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The Cardboard Cat

hmmm...

I had a semi long-haired ginger cat turn up in the hallway of my house the day before yesterday (definitely a real one; I tried to talk to it; then followed it outside and saw it jump over the wall into next-door)
Then yesterday when I was cleaning out my guinea pigs, I saw a ginger cat hanging around the back door-step three times out of the corner of my eye, only to have it disappear when I looked straight at it.
I tried to tell myself it was the reflection of the puppy (who is a sable and white collie) in the back of my glasses, but the size, shape and movement were all wrong for it to be that...
I used to live in a bed-sit where I saw a black cat out of the corner of my eye all the time too.
 
tamyu said:
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.

...

I ran over to the puddle and looked, but there was nothing out of the ordinary and certainly no one dimensional cats.
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Well, strictly speaking, tamyu, it would have to be a two-dimensional cat, but I know what you mean because encounters with these things were covered in the Letters page of the magazine a few years back [FT 128:52 follows up on a previous letter in FT 125:52]. I know because I happened to have witnessed, and wrote about, one of the encounters myself.

Polterdog.
 
wendytorrance said:
Would you mind sharing it again here....?
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Sure. It went a little something like this:

Chris Halliday's encounter with something he believes to be a feline ghost [FT 125:52], is eerily similar to an experience I had had some 10 years ago.

Whereas he describes the thing that he saw as looking as if "you cut a picture of a cat out and stuck it over a picture of our hall, taking no regard of lighting and shadows", I would have described the mysterious black cat that I saw as looking distinctly two-dimensional and sharply trigonical. Another arresting feature were the thing's eyes -- cut-out, or almond-shaped, holes through which I could see the scene directly behind the creature (in this case, coincidentally enough, also a hallway wall) and wonder if Mr. Halliday might recall a similar detail. Furthermore, he also mentions that he cannot really remember the creature vanishing, and I had the same impression -- that is to say, I remember the strange kind of out-of-body/timeless dissociation that I had with my immediate surroundings at the time of my viewing; the other two people who were with me just seemed to fade away into peripheral non-importance the instant I locked eyes with the thing and time literally seemed to stop.

Interestingly, this encounter also took place at about the time that I had either just gotten, or was planning to get, my first cat, as well. Some years later, I also had an encounter with a ghostly white cat while stepping out of the shower at my university residence (which other people, living with me at the time, also claimed to have seen). Unlike Mr. Halliday, however, I only saw the black cat once but my own cat used to constantly see, and start at, things that were invisible to me. Could it have been this mysterious "black cat" that he was somehow sensing? Unfortunately, I'll never know.

Polterdog.
 
Polterdog said:
Well, strictly speaking, tamyu, it would have to be a two dimensional cat, but I know what you mean because encounters with these things were covered in the Letters page of the magazine a few years back [FT 128:52 follows up on a previous letter in FT 125:52]. I know because I happened to have witnessed, and wrote about, one of the encounters myself.
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Yes, I know I made a silly mistake with the dimensions, and realized it earlier in the thread - just never actually edited the original post. I guess I`ll do that now. :blush:

It is oddly comforting to know I`m not the only one to have seen something like this. I don`t think the cat looked out of the ordinary prior to falling over out of existence - the fact that it was drinking out of an oily puddle drew my eyes to it more than anything else. I also never looked at it`s eyes, so don`t know if they were like those in your story.

I would like to know if it was some sort of strange illusion, so may wander over to the grocery store and take a picture from about the same spot.
 
tamyu said:
It is oddly comforting to know I`m not the only one to have seen something like this. I don`t think the cat looked out of the ordinary prior to falling over out of existence - the fact that it was drinking out of an oily puddle drew my eyes to it more than anything else. I also never looked at it`s eyes, so don`t know if they were like those in your story.
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Well, I do wonder (about the similarities of our experiences, I mean)...

I'd have to dig up the Chris Halliday story to refresh myself again on exactly what he saw but I often used to describe the cat that I saw as looking like one of the animated black "spirit bunnies" in the Watership Down cartoon -- you know, very angular, and El-ahrairah-ish. I wondered if my sighting was due to cultural contamination or something (even though, at the time of my sighting, I hadn't watched the cartoon for ages prior). The fact that other people are seeing "Flat Cats" (as FT dubbed them) makes me think there's a real phenomenon at work here -- though a very rare one, apparently. Your sighting is the first I've come across in about 20 years! It was great to read your post on it.

The hunt continues. :)

Polterdog.
 
Polterdog said:
I would like to know if it was some sort of strange illusion, so may wander over to the grocery store and take a picture from about the same spot.
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this always helps and if nothing else anchors the story to a physical location for us all. maps and photos!
 
Absolutely. Even if it's just to keep the topic high up in the lists :) this is really interesting.
I wish I could have experienced something like this. Anything. And especially if they look like the bunnies from Watership. I love the look of them. I even have a tat planned of the Black Rabbit.

OK, WOT, I know :p
 
I have read Watership Down, but don`t remember the movie... Although I`m sure I`ve seen it. I`ll have to try and track down a copy.

I haven`t gone to the grocery yet, so don`t have a picture of the shop from the same angle as when I saw the cat. (Possibly head over there today.) But a map is very easy - Joy to Google Maps! You can see the satellite picture of the parking lot - it`s in the center.
http://maps.google.co.jp/?ie=UTF8&ll=35.18854,136.829749&spn=0.002999,0.004748&t=h&z=18
 
tamyu said:
I have read Watership Down, but don`t remember the movie... Although I`m sure I`ve seen it. I`ll have to try and track down a copy.
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Quite alright, tamyu -- I'm not sure how much I'd be influencing your own recollections by drawing your attention to it, anyway. For my part, I have tracked down Chris Halliday's original letter (though, I have to say, I feel a little bit funny about reprinting it here in all its entirety...mainly because I don't feel it's my place to do so.) There is something in his letter that is quite interesting though (something that I didn't remember before now). Towards the end, he writes:

"Since then, both Jackie and I have seen our 'house guest' frequently, though I seem to see him with more clarity and regularity. His presence doesn't appear to bother our living cats, but may go some way to explaining why they have taken to wandering the house and yowling oddly, something they never used to do."

After reading that, I have doubts that I and Mr. Halliday even saw the same thing -- although, I suppose, with more encounters, my black cat could have eventually fleshed itself out for me a little more. Thinking about it, I'm now reminded of that bit of conventional fairy lore -- you know, how fairies only looked three-dimensional when viewed from the front? Added to that, there's also that bit of folk wisdom that links the Land of the Fairies with the Land of the Dead...though, if any of that is true in this, it doesn't really explain what the ghost of a dead cat, from Summerland, was doing wandering the hallways of an essentially brand new home in the far flung reaches of northern Ontario. :)

Bah! To quote Danny Glover's Lethal Weapon character, Roger Murtaugh: "I'm getting too old for this sh...!" :)

Polterdog.

P. S. It seems to me when I was attending college (after my university career was over) that I drew, from recollection, a picture of the aforementioned cat for one of my friends. I have all of my old notebooks so, theoretically, I should still have that picture. If I can find it, I'll post it, or link to it, here.
 
Due to (overwhelming?) demand - I took a picture of the "puddle" from about the same spot as when it disappeared. Of course, as it hasn`t been raining there is no water there, so you can clearly see that it is an indentation and not a hole at all.

http://tamyu.net/wp-content/uploads/2008/08/sany0418.jpg

I was thinking about it a bit more, and I haven`t really remembered anything else... But as I was walking toward the store at the time and the cat didn`t look strange in itself until it sort of fell over and out of existence - I don`t believe it looked flat prior to that. It looked like a regular but scraggly cat, lapping water of of the puddle. I believe it was facing to the right of me - I couldn`t see the back of it when it fell over. It fell in the direction of the front tire on the truck (but at the time, the truck wasn`t there, so it was open space.)

And... That`s about it. I was close enough that I definitely do not think it was me mistaking the cat for something else. The woman who commented to her partner was a bit closer than the woman on the bicycle in this picture, but I`d say probably around the same angle, as that is coming straight out of the exit. (I wasn`t looking directly at them and probably wouldn`t have noticed or heard if she hadn`t made the comment as I rushed over to the puddle.)
 
In all honesty, tamyu, I just don't think I can give any more meaningful insight into your experience and anything I could offer at this point would just be more speculation. I still find it highly significant that at least three people, in different times and places, for some reason or another, have perceived cats in two dimensions instead of the usual three but beyond that...*shrugs*.

It's a shame that you didn't get a chance to converse with the other two observers (so that you could compare notes on what everyone had witnessed) but I understand the difficulty of trying to do that given the situation and very weird circumstances.

Still, some very nice work on the photo. It's odd that a picture of such a mundane setting should add yet another layer of otherworldliness to your overall story. But I guess that's what adds the "creep factor" to tales such as these -- you know, by making The Other tangible and relatable to the otherwise oblivious world-at-large.

Thanks again for the great post.

Polterdog.
 
Thank you for posting the photo, Tamyu. I now have much better understanding of how having the cat disappear would be alarming!
 
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