Beware the cat-man!

Cat-person

On New Year’s Day 1979 I had supper with Maria Moustaka in her flat in Finborough Road, Fulham. [Editor’s note: Neil Oram had driven south from his home beside Loch Ness the day before. Maria was playing the female lead in his epic play cycle The Warp,

directed by Ken Campbell, which was opening at the ICA the following day.] Afterwards, Maria and I were sitting together on her sofa listening to music and looking out through her French windows into her garden. All of a sudden her cat went ballistic. It didn’t scream but howled

like a wolf… and ran full pelt out of the room… up the passage… into the bedroom… back down the passage… back up the passage – howling!

Maria tried to catch it but it just clawed her and ran away, howling like it was being murdered.

Maria exclaimed that she’d never seen her cat behave like this. Then she shrieked and gripped my hand as a huge cat-person alighted on the wall at the end of the garden. Not a big cat, but a cat-person crouching – facing us from the top of the six- foot [1.8m] high wall. Not exactly a human face. Not exactly a cat’s face. Somehow I knew what it was. I felt spaced out but not afraid. It seemed to emanate a powerful, quiet ambiance as it almost floated down into the garden. Maria was shaking and digging her nails into my palm. The cat-person, roughly five feet [1.5m] tall, started to walk, upright, toward us. Almost glide-walked towards us. And as this elemental utter strangeness approached the large French window, I could sense an invisible steady intense air pressure building up on the creature’s side of the window.

I thought the glass had cracked – but it was Maria’s cat howling even more distraughtly. The absolute black furry streak of complete cosmic strangeness raised its palms (not paws) – raised its palms so we could see them pressed against the glass. (I think Maria passed out at this point, but only for a few seconds, because I pulled her awake and hissed – “Just watch”.) It seemed to me that this jet-black visitor was not familiar with windows. It kept its hands on the glass for 20 seconds – the demented cat still howling – then turned around and glided/walked back to the wall… and seemed to almost float back up to a crouching position on top of the wall. It turned around and looked in our direction, then seemed to be scanning all the way around… turned its back to us… and disappeared beyond the wall. The sound of weird silence invaded the flat. The trembling cat, now silent, settled on Maria’s lap.

“Did it have a tail, Neil?” Maria asked me recently, 40 years later in her different garden in north London where she now lives with two demanding female cats. It was a very bright, warm sunny day in late September. “True, you would think a tail or a lack of tail would not be forgotten,” I said; “but actually Maria, actually I don’t think it’s something we’ve forgotten – but a feature we failed to digest at the time.” Maria nodded and took another drag on her fag.

Neil Oram

Inverness

Rabbit man

I grew up in the small Lincolnshire hamlet of Branston Booths, named in legislation as a “nitrate sensitive area”. It had a pub, an old wooden village hall and a chapel, but no church or shop. What it lacked in amenities, however, it more than made up for in attractions for adventurous children, such as a mysterious island surrounded by a moat, a stretch of woodland with some old but occasionally inhabited caravans in the midst of it (always the operations centre for international crimes in our imagination), and a body of reedy water known locally as the ‘ Delph’. This waterway ran straight from the main crossroads at the Booths, via an intersection with the Car Dyke, to the Sincil Drain, ultimately feeding the county’s main watercourse, the River Witham.

The Delph has high grassy banks on either side, accessed from the crossroads by the Car Dyke’s own bank, which runs crossways to meet them and provides a bridge between the Car Dyke and the Delph. The first Delph bank is about 10m (33ft) away from the crossroads access point.

One summer’s evening in 1985, as day was slowly turning to night, I was with my band of adventurers at the crossroads – there were five of us, aged 12 to 14 – chatting idly, with the Delph and bank tops, and fields beyond, as our backdrop. Three had their backs to the Delph, I was facing it, and a friend, Darrell, was standing to my right on a slight diagonal so that he was able to turn to me and then to our friends during the conversation, giving him a broader view than the rest of us. We were on the point of saying our goodbyes when something caught my eye. A head had popped up over the first Delph bank-top, and as I turned to register it, my mind was troubled: was this a rabbit-faced man or a manfaced rabbit? And with that, the head, on a pair of non-rabbit- sized shoulders, shot back down behind the bank.

Open-mouthed, I looked to Darrell, who had a similar expression, and we both said in excited unison, “Did you

“She shrieked as a large cat-person alighted on the wall at the end of the garden”

see that?” We tried desperately to explain what we had seen to our friends – Darrell found it difficult to articulate, perhaps because of the angle at which he saw it, other than describing this human/ animal ‘thing’ popping up and shooting back down again. We searched along the banks to see if it was still there. We found nothing, but – if truth be told – we didn’t look very hard. It was a terrifying encounter, but mercifully short. My friends were nonplussed – “You just saw a big hare or rabbit” – but Darrell had seen what I had seen, and he just shook his head.

