It’s happened since we moved in here, since before we started our family and it was just the two of us. This old farm is a happy place. We never picked up on any bad vibes at the place; it’s just that one strange thing. My father saw it. The neighbors have seen it. The kids have seen it over the years too but nobody’s afraid of it. It always takes you by surprise.

It was my husband Richard who saw it first. We were just finishing chores in the barn when Richard saw a black cat dash across the floor just off to his side. He turned around and began calling “Kitty, kitty! Heeeere kitty, kitty.” But it was gone. He couldn’t figure out where it could have gone to. We set out a bowl of milk that night with some leftovers from supper along the wall where he had seen it. It was bugging Richard, the fact that the cat had simply seemed to disappear. There was no way out or past him. He thought about that a long time.

I saw the cat the next night. Again in the old barn. I saw him slip into the calf stable. I set down my pails and tippy-toed over to the door of the stable and peeked in, slowly, so as not to scare the cat away. But there was no cat inside that pen! But I saw him go in there!

We made it a ritual to leave water and food and an occasional bowl of milk in the barn for this new mysterious friend of ours. The friendly buffet only attracted skunks and neighborhood stray cats, which all gratefully indulged in the feast, but no black cat.

Seeing him was pretty regular. One day when the kids were little, they were out playing in the barn and for once they weren’t yelling and fighting and raising trouble with each other out there, in fact they seemed much too quiet. They were late coming up to the house for supper which was not like them at all. Richard and I went out to the barn to call them in and we found them high up in the hay loft crawling around in the hay searching intently for something. We yelled up at them, “What are you kids doing up there?” Without looking down at us they just kept moving the hay around and replied, “We’re looking for a cat Mamma! Hey Dad! Come help us! He’s real pretty! We named him Shadow ‘cause he looks like a see-through cat!”

Richard and I looked at each other not really knowing how to respond to that. Dick repeated in a whisper to me, “Like a see-through cat?”

After all these years we still see that Shadow cat and still can’t figure it out. Come Halloween, we hang an abundance of black cat decorations around the house and barn, symbolic of our mystery friend.

We just shrug our shoulders at the thought of him. He’s still out there.

Somewhere.

~C.E.

Enter this door to select another

Halloween Story