Monday, October 28, 2013

Ghost Tail

Since it's nearing my favorite time of year - Halloween - I thought I'd blog one of my creepier stories.

I love cats. And I mean really love them. You might subscribe my love of them to my inner witch. Whatever the draw is, I just have a strong connection to cats. I also love old homes. And I love cemeteries. Cemeteries don't creep me out like they may for some people. The energy I feel at a cemetery is mostly peaceful which is why I often visit them. I used to live in a Victorian house in Oakland down the street from one of my all time favorite cemeteries, Mountain View. One sunny morning, I was tra-tra-tralling through Mountain View when I spotted a red circle on a tombstone. I was instantly intrigued because I associated that kind of of symbol with Native American Indian hieroglyphs - and to me that was a positive type of drawing. I was too far away to make out what the symbol truly was so I bounced excitedly over to the tombstone to figure out what it could mean. The design consisted of two circles, one larger circle encompassing the smaller circle. The larger circle was painted with something that looked like hair and more hair then would ever come off using a brush. A chill came over me and I got a tingling that something wasn't right which made me look to my right. Down on the ground I saw a skeleton of a newly killed cat. The body was skinned and contorted. I realized then that what I truly discovered was a cat used in animal sacrifice. This symbol had nothing to do with Native American culture. It was sinister. And maybe what I thought was red paint could very well have been blood. Horrified, I rushed to the cemetery's management office to report what I saw. I explained to the person at the counter what I found. The person took in what I said and told me that they would send someone over to clean it up. I wasn't sure if the person at the counter took me seriously. To me it was dead serious. Someone had performed an evil act in one my favorite places & I wanted that cleaned up. I left the cemetery, disturbed, hoping they would follow through.

I couldn't let it go. I kept thinking about the cat, wondering if the cemetery personnel were handling the cleanup. I dragged a friend over to the tombstone the next day. The symbol, the cat & all the negativity of that act was still there at the grave site. Pissed & upset I marched over to the office. Now, normally I'm pretty polite. I don't harass people to get my way but on that day, I did just that. I made a cemetery staff member get into one of their golf carts and drive over with me to the site so he could see it for himself. The staff member tried to figure out who would do the sacrifice, blaming it on art students he'd seen the day before. I wasn't convinced. That wasn't an act of someone just dabbling in black magic. To me, the extent of the sacrifice, including the skinning of the cat spoke of someone with a very corrupt and damaged mind.

I don't know if they found the culprit who did the sacrifice but the cemetery did clean up the mess and today there is no trace of what happened there - the energy has been purified. But I think of that cat and what happened to it. I'm angered that anyone would murder an animal because of their fucked up psychology. Recently I've been thinking about the cat's spirit. "What happens to the spirit of an animal if it is sacrificed?," I wondered. Then it dawned on me that I might know. (Now that I've already revealed some of my weird quirks such as liking cemeteries, I guess I can confess that from time to time I see spiritual energy.) In my Victorian house in Oakland, out of the corner of my eye, I would see a spirit of a black cat darting around the house. I didn't know who the cat was. I thought I might be, Frankie, who was a cat of former housemate. Frankie didn't die at the house but he lived at that house for several years and he and I had a close relationship. But I wasn't sure. I would only see the cat briefly, jumping around. Finally it hit me that maybe it was the cat from the cemetery. I didn't see the color of its fur in the circle because it was covered in red. It made sense though that the color of the cat was black as they are too often picked up and abused in that way. I truly hope that it was the cat, that it's spirit attached to me in the cemetery and I brought him home to a safe place. And mostly I hope that cat has moved on and is living it's 2nd, 3rd or 9th life in a very happy home.






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