bit of a story behind this, actually.
I lived on a farm in new jersey when I was in 3rd/4th grade. we were renting it from a nice older lady, who had owned it for a few years.
strange things started happening shortly after we moved in; my brother wouldn't stop talking about the 'shadow man' that would move around his room at night (which is a story for another day), and we'd hear occasional yowling and meowing from the basement when our only cat was outside or in the room with us, clearly not meowing. nothing in the basement ever made that noise when we played down there, and boilers and washing machines typically don't yowl.
then, I started seeing shadow cats. I saw one in the basement while playing with my brother. I saw one in the hallway at night, blocking my way to bathroom. I remember lying down in my room one night and seeing one cat on the desk next to my head, and another on the pillow beside me. I held perfectly still under the covers for an hour, and when I came out, both were gone. I still to this day do not know which one was my real cat, Kira, and which was a shadow cat - or if Kira was even there at all.
Then one day, while playing outside in the late summer, I found a cat skull among the weeds by the barn. it was clearly old - there wasn't a single tuft of fur or remnant of viscera on its sun-bleached surface. my father buried it by the smaller sugar maple on the weekend. I visited it every firefly-lit evening in the month that followed. I never saw the shadow cats after that, but the 'shadow man' only got worse.
we came to find out where the skull came from about half a year after the fact. before our landlord had bought the property, an older couple had lived there. I admittedly don't remember the finer details, but one day, the wife passed away from an illness or an accident - something no one can really prepare themself for. the old man, in his grief, locked his numerous mousing cats in the barn with no food before he followed his wife. when the landlord bought the place, she opened up the barn to find upwards of a dozen cat corpses.
what was odd about the skull was that it was alone in the weeds. there weren't any other bones or remains there, but both of my parents confirmed it was real, and not some nasty prank by the neighbors or my brother. I don't know what happened, but I hope the poor thing's in a better place. maybe some other weird little kid is bringing flowers to a cat's grave on that property now, haha.
anyway, I don't think the cats were evil - I don't think animals really even have the capacity for such things. (the 'shadow man' was absolutely malignant, there were a lot of things that happened there that just weren't right, but that's a whole other can of worms.) I don't know if the old man became the thing in my brother's room, or if that was something that fed on his grief, or something that came before/after the incident, but part of me thinks the cats were protecting us from it. my mother never saw them, but she heard them; my brother and I saw them though, plain as day. I don't think I'll ever forget them.
so yeah haha anyway here's my pixel pet poultry milkshake dot com dressup
I lived on a farm in new jersey when I was in 3rd/4th grade. we were renting it from a nice older lady, who had owned it for a few years.
strange things started happening shortly after we moved in; my brother wouldn't stop talking about the 'shadow man' that would move around his room at night (which is a story for another day), and we'd hear occasional yowling and meowing from the basement when our only cat was outside or in the room with us, clearly not meowing. nothing in the basement ever made that noise when we played down there, and boilers and washing machines typically don't yowl.
then, I started seeing shadow cats. I saw one in the basement while playing with my brother. I saw one in the hallway at night, blocking my way to bathroom. I remember lying down in my room one night and seeing one cat on the desk next to my head, and another on the pillow beside me. I held perfectly still under the covers for an hour, and when I came out, both were gone. I still to this day do not know which one was my real cat, Kira, and which was a shadow cat - or if Kira was even there at all.
Then one day, while playing outside in the late summer, I found a cat skull among the weeds by the barn. it was clearly old - there wasn't a single tuft of fur or remnant of viscera on its sun-bleached surface. my father buried it by the smaller sugar maple on the weekend. I visited it every firefly-lit evening in the month that followed. I never saw the shadow cats after that, but the 'shadow man' only got worse.
we came to find out where the skull came from about half a year after the fact. before our landlord had bought the property, an older couple had lived there. I admittedly don't remember the finer details, but one day, the wife passed away from an illness or an accident - something no one can really prepare themself for. the old man, in his grief, locked his numerous mousing cats in the barn with no food before he followed his wife. when the landlord bought the place, she opened up the barn to find upwards of a dozen cat corpses.
what was odd about the skull was that it was alone in the weeds. there weren't any other bones or remains there, but both of my parents confirmed it was real, and not some nasty prank by the neighbors or my brother. I don't know what happened, but I hope the poor thing's in a better place. maybe some other weird little kid is bringing flowers to a cat's grave on that property now, haha.
anyway, I don't think the cats were evil - I don't think animals really even have the capacity for such things. (the 'shadow man' was absolutely malignant, there were a lot of things that happened there that just weren't right, but that's a whole other can of worms.) I don't know if the old man became the thing in my brother's room, or if that was something that fed on his grief, or something that came before/after the incident, but part of me thinks the cats were protecting us from it. my mother never saw them, but she heard them; my brother and I saw them though, plain as day. I don't think I'll ever forget them.
so yeah haha anyway here's my pixel pet poultry milkshake dot com dressup
