined the rest of the group at the end of the night and were talking about our ghost cat experience and one of the theater women told us that, yes, indeed, there WAS a ghost cat. Several of them had heard it and tried to find it on several occasions. And there definitely was NOT a real cat on the third floor.

Unfortunately, I only caught the sound of the cat briefly - I’d left my recorder in the hat room. While it picked up our voices nice and clearly, it didn’t catch the faint cat cries. Although once it figured out it could brush against someone, the cries pretty much quit.

Play the sound: