The Cardboard Cat

[tamyu]

This happened a few months ago - I intended to post it almost immediately, but life got in the way.

It happened when I was going to pick up some food. I drove over to the local grocery, parked my car, and started walking across the parking lot when I noticed a ragged looking grey cat drinking water out of a puddle in front of the store. I have pet cats, and I love them, so I couldn`t help but think how sad it was that it was drinking water out of an incredibly dirty and likely oily puddle in a parking lot.

And then the cat fell over, as if it were a piece of cardboard or paper and just disappeared.

The lot is very small, only space for two lines of cars. I was only about 3 meters away when it happened. The cat was definitely alive and moving, as it had lifted it`s head and looked around just seconds before. Another woman, with her husband or boyfriend, who was coming out of the store also saw it happen and I heard her asking him if he had seen the cat because it just disappeared.

I ran over to the puddle and looked, but there was nothing out of the ordinary and certainly no two dimensional cats.

 

[fnordish]

:shock:
..... so THATS what it looks like when cats teleport!
and, really, i am being at least half serious. ive seen cats disappear in most unusual (and impossible) circumstances, but never directly. they always disappear into, say, the bottom shelf of a bookcase (with a back), and reappear from behind something else.
VERY cool. youre possibly a very lucky person.

 

[escargot]

As I first read this I thought you must've been mistaken - seen an abandoned carrier bag across the road and your brain'd 'filled in' the rest*, for example - but as someone else saw it too, from a different angle, that's ruled out.

* This has hgappened to me. Driving home down back lanes late one night, alone and tired, I once 'saw' a huge Black Dog standing at a junction. :shock:
As I drew nearer it 'turned' into a car waiting to pull out.

 

[tamyu]

As I first read this I thought you must've been mistaken - seen an abandoned carrier bag across the road and your brain'd 'filled in' the rest*, for example - but as someone else saw it too, from a different angle, that's ruled out.

I`ve had that sort of thing happen to me - many times, in fact - but I know better than to post something on here about it.

The cat was really a mystery, as I was indeed looking directly at it. Wondering, if I recall correctly, whether it would stick around long enough for me to buy something for it to eat in the store. It was quite scraggly looking, and had to be pretty desperate to be drinking out of a puddle. Particularly as the cats around here are all terrified of people and run away if you try to approach them. The grocery may have been small, but it was a busy afternoon and there were plenty of people going in and out. It was really out of place to begin with.

It looked around, I figured it would dart away, but instead it fell over as if it had been 1 dimensional. It was all very strange, and the last place I expected to encounter something out of the ordinary.

 

[meowfur]

youre possibly a very lucky person.

OR, you're possibly in grave danger. Let's hope for your sake the careless little pussycat doesn't know that you saw him.

:shock:

 

[tamyu]

youre possibly a very lucky person.

OR, you're possibly in grave danger. Let's hope for your sake the careless little pussycat doesn't know that you saw him.

:shock:

I am sure it`s alright. It should know I had good intentions. I was actually planning on picking up a can of tuna for it if it looked like it was going to hang around out there. I just hope it was able to find food where ever it disappeared to. It looked like it was starving.

 

[spiritdoctor]

Could the puddle have been quite deep maybe covering a hole and the cat fell into it? Or is this not possible? maybe it fainted if it was malnourished.

Also the way it folded up sounds a bit like a reflection or hologram.

I don't know. It sounds bizarre - maybe it was a genuinely fortean event.

 

[ElishevaBarsabe]

Could the puddle have been quite deep maybe covering a hole and the cat fell into it?

Oh, terrible thought.

tamyu, could you go back and check whether there is a hole in that area?

To assure you, however, that you might indeed have seen the cat disappear: my husband has seen one of our cats literally disappear in mid-jump and reappear moments later.

 

[Eve11]

Well, I have to say I experienced an appearing and disappearing cat.

I was sitting on the patio of an old flat on a warm sunny day, somewhere I had an awful lot of unusual experiences, with my own cat, gazing absently at the view.

It's really difficult to explain what I saw, but basically it was as if a cat was jumping over a wall, but through an arc shaped tube with just the top section cut out. It literally appeared out of this invisible tube/tunnel in mid leap, paws first then head and body. By the time it's hind legs appeared, it's head had already disappeared again into the next section of "invisibel tunnel". It was sleek, black and very big compared to your average moggy, but not excessive. Possibly approaching lynx size. I even remember seeing the sun glinting on it's fur where the coat was very glossy.

The thing that clinched it for me was I could clearly see my own cat out of the cornder of my eye, and he cleary saw it to, his head and eyes following the exact trajectory of the appearing/disappearing cat in front of us.

Or it was a cross-species colective hallucination 8)

 

[tamyu]

Could the puddle have been quite deep maybe covering a hole and the cat fell into it?

Oh, terrible thought.

tamyu, could you go back and check whether there is a hole in that area?

It`s my regular grocery store - I go almost every couple of days. There is no hole it could have disappeared into, and the puddle isn`t even a hole in the lot. It`s just a low spot where water gathers.

It really didn`t seem to sink. It sort of... fell over out of existence. The way it looked is incredibly hard to explain, but it was honestly as if it was paper thin.

My first thought was a ghost cat... But why would it haunt a puddle in mid afternoon?

 

[Mythopoeika]

Perhaps this is where Lewis Carroll got the idea for the disappearing Cheshire cat?
What you may be seeing is rifts between dimensions, and a cat happens to be travelling through them at that point in time. I think we get spontaneously-occurring time/dimensional rifts all the time, all around us.
It's quite scary to think that this universe is less solid than we had otherwise thought - it's like Swiss cheese.

 

[meowfur]

a cat was jumping over a wall, but through an arc shaped tube with just the top section cut out. It literally appeared out of this invisible tube/tunnel in mid leap, paws first then head and body.

Sounds like "The Wild Road," Gabriel King's book about the magical highway of cats and other animals.

 

[solidshadow01]

It's clear to me that you should have drank from the puddle.
Then you may have found out what happened.

 

[ElishevaBarsabe]

It's clear to me that you should have drank from the puddle.
Then you may have found out what happened.

Oh, well, that's Lewis Carroll, again, isn't it?

 

[markbellis]

It's clear to me that you should have drank from the puddle.
Then you may have found out what happened.

Oh, well, that's Lewis Carroll, again, isn't it?

Or the film The Vanishing.

 

[solidshadow01]

I understand the references but no I just thought of it with my twisted mind.
Seemed right to me somehow.

 

[Mouldy13]

interesting, i'm writing a story involving cats at the moment which includes a simliar theme. the precis being, in the anciaent days the gods made a terrible (unspecified) mistake and had to withdraw from the world, but before doing so left mankind the gift of the cat. cats are formidable warriors and are able to see beyond and in some cases pass through the veil between the worlds.

it's the tale of a young cat called clarence who saves the world by stopping the demon lord breaching the veil.

Written in honor of my cat clarence who passed through the veil recently ( and i really miss him :cry: )

 

[GNC]

Maybe the cat's batteries ran out?

 

[LeeCharlish]

Interesting post. I have nothing in the way of an explanation to add, but I agree cats are quite mystical (and somewhat annoying ) creatures. It's hard to believe that it was some kind of optical illusion what with the second witness and the detailed range of motions you mention, but then again, a cat vanishing before your eyes is bizarre.

And sorry to hear about Clarence mouldy. The little sods sure do get under your skin. Good luck with your book.

 

[oweny29]

What a great thing to witness, you are so lucky! As a lifelong cat lover myself I am perhaps slightly biased but I have often sensed that cats are wiser and more mystical than meets the eye. Even the most scruffy, scraggly moggies have an aire of superiority about them, of calm assurance and deep knowledge, a sense of knowing more about the world than most other animals do (including humans).

Find a cat, any cat, and look into its eyes. You'll sense it, too.

Your dissappearing puddle sipping pussy was probably a feline consciousness projection (F.C.P.), sent to the parking lot to remind random passers by that there really is more to their world than they might think.

 

[henry]

at the risk of getting flak from all you cat-lovers (i know how many of you there are because i started that huge thread in chat, which is french for cat!) - theyre no more mystical than any other creature... youre just besotted with them...

anyway - it appeared to be a 2-dimensional not a 1-d cat otherwise i cant imagine what it would have looked like...

complex optical illusion? hard to rule out even on the basis of two observers - you only have the very general "cat" remark to tie them together - what the other party saw may have looked as wildly different from what you saw as if youd both gone "hey, did you see that 2-dimensional plant?"

 

[henry]

meant to say, great story though - i love this level of weirdness.

 

[LaurenChurchill]

Seeing as the standard 3 dimensions are length, width, and height, I wonder what a 1-dimensional cat would look like.

Not much, I bet

 

[Awestruck_]

Oh that's something wild, and wonderful. I know about ghost cats and such, but I've never heard of anyone seeing a cat disappear before their eyes. I hope I get to see it someday. As far as dimensions go, I think I know what you mean. I think you mean the cat looked completely normal while it was drinking, and looking around. Then an instant before it disappeared, it looked flat, like a photograph of a cat.

 

[henry]

yeah but photos are 2-d. a 1-d cat would look just like a 1-d dog: a line.

 

[GNC]

yeah but photos are 2-d. a 1-d cat would look just like a 1-d dog: a line.

Does this mean stickmen are one-dimensional cats stuck together? Think about it.

 

[PeniG]

It's easy to lose track of the first dimension in casual discourse - consider the tendency of new D&D players (and Andre Norton, no dummy, way back when she wrote Quaq Keep) to refer to the pyramid-shaped random number generatores as "three-sided dice."

I'm as besotted by cats as anybody, but I don't find them mystical. But then I don't find much mystical in my life. Cats are like small kids in that their perspective on life, their brain structure, and their senses are sufficiently different from those of an adult human that behaviors which are logical and natural to them seem inexplicable - especially if you don't make the attempt to view things from their point of view.

I think a good chunk of the mysticism attributed to them is down to their combination of self-confidence (the result of being completely at home in their bodies and knowing exactly where they stand in their social milieu) and capacity to detect things that humans either can't detect or filter out. They see in a different spectrum, hear in a different range, track movement better than humans, detect and sort orders differently, and aren't distracted by abstractions. The same is true of dogs, but dogs are pack animals and don't have that strong feline ego, so they don't rouse that sense of the mysterious in us.

 

[James_H]

interesting, i'm writing a story involving cats at the moment which includes a simliar theme. the precis being, in the anciaent days the gods made a terrible (unspecified) mistake and had to withdraw from the world, but before doing so left mankind the gift of the cat. cats are formidable warriors and are able to see beyond and in some cases pass through the veil between the worlds.

Interesting: I'm making a film about a cardboard cat with some friends in the next couple of weeks. Should be fun!

 

[escargot]

yeah but photos are 2-d. a 1-d cat would look just like a 1-d dog: a line.

Does this mean stickmen are one-dimensional cats stuck together? Think about it.

 

[tamyu]

anyway - it appeared to be a 2-dimensional not a 1-d cat otherwise i cant imagine what it would have looked like...

You`re completely right about that. I don`t know what I was thinking with the 1D bit!

I too would like a good explanation for it, and I definitely can`t say what the other person saw as I didn`t talk to them. It was just a very strange experience. Whether it was truly fortean or not... Who knows!

ETA; I don`t really think cats are all that mystical, especially as my own two can`t even clean their bottoms properly - let alone warp about the place.