Hello, everyone, I'm a longtime lurker finally decloaking. This isn't the story I'd planned to tell, and it didn't even happen to me, but it did happen to my nine-year-old daughter, and I'm posting on both our behalfs (behalves?). It's quite long, for which I apologise, but I'd like to include as much detail as I can.
Last summer, we'd just pulled up in a small village not too far away from Cork; we were due to meet a family we'd not met before (my wife had got to know her counterpart through courses that she runs). My elder daughter M had been arguing with her little sister for most of the journey down from Portlaoise and, given that we usually live in the UK, we were not on familiar ground in many senses of the phrase. M was not feeling particularly sociable, and so she elected to stay in the car reading while the rest of us began to get to know our new acquaintances. A little while after, she joined us in the kitchen, and she seemed in pretty good spirits.
It was only days or weeks afterwards - we must have been back home by then - that she told me her experience in the car: she'd seen a thick, black, furry paw coming down from the car roof and tapping lightly on the windscreen, 1-2-3. Very soon afterwards, she saw it coming up from below the rear window of the car, and tapping on the back window. In very quick succession it did the same thing on both sides of the car as well, again reaching up from below. M could hear the paw as it tapped, but could not hear any other movements, especially nothing on the roof or from underneath.
As she recounts it now, she says she did not find it particularly scary at the time, although she did decide she would feel more comfortable in the house with the rest of us. That said, she does remember that her sense of perception changed when the paw was tapping on the side windows, as though either she had shrunk or the car had expanded: the window seemed further away than normal. She was relaxed enough to look all round the car when she got out for what it might have been, but she doesn't remember looking underneath or on top (we've got a Mazda Bongo, so it would be a stretch for a nine-year-old to see on top of it, anyway). It was only much later that she realised how eerie an experience it had been (and from my limited knowledge, is this not typical of encounters with the weird?).
We've talked about it again over the past couple of days. She describes the thing as a paw, more like a cat's paw than a dog's, but she could not make out claws or toes. It was black, furry, and 2-3 inches thick (she actually compared it with the diameter of the stilts she has). She only saw this one paw, and the limb disappearing past the window frame, but nothing else to which it might have been attached.
She is generally level-headed, and clear on the distinction between what she has made up and what she has actually experienced. I have no reason to doubt she is truthfully recounting her experience as she remembers it. We're both extremely curious as to what it might have been and if we haven't already trespassed too much on the generosity of this board with the length of my opening post, we'd be very grateful for any ideas any of you may be willing to share.
