"The first time I saw it, I was actually really annoyed. We hadn't moved in that long before, so I'd say this was the spring or early summer of 2004. I was walking through the kitchen when suddenly an orange kind of stripey cat ran up the few steps from the family room into the kitchen. I was so startled that I just instinctively stepped back at first, to let it come into the kitchen. I remember being mad and thinking the kids had left the window open in the family room, and maybe this cat belonged to the old owners and had just found it's way back home. But, of course, it wasn't there once it got all the way into the kitchen.When we moved in, we placed our table in the kitchen, in the place where the previous owners had had theirs. I had taken the kids to school and I was sitting in the living room, able to see the table in the kitchen. I was reading or playing on my laptop, I can't quite recall what, but I had left my sweater on the back of the chair in the kitchen, after I'd come home from dropping my kids' off at school. I would say this was in the afternoon, when the sun was starting to hit the chair there, making a warm sunny patch for lying in. I was suddenly aware of the sound of paw steps coming up the few steps from the lower family room. They entered the kitchen, and I swear I heard something hop up onto the chair, and my sweater suddenly slid off onto the floor. I got up to look, and there was nothing there of course.

 

We joked a bit about having a ghost cat after that, best kind to have, with kids with allergies, and my husband thought I was just being silly,hearing things, getting used to a new place, and  not used to being at home alone, with both kids at school, etc.Then during my daughters' birthday party we were downstairs playing a party game, and my husband had run up to grab the camera, the girls were yelling and getting rowdy while playing musical chairs, and as he came down, he had a weird expression on his face. The next time he could get me alone, he told me that he was just about to come down the stairs when  the girls started to get really loud, and an orange cat shot up the stairs past him, then just wasn't there.

 

We got a dog after that, and for a while, we didn't hear or see the cat at all. I tried looking that kind of thing up, but there isn't a lot out there about ghost animals, or even "shadows" of animals that were still alive- we kind of wondered if it was just an echo sort of, of the cat itself, maybe still happily alive somewhere else. Until a year or so after our dog went to live with my sister, I was here alone and saw the cat from the corner of my eye, coming up into the kitchen again, then it was gone. And last year (2009). I was lying in bed nursing the baby, and the house was totally silent for once, and all of a sudden, I heard the stairs creak. I was raised with pets, and I know the sound of an animal on the stairs. It was a cat, treading it's way up the staircase. The hairs on my arms were standing up. I don't know, it just looked like such a solid real cat. A kind of orangey-gingery striped thing, the roundy (apple?) headed kind of cat, and we really wondered if it was a real cat still somewhere, and just his memory was kind of lingering in the home he'd lived in before. (though, no cat lived here when we viewed the house when it was for sale). "