Physics Be Damned

At one point we lived in a house with a concrete slab foundation. When we moved out of it, we moved to a farmhouse with... Well, not a concrete slab foundation.

The first night we spent on the ground floor of the house, my husband fell asleep almost instantly (he will deny this claim, but know, I'm right). I lay awake as usual, listening to him snore, I mean sleep, when I heard something else.

Footsteps. Fast ones. Heavy ones. Clearly human ones.

But I knew no one else was in the house with us. Which meant one thing.

I woke up my husband, which really was a bold move. When he was awake enough to stop telling me how he felt about being woken up, I said, "There's a ghost in the house. I hear footsteps."

You can imagine, neither one of us really got the outcome we desired from this conversation. And, the footsteps, while he was awake, stopped.

He went back to snoring, I mean sleeping, and the footsteps started again. I didn't feel like they were malicious footsteps, so eventually, I fell asleep.

A few days later, I was on the couch when I heard the footsteps again. Loud. Heavy. Incoming. Then, the head of a calico cat appeared at the foot of the couch. She looked at me with distain, I was sitting with her nemesis, her brother. She shifted her narrowed eyes directly at me, then at him, then again at me, flattened her ears, then took off at a trot, the footsteps sounding loudly.

Turned out, the ten pound calico cat who refused to bend her knees while running, sounded like an adult male walking across our new house's floors.

A few months later, my brother came to visit. After his first night he informed me, "There is something large roaming your house at night."

To which I responded, "It's the