We’re all pretty familiar, probably, with the horror story about the haunted house, and the cat/dog senses the spirit’s presence even when the people don’t. Or the notion that domestic animals can sense earthquakes or other disasters when people can’t.
Has your pet ever done this? I had two cats once, and they had sharp eyes, and could see things like roaches (not that I have ever HAD any, of course… :eek: ), but they never seemed to act wacky like that.
My cats flattened out on the floor once when I was living in SF. I felt the house sway back and forth about a minute later. Minor earthquake.
Around these parts if you see cows all clustered up next to the fence in one corner of their field, a storm is coming from the opposite direction that they gathered in. True, BTW. I guess they can sense the drop in air pressure.
I always heard that animals were supposed to be able to sense earthquakes, but I can tell you that our cats were quite useless in that regard. When we lived in Japan, where, among others, we experienced a 7.5 earthquake, the cats gave no warning, whatsoever. I told them “You know, Lassie would have had us out of the house by now.”
My dog has a tendency to stare at the wall, or into the kitchen when no one’s physically there. We think he might be seeing my late grandfather.
I had one cat that would stare at the ceiling in one corner, as though there were a meal there. He did it at different times of the day, but he did it every day. I even climbed a ladder to see what might be up there. Nothing. Not even a cobweb.
I had another cat that got weird about an hour before earthquakes. If I was asleep, he’d run back and forth over me until I’d awaken, then race around with wild-eyed freezes every few seconds. He didn’t seem especially scared during the earthquake. He’d be back to his old imitation of a pillow with legs when it was over.
Years ago my cat Michaelmouse would watch invisible things. He’d look up in the air, and he’d track something moving around in the room. There was never anything there I could see.
He would occasionally jump up the wall at invisible spots. In other words, he’d stand by a wall, look up at something only he could see, then leap up the wall at it.
Maybe it was the ghosts of mice or something.
Lots of times cats see and hear things that are really there (tiny bugs, floating dust) that your senses don’t pick up. OTOH, decades ago my mom was sure she heard a child come running into the house sobbing. She hurried to the room where she believed she heard the child go (thinking it was me or my sister). There was no one there, but the cat bristled up her fur and hissed, and would not go into that room for hours.
I had a cat that would refuse to go into our utility room unless the light was on and somebody was close by. The problem was, that’s where we kept the litter box. We had to stand there and wait for him to finish.
Once, I was sitting on the couch with the dog, in the den (next to spooky utility room). There are three doors in the den, the one to the utility room, one that leads into the bedroom, and an exterior door. The dog could see into the dark bedroom, but I was on the other end of the couch. The kid was asleep, and my husband was at work. Suddenly, he sat up, wagged his tail, and stared into the bedroom. He was following something with his eyes, that would’ve been at the level of a standing person. This invisible person came into the den, walked in front of us and went out the exterior door.
The Merco-dog barks at nothing sometimes. Colliding air molecules is the current theory.
My cat sensed that my boyfriend was a dick looooooong before I did. Does that count?
My cat used to jump over an invisible obstacle - always in the exact same place.
My cat- or more correctly my brother (Vanyel)'s cat for the past several years, sometimes more than others, has “needed” to get into the attic. We live in a very old (1880s) house with a very busy history, it’s been a house with servants, a dorm, apartments, President Garfield had visited it on numerous occasions. I never thought anything about Maddie (cat) needing to get into the attic by meowing and pawing frantically. Once she got up there she would walk around and meow, sometimes begging us to come up, and when she did she would just stare into space. I just figured it was another crazy thing she did, being pretty nutso.
But at college I went to a lecture by the Warrens, America’s most famous ghost hunters, and Mrs. Warren told me that it’s possible my attic is haunted but we weren’t attuned to it.
Took some pictures, got some mysterious orbs. So yes, if you choose to believe in ghosts, my cat sensed them first.
http://www.angelfire.com/film/merla/orbs.JPG
Merla
We have a golden retriever who is a wonderful weatherdog – any electrical activity within about 20 miles and he lets us know immediately (by freaking out). Useful and yet a pain in the rear at the same time, you know?
And I have a friend in California who used to have a golden retriever who was an earthquake dog. We figure our golden would be, too, if we lived somewhere where we had them. (The cat I had during the Northridge quake didn’t let me know at all, unfortunately!)
oooo let’s see. My cousin had a dog who went nuts one day. Wouldn’t go into the dining room and just kept barking. She was backed all the way up to the window and just kept barking. It was rather creepy because you could feel something in the room.
in my old house, my cat would stare into the hallway following something I couldn’t see. Here(in our new home) one of my dogs was actually trying to climb the wall after something we couldn’t see…
In my old place in Minot, ND, I rented the basement of my buddy’s place–it had a remodled walk-in closet of the old cistern that used to be there (a full 4 walls of concrete).
My buddy’s dog would run in there occasionally, and lay on the floor behind one of the shelves I had in there. But get this, when I tried to get ‘Winston’ to follow me into the room, he would never go. . .
Weird.
Tripler
I never did figure it out. . .
I was alking mt cat Midnight through our yard, and she called my attention to something. We’ve got a rock wall – one of the traditional New England rock walls, like Robert Frost wrote about – in the back yard, and she was agitated about it. I moved a rock aside, but she wanted m to keep going. So I removed another. And another, and so on, until finally we found…
A baby mouse. Naked and eyes closed. No nest – maybe its mother as moving it or something when we took away the last rock. I don’t know if Mdnight smelled it, or heard some high-pitched squeal, or what.
I thought she’d try to eat it, like she did just about eveything she found. Or at least pick it up and show it of to the other cats, something else she always does (“I have a mouse nd you don’t!”). But she lost interest and went away.
