Let’s just be clear. I’m not a religious person. I don’t believe in organized religion and I’ve had way too many disappointments in that area to ever believe again. That being said, I do believe in an afterlife and I believe in certain aspects of the paranormal. I’ve seen too many weird things to be a complete skeptic in that area. Take this story, for example.
I wasn’t expecting what I found when I went to the little market in town one day. As I was checking out at the counter, the clerk asked me if I was interested in a kitten. At the time I was actually looking for a companion for my other rescue kitten, who showed up unexpectedly in the yard one day. She was a young cat and had no companions close to her age, so she terrorized the two grumpy seniors in the house until they were almost insane. I thought if she had a cat friend close to her own age, she might leave the seniors alone and keep herself amused, so I gave the clerk my phone number.
Later that summer I learned that three kittens had been born, but their mother disappeared, probably at the hands of coyote. The kittens were being bottle fed and the clerk didn’t know if they would survive. That’s the last I heard about it that month. Blue Mew, one of my seniors, passed away and I was distracted by his death and my own continuing illness.
One day in August I received a call from the clerk asking if I still wanted a kitten. I was surprised because I had not heard anything and was worried the kittens hadn’t survived. Of course I wanted the kitten, so she brought him over. He was a feisty little handful of blue-gray who hissed at everyone in the house but me and soon made himself at home with the rest of the family. It took me a few days to name him, but he ended up being called Mr. Blue because of his fur color.
I knew Mr. Blue had two littermates. One his original people kept and the other, a gray and white female, was given to someone else in our small community. I had the only male in the litter.
Fast forward a few years. Mr. Blue was now four years old and my constant companion. He’d quickly taken the place of Blue Mew, who was always at my side when he was alive. At that time we were pretty much trapped in the house by the pandemic and spent all our time together. He was always under my desk demanding pets while I worked on the computer.
One night I was in bed with Mr. Blue purring away on my chest. His cat companion, Meelet, was sleeping on the pillow beside my head. All of a sudden I heard meowing from the living room. At first I thought it was one of the cats, until I realized they were both in my room. I checked to see if one of the feral cats I feed was making the noise, but there was no one at the outdoor food dish. Shrugging, I assumed it was probably still a feral and went to bed.
I didn’t think much of it until it happened again, this time while I was working on my computer in the living room. Turning around, I caught a blue-gray blur racing across the living room toward the bedroom. At first I thought it was Mr. Blue, until I saw that he was still sitting on the couch. A chill ran through me.
These strange incidents continued for some time. I would hear meowing in the middle of the night when there was no cat that could’ve made the sound. A gray blur darted across the living room, snuck a peek at me from around the corner, or lingered just out of the corner of my eye. Whoever it was, they seemed particularly interested in Mr. Blue and hung around him more than anyone else.
It wasn’t just me who noticed the mysterious visitor, either. The dogs often responded to the meowing, moving their ears and looking around in confusion. More than once, a head popped up to excitedly watch the blur cross the house. That’s why I knew I wasn’t going stir-crazy from the pandemic. Something weird really was going on.
The mystery continued for several months. Then one day I ventured out of the house and back to the market. That clerk hadn’t worked there for some time, but that day she was there shopping with her husband and she stopped to ask about Mr. Blue. She was very happy to learn that he was not only still alive, he was thriving and had a special place in the household.
That’s when I learned the sad truth. Both his littermates were dead. The black and white kitten had an unfortunate run-in with an owl. As for the gray and white one, I was never told exactly what happened to her, just that the woman was disappointed in the people whom she had been given to.
I felt another chill as our conversation ended and we went our separate ways. Suddenly it made sense. The blue-gray blur that was shooting through our house, the sweet little meows, were from Mr. Blue’s littermate. Somehow she had found her way to our home to be with her brother.
The mysterious visitor still comes around today. Just tonight I thought I saw her peeking around the corner in the kitchen while I worked on one of my books at the computer. Those meows still echo through the house, and occasionally a blue-gray dart crosses the living room. I have a feeling that as long as Mr. Blue is around, she’s here to stay. I have no other explanation for this phenomenon.