Four-legged phantom
We desperately missed our cat, Dinah. But she wanted us to know she hadn’t gone far…
Iforced a smile as I served a customer at the New Age shop I owned, but my mind wasn’t on the job.
Our 13-year-old cat, Dinah, hadn’t come home after being out all night, and I was worried.
We’d taken Dinah in as a tiny kitten, after finding her shivering on our doorstep, and she’d become family.
She had the same routine most days, sleeping all morning in her favourite spot on our bed, before padding downstairs.
After dinner she’d generally head outside overnight. But she always came home in the early hours. Until this morning…
My husband Sid and I had called her name and banged her food dish for ages until, reluctantly, we’d had to head to work.
It was the mid-afternoon when my neighbour, Val, rang.
‘I’m so sorry,’ she said. ‘We’ve just found your Dinah in the graveyard…’
It seemed Dinah had been hit by a car before crawling off, injured, to die alone.
My heart broke and the house seemed eerily empty without her.
Except sometimes, in the weeks that followed, I was convinced I could hear the distinctive thud of four small paws jumping from the bed upstairs onto the carpet. Other times I’d catch a ‘miaow’. Then one day, a few months after losing Dinah, Sid and I were watching a film one Sunday afternoon when we both heard something scampering down the stairs.
Next the temperature in the room dropped, before the sliding door that separated the lounge and hallway started to rattle in the exact way it had when Dinah used to shake it with her paw to be let in.
I turned to look and gasped.
Because there, coming through the closed door, was the front half of Dinah. Her expression was indignant, as if to say: ‘Why didn’t you open the door for me?’
After glancing around as though taking stock, Dinah stepped forward and the other half of her slinked through the solid door. She was making her usual way towards the back of the house when she faded away in front of our eyes, starting with her nose until all that was visible was the tip of her tail. Then that vanished as well.
‘You saw that too, right?’ I asked Sid when I’d recovered enough to speak. He nodded slowly, gobsmacked.
After that, we’d often see or hear Dinah, right up until we moved in 1999.
Once in our new place I didn’t hear or see Dinah. I knew cats were territorial, so assumed she’d stayed behind in a place she knew well.
Until one night in 2019 when, out of the blue, Sid and I felt something warm between us in bed – and soon after we heard a familiar rhythmic purring…
It was so comforting to have another visit from Dinah after so long, although it turned out to be our last.
I think after 30-odd years it was Dinah’s time to move on to the next place on her journey and she came back for one last kitty cuddle.
I’ll always treasure it.