The Tale of the Man and the Cat

Stacey at Reality Is Not My Friend has a couple of really creepy tales about her father and her house in Corpus Christi, TX. I hate noisy ghosts that scare children. And a ghost cat?! Yikes!


It's important to start with the fact that my father is a police officer. They aren't people given to wild flights of fancy or letting things frighten them. About 30 years go we lived on an Army base in Hawaii. One night my father woke up in the middle of the night and found his buddy standing by his bed. He asked his friend what he was doing in there and reached to turn on the light. When he turned back his friend was gone. My dad chalked it up to an odd dream, looked at the clock and settled in for a few more hours of sleep. The next morning when he went in to work he found out that two of the MPs had been killed in a car accident the night before. One of them was the friend he saw in his room. It happened pretty much around the time that my dad woke up. To this day my mother refuses to believe him, but like I say, cops aren't given to flights of fancy. My dad prefers to deal in facts and if he says it's a fact that this happened, then I'm sure it did.

I've seen things off and on through out the years, but have only lived in one truly haunted house. My house in Corpus Christi, TX was haunted by the ghost of a cat and also a rather unpleasant man. I think the cat just didn't realize it was dead and went on doing the things it always had. I never saw it dead on, but frequently I would catch a quick glimpse of a cat jumping on a counter or scratching the couch. When I would go to scold my own cats they wouldn't be there. Usually they were outside when the cat ghost appeared. I guess it didn't like to share attention. My rats and hamster would go nuts when it was around, but the dog couldn't be bothered to wake up, much less bark.

The man was a lot more obnoxious than the cat. He wasn't tied to my house, but seemed to be tied to the land. I say this because he started off at my neighbor's house. From the time she had moved in there odd things would happen. Books would fly off of shelves, tvs would turn off in the middle of a program, lights turn on or off - that sort of thing. The oddest story she told me was about her son's electric guitar that started playing. While it was unplugged and in the case under his bed. It was spooky enough that her two teenage sons refused to sleep in separate rooms. Finally my neighbor had enough and did some sort of cleansing. This is when I started having problems. It's easy to think that anything I saw was influenced by what she told me, so I must point out that at the time she did the cleansing we didn't know each other. I didn't get to know her until months later when my kids started school and I had more time to visit with neighbors.

In our house the man didn't throw books, he preferred to scare my older son and tried to scare me. I'm not bothered by ghosts. I do think they exist, but generally they don't scare me. One day I was sitting on the couch watching tv when someone sat down next to me. Someone invisible. I could feel the heaviness of a person sitting there, see the indentation in the couch, but couldn't see anyone. That freaked me out, so I moved spots. After a few minutes the presence went away. A week or so later it appeared in my son's doorway. He came to ask me why "casper" was in the hallway. I went to look, but couldn't see anything. He pointed to a spot near the ceiling and said "he's right there". I didn't see anything that day, though later I would see a gray, almost triangular thing in the hallway. More than once "casper" would appear and scare my son out of his room or keep him from going to the back hallway. The cats, rats, hamster and dogs did NOT like Casper. They would get very agitated when he was around. Periodically the ghost would slam and lock the garage door when I was inside. That meant I would have to go out the front of the garage and around back to get in the house since the front door was always locked too. For some reason he chose to leave my husband and other two children alone. The kids witnessed the garage door shutting and saw their brother get scared - so they were scared too, but they never saw anything directly. My husband once challenged the ghost to prove it really existed and he spent the entire night have horrible nightmares. He woke up screaming twice that night. I don't know if the ghost caused this or not, but I do know my husband never challenged it again.

The most disturbing event happened the time I did see the ghost. He appeared in my bathroom mirror when I was brushing my hair one morning. He was a youngish man, late 20's - early 30's with dark hair. His skin appeared to have been burned very badly with blisters and black spots and he generally appeared angry. I looked at him for what seemed long minutes, but was probably long seconds. Then I left the bathroom and thought about what to do next. I didn't want to live with that in my mirror, even if I didn't think it could hurt me. It was shortly after this that I met my neighbor and a few weeks later that she felt comfortable enough to tell me her story. When I realized that a cleansing could drive off the thing I gave it an option. Leave us alone and live peacefully or I would cleanse my house too and it could go wherever was left for it to go to. I didn't know exactly to get a cleansing since we didn't have a church or priest, but it wasn't an empty bluff. I figured I could find one if I needed it. The ghost must have figured that too because he was much quieter after that. He didn't leave 100%, but no more scaring my son and no more showing up in my mirror.

In Belton my shop was haunted. She (seemed female) would take down my mylar balloons at night and scatter them around. Occasionally she would move things, but nothing major and nothing scary.

Stephanie and I think that there is at least one spirit haunting the shops here. Odd things get moved or turned off at night. A basket that isn't on the table anymore or my helium tank turned off. Little things that couldnt' happen by themselves. Sometimes you will feel something in the room. No real sightings, but you can feel it(them) here. These buildings are pretty old, so it's possible. After all, Westport was once a center for all sorts of stuff. I'm sure more than one person has left their impression or a bit of their spirit behind.