AO: So um, my parents told me about when they first bought the house I was raised in, this old man used to live there. Had a ton of cats. And he passed away in the house. Most of the cats escaped, but some just stayed in the house cuz they were raised domestic or whatever. As the old man decayed for like a month, the whole house reeked of cat piss and shit, they weren’t being taken care of. Obviously his cadaver was removed– but when it was, they found that his corpse was like, completely unrecognizable. We assumed the cats ate the remnants of the corpse because it was so decayed. It was a lot of cleaning to do, cuz there was a lot of damage around the house. And a couple nights after it was being refurbished and totally cleaned out, my mom would walk into the kitchen and see a pair of glowing eyes in pitch darkness. Or she’d see blinds move, hear scratching of fabric or sofas. There was scratching at the doors too. And it went away for a while, but when we first got my dog, he always avoided a spot in the back yard. And my mom realized it was one of the ways the cats would get into the house from the streets and stuff. In fact, it got to the point where we wouldn’t see a single cat on the street for a couple years, and my dog would still go crazy at that spot near the house.

Context: collected during an in-person conversation.

Thoughts: This story felt especially morbid to me– especially with the gnarly cat-corpse ordeal. It’s such a disgusting and disturbing visual. Upsetting too. I think it’s interesting that this deals with the presence of animal ghosts, but not at all with the ghost of the old man.