Over the years, I have sought to explain this away as a trick of the crepuscular light (but why would it trick two people in the same way?), as a larger than normal animal (but I have seen enough rabbits and hares to know that they do not pop up in that way, or have human-like shoulders), or as a person playing a prank (doubtful, given that it is one of those places where everybody knows everybody else, and we would definitely have heard about it later). Was the entity, perhaps, a cousin of the “giant rabbits” of the mythical island of Hy-Brasil? I have also wondered about whether I had already seen The Wicker Man and was simply imagining a man with an animal head mask popping into the shot, as they do most memorably in the film; but had Darrell seen that film too and had he really been having the same thoughts as me?

None of these strike me as satisfactory explanations

– I definitely saw something strange that night and it has stayed with me ever since. We didn’t mention it again within our group, and while I have always looked at those banks hoping to catch another glimpse, none has been forthcoming. I lost touch with Darrell when I went to university and he moved from Branston Booths, and I hope he sees this account. It is the first time I have written it down and would welcome his and any other reflections on this brief encounter.

Andrew Mitchell

Bourne, Lincolnshire

Comforting vision

Having read about patients’ near-death visions of muchloved pets in Alejandro Parra’s fascinating article [ FT398:40-45], I would like to share a moving story. I prefer to remain anonymous, as my sister may not want to be acknowledged publicly as part of it. The story is exactly as she told it, to the best of my recollection.

On 1971, 18 months after my father’s death, we were faced with the unpleasant task of having Honey, his muchloved retriever, put to sleep, because of a terminal kidney condition. In those days, no one in the family owned a car, and no local taxi firms were prepared to transport a large and very sick dog, in case of accidents, so we contacted a vet who was prepared to do a home visit and administer the last rites. Neither my brother, sister or mother wanted to witness the fatal injection, and so it fell to me to sit by Honey and comfort her as best I could. As it went in to her vein, she stretched out as if she were lying in a warm patch of sunlit lawn, sighed gently, and was gone. After the vet left, we all went to various rooms to grieve for Honey, and also for my dad, as in a way, our last link with him had also been severed.

Suddenly my sister shouted from the lounge, where she had been sitting on the sofa, and my mother, brother, and I rushed down to see what was wrong. She had been crying, and having stopped, stared into space, thinking about our father and Honey, when the wall in front of her seemed to shimmer and then cleared to a view of a rich green meadow, studded with wild flowers. To the left of the meadow, stretching across the horizon, was a range of majestic snow-capped mountains, while to the right was a dark forest of huge pine trees that stretched off into the distance. The scene was lit by brilliant sunshine under a cerulean sky, dotted with fluffy white clouds. A man full of youthful vitality came running out of the forest. As he moved further into view, he turned and, laughing, waved his arm, calling to someone. The figure was my father, fit, healthy and no longer ravaged by cancer. A large golden retriever bounded up to him from out of the trees, and put her front paws on his hip, while he stroked her head and kissed her, as he always had in life. Then he turned and ran, with Honey by his side, as the scene faded.

This story had a marked (and positive) effect on all of us, and I have often found comfort in it over the past half century. Logic might say that at that moment, my sister was overwrought with grief, with the still raw trauma of our father’s illness and relatively recent death, and the loss of a much loved pet, and that what she saw was a mental construct, that gave her – and all of us – some solace; others might prefer to believe that she was granted a privileged glimpse into what is beyond physical death. Personally, I prefer to think that sis had a vision of what is to come.

In her prime, Honey was a big and heavy (84lb/38kg) dog, and when she came down the stairs, they would creak in a particular rhythm, in a way that a two-legged human could not replicate. We never saw her again, but would sometimes hear her coming down the stairs.

David ––

Ealing, London

Telekinesis?

I was at a friend’s flat-warming a while back and, as is typical for me, the first thing I did was accidentally break the handle of his toilet. I reached inside the cistern to pull the flush, then confessed to him. He took it like a champ. At this party was a recently tornapart love triangle, where someone had stolen someone’s girlfriend and, to the horror of the woman in question, both paramours had turned up, and a lot of nervous glares were exchanged. Then a picture flew off the wall and smashed on the floor. No one had jolted the wall from behind.

I’ve read how young women are supposedly a magnet for poltergeist activity. I had been looking at the picture at the time, so it might even be the case that something was trying to grab my attention, something that had clocked my observant nature. I am not suggesting that I was trying to bring the picture down myself. The party was a bit of a fizzle, we’re a boring crowd when you get right down to it, and for the next week apology emails flew around, mentioning “all the tension in the air”.

James Wright Westcliff-on-Sea, Essex