I like to point to the television during cat food commercials and say, “That cat has a job.” My beasties don’t seem to take the hint.
My cats are good at letting me know if other animals are outside our house, or have gotten into our backyard. I’d like to think they’d let me know if someone was trying to break in, but they’d probably just lead the intruder to the cabinet where we keep the kitty treats.
Cats and dogs can often hear or smell stuff that humans don’t notice, so that may account for some odd behavior. I do recall one incident where my parents’ cat was eating near the stove and suddenly jumped several feet in the air, then ran off. It came back and then sniffed very carefully around the stove until it was sure things were safe, then went back to eating. I never did figure out what was upsetting it and I’ve never seen any of the other cats do a thing like that. This was in a house where we occaisionally heard someone walking down the hall when no one was there (not that we were frightened by this; we figured it was the pipes making funny noises, although we sometimes joked about it being a ghost.)
As far as weather/earthquake prediction is concerned, I noticed my parents’ cats howling horribly during a tornado (but not before.) Prior to and during an earthquake NONE of my animals showed the slightest sign of distress.
My mother’s late cat Muffin chased invisible aliens. She would go tearing after them through the apartment then stop at the door of the front closet, then sit down and stare at the door for a while, I guess to make sure they weren’t coming out again. A few months after Muffin died (at the age of sixteen), we got a six week old kitten, who we named Conan. Within two weeks of coming to live with us, we would see him tearing through the apartment, only to stop at the door of the front closet, and try reach under the door with his tiny little kitten paws. By the time he was three months old, he had not only eradicated the front closet invisible alien threat, but had also flushed out an auxilliary base under Mom’s wicker filing cabinet. By the time we got Schrodinger, there was precious little alien chasing to do.
We have since moved to a different apartment, and Schrodinger has taken up the alien chasing duties, Conan seeming to have retired. The other day, I saw Schro tearing through the apartment, only to stop in front of the hall closet…
Our dog did. Here’s the story I based on it, based on a real experience (except the ending):
NIGHTMARE IN THE LUBERON
Waking up to the sound of a screaming wife is not the best way to start the day. I should have seen it coming. At the best of times she can have nightmares, and after yesterday afternoon…
It had been a lovely day. We were really enjoying our spring holiday in the Provence, lots of sunshine and not too hot. During the day, we had already seen a number of typical Provence villages in the gorgeous Luberon, and I had one more on the list before returning to the hotel. This one turned out to be quite different however. No peaceful collection of houses perched on a hilltop, visible from a far, with art galleries and locals enjoying their game of petanque. Instead, we had to park our car outside and walk up a hill through a park with trees obscuring the view. Our dog liked the exercise, but we already got a strange feeling. “The flowers are too beautiful”, my wife whispered. I nodded, and tried to ignore that my stomach was starting to ache. When we finally arrived in the town, we passed a few houses and ended up on a large square, where we were confronted by a huge entry gate, which would not have been out of place in a grim medieval castle. We looked at eachother and though we did not say a word, we knew that we both felt a reluctance to enter. Fortunately, there was a little bar a bit further back, where we could sit for a while.
For some time, we sat quietly drinking a glass of wine. Gradually, I noticed something strange. Even in May, all the other towns had been lively with scores of tourists. Here I saw no-one, except for our waitress and an old man sitting with his dog in front of the gate. Weird. Finally, we decided to take the plunge, paid and went to the gate. The old man did not look at us. Neither did his dog. Never mind, in we go. We were not quite prepared for what we found behind the gate. No cute little houses - just ruins. Trees growing inside rooms through the windows which had not seen glass for ages. Baffled, we walked on, and just around a corner, we suddenly saw the House. Not in ruins, except for the fact that there was no glass in the windows, offering an unobstructed view of a strange spiral staircase in a little tower. Aside from that, it looked perfectly normal. Normal? There was something about it which defied that word. We just could not figure out what. My wife stared at me. I stared at my wife. And then, on a side wall, I suddenly saw the face. I knew it was just a sculpture, but who in God’s name had come up with the bright idea to make a sculpture of a face looking as if it was someone inside trying to get out of the wall? To make things worse, our dog, normally joyful and well-behaved, suddenly started to whine and to pull on his lease like a raving lunatic, wanting to get away from this place as fast as possible. We decided to oblige him.
During diner that evening, we tried to laugh the whole experience off, but we did not quite succeed. Back in the hotel, we briefly discussed our experience with our elderly landlady. She told us that she simply could not go into this town, because the sun never shines there. Not very helpful. Before we went back to our hotel room, I managed to pick up a book with the history of the Luberon. It turned out that this town had been deserted and repopulated a number of times throughout the centuries. The plague had once decimated the population. Battles had been fought there. The most recent abandoning was a century ago, when the inhabitants had decided to build a new town in the valley for unknown reasons. It did not help very much to put our minds at ease.
The nightmare was practically unavoidable in the circumstances. Quivering in my arms, my wife told me all about it. It was the House of course. She was walking around the empty house, with white shadows around her. Slowly the shadows focused, and they turned out to be white bicycles running around without anyone on them. Then suddenly, a lady, dressed in white, with a grey face appeared in front of her, with a shadowy figure behind her. “Please leave my husband and me alone” she whispered, and then she turned around and walked up the spiral stair case, slowly disappearing into thin air. My wife could not utter a single word, as the shadows slowly returned, this time with a taint of black. The bicycles suddenly fell on the floor, wheels spinning aimlessly in the air. A dark face with a wet nose appeared in from of my wife’s face and she started to scream - to find our dog looking at her with an astonished look on his face.
Finally, my wife managed to fall asleep again in the early morning. I got up to take the dog for a walk. And now I have a problem. How the hell am I going to explain to my wife that there is a small white bicycle standing in a corner of our hotel room?