Our family home caught fire in 1990. With very few possessions, I moved with two of the cats to a house which belonged to a professor friend of mine. It was my last quarter of undergraduate school, so I basically just studied and slept there. I knew that I would only be there for a couple of months.
The house was lovely, early 1900's brick construction, gleaming hard wood throughout with a ravine behind it that was quite steep. One advantage of having few possessions left was how easy it made it to move. I had just a futon with no frame which I set down in one of the upstairs bedrooms on the floor. The cats would sleep there as well, but in an odd way. They would sleep on the floor near the futon, cover their heads with their front paws and nestle their heads under the edges of the futon. I attributed this to their being a bit nervous because this was a new place. It usually takes some time for cats to adjust to new surroundings. During the day, workmen would be outside taking care of some repairs.
One day my friend Mykl came by and we went exploring in the house. We went up to the attic and found a few boxes. One was a box of toys. In front of the box near the center of the room, about a dozen small toys were arranged in a straight line. That's funny. I thought. I knew that I hadn't done that and it was hard to imagine my 70 year old professor friend who owned the house doing that. Maybe the workmen had needed access to the attic and had decided to take a break and had been really bored and made the little line of toys.
The cats never adjusted to the house, it seemed. They never changed their odd sleeping habit. These cats were very laid back, "crash experts" who before had slept anywhere and everywhere.
I moved from the house and thought nothing more of it. After graduation, I opened a metaphysical/folklore bookstore on the main street in town. People would often come in with ghost stories and the like. One day a man came in and said that he and his roommates really needed help. They had rented a house and had seen a full apparition of a woman in a long dress with a high collar with her hair in a bun on the stairs. She did not look pleased. They were hearing noises at night and were very uneasy most of the time. Well, where is the house? I asked... Sure enough, it was the house where I had lived alone where the cats had been so uneasy. The man went on to explain that they had painted the walls bright purple and had a lot of parties, there. I wondered if the sort of school marmish ghost had not really objected much to my quiet occupancy and that perhaps this was why I never saw her or heard any noises, but the wild life that the group of young men brought perhaps did not appeal to her. I did recommend sage to them but in the end, my professor friend said that it had been too much to handle for them and that they had broken their lease and left. He was completely skeptical of the whole affair and thought that they had invented a tale just to break their lease.
I once saw an episode of A Haunting set in Ireland where the ghost there was fond of placing the toys in the child's room in a row on in a circle on the floor. It made me think back to the odd arrangement of toys we had found in the attic that day.
The cats knew she was there, but she didn't seem to feel the need to make her presence known to me. I guess I was "behaving".
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