Tag Archives: halloween

The Truelife Undead Adventures of GhostCat

Are you here looking for information about DC’s Demon Cat, who was alleged to prowl around the grounds of the White House and U.S. Capitol? You’re in the wrong place, but you might as well stick around because every day is Halloween around here and I have a ghost story for you all the same!

One day, while I was making some afternoon coffee, I looked out our kitchen window and saw the neighbor’s kids giggling and intently watching one of our upstairs windows. One of them waved up at the window. My office window. Since it wasn’t the window I was looking out, and I’m the only one home, that was a bit…unsettling.

I went outside to see what was up.

The kids told me they’d been watching our kitty sun itself in the window.

We don’t have a cat.

GhostCat Reenactment

I asked her if she could still see the kitty. Nope.

I asked her where the kitty went. She said the big orange cat got up, stretched, and hopped down off the window sill.

Creepy? Yes.

Surprising? Not really.

GhostCat apparently took up residence here in our house last year around Halloween. As one of the few houses in Alexandria, Virginia not claiming a ghost, I guess we were due.

I haven’t seen GhostCat myself and we’ve never owned an orange cat. Husband’s grandmother had a big orange cat, maybe it just took a while for him to find us? If cats can have ghosts and ghosts can sneak in to your house, we figure that’s how GhostCat got here.

You can’t prove it didn’t happen that way!

Our Official Ghost Cat Sightings began when JunglePete visited last Halloween. On the first morning, he mentioned that our cat walked over him a lot before finally settling in to sleep by his pillow.

We laughed at him, chalking it up to travel fatigue.

Since then, 3 little girls and one allegedly sober adult claim to have seen the big orange cat sitting in the window.

There are few things as creepy as watching someone wave and greet someone only they see, especially when you know there’s no one else in the house. And it’s always the same window – the window I have my back to when I work at my desk.

The window I have my back to right now.

Hang on a second, I need to nervously glance over my shoulder a few times.

Okay. I’m done.

Nope. One more time.

Okay, where was I?

Right. I’ve spent a lot of time standing in my yard at all times of the day trying to figure out what they could be seeing but there’s nothing there, and definitely nothing creating a reflection that looks either orange or feline. (We just tell little kids our kitty is very shy. My neighbors would kill me if I filled their kids heads with ideas about ghostly pet hauntings).

In light of the fact that one family turned their house into a haunted hospital last halloween and some guy wearing a clown costume was chasing people with a chainsaw, I don’t know why I’m concerned about inflicting psychological damage on the little ones. Yeah, sure, fine, that was Halloween and this…isn’t.

Maybe I should tell them we have a Cheshire Cat!

Recently, a friend and her adorable hound were visiting for the afternoon. Carolyn and I were knitting and watching a movie when the dog hopped up, ran across the room wagging her tail, and started behaving like she was trying to befriend another animal. She then trotted around the house with her new friend for about an hour. We both found the dog’s behavior terribly peculiar. The hound now runs around our house looking for her friend whenever she comes over, although even with her canine friends, GhostCat can be elusive.

I don’t know why it only just occurred to me that we should make a video of this behavior. I’ll keep you posted on that. I think we should also bring in another dog, one that hasn’t “met” GhostCat.

I’ll work on that.

Now that I think about it, ghostly pet eminences aren’t completely unknown in my family.

My uncle is apparently being haunted by my grandmother’s dog, a mastiff cross who, I suspect, could do some serious spectral damage. Do you think it’s possible to drown in ectoplasmic drool?

How the King Cobra Maintains Its Reign

Yesterday’s Science Times had a cool article about cobras, “How the King Cobra Maintains Its Reign.” (Don’t click that link if you don’t like pictures of snakes).

I wanted to post a link to that article because I thought it was interesting. It popped up because I have a google alert set for cobras, not because of Halloween.

Still, snakes are pretty spooky, so they make good Halloween post fodder. Yesterday’s Washington Post contained an article, “Evolutionary psychology explores ancient and newer roots of instinctual fears,” that was pretty interesting.

Cars kill a lot more people than spiders, bats, snakes and wolves, but why don’t we fear them in the same visceral way? When’s the last time you saw a jack-o’-lantern carved in the shape of a BMW?

The drugstore Halloween images of dark and hairy critters touch off sensations deep inside us, pointing bony fingers at instincts that go back millions of years, evolutionary psychologists say.

On a related note – I don’t know about your house, but mine has become the Kingdom of the Spiders lately and I’m not enjoying it. I know we’re not alone in our neighborhood, the local hardware store is doing a brisk business in glue traps. Yuck.

p.s. if you read these posts via email, I apologize for the last post you received. The email you received was of an early draft and it was a mess. The correct post is on the site.

Legend of Hell House

Our Tivo, OverLord II, recorded Legend of Hell House for us. We thought we’d seen it, but when we started it we realized we were quite mistaken. To be honest, we haven’t finished it. Although it’s not dull, I was finding it slightly ponderous compared to the other viewing options for the evening so we set it aside. I looked it up and read how it ends and I might still finish it at some point.

It’s got everything: rather good good acting, excellent sets and atmosphere that practically drips off the screen, respectable writing, the occasional episode of over-wrought acting, a good cast, a possessed cat, an interesting score, an old dark house, and Roddy McDowell in enormous 70s glasses.

The film is based on the novel Hell House, and both book and movie were written by Richard Matheson, author of I Am Legend and other spooky stories.

I recommend the movie, although I don’t have much else to say because we haven’t seen the end yet. I can tell you that the ghost is played by an uncredited Michael Gough, who went on to play Alfred in 4 Batman movies (starting with Tim Burton’s 1989 version) and most recently was the voice of the Dodo in Burton’s Alice in Wonderland.

Nightmare Before Christmas

Is it a Christmas movie? Is it a Halloween movie? Do I care? No.

I watched Tim Burton’s Nightmare Before Christmas this week for 3 reasons:

1) It’s really clever.
2) It’s got ghosts.
3) It rounds out the inadvertent 2010 subtheme, “a year(ish) of Tim Burton”
4) We’re off to Disney for Halloween adventures so it seemed appropriate.

That was more than 3 reasons.

I suppose I could keep going…

5) It’s my favorite Tim Burton movie, with Alice in Wonderland probably running a close second.
6) Alice might be first. It does have Alan Rickman, after all.
7) The Blu-ray release of Nightmare is really beautiful.
8) Zero is one of my favorite movie ghosts.
9) I always liked Nightmare, but I fell in love with it when they re-released it into the theaters in 3D in 2007.
10) The Blu-ray of Nightmare has cool bonus features, including Vincent and Frankenweenie.
11) Alan Rickman was in Tim Burton’s Sweeney Todd, but I wasn’t crazy about that one.
12) Alan Rickman.
13) What?
14) Where was I?
15) Is it warm in here?

Oh, nevermind.

(I just want to note that I originally embedded the official Disney trailer for the Blu-ray of Nightmare, but it was a promo for the special edition disk and, while it looked really cool and the image quality was better than what I found on youtube, I liked the original trailer better to kick off this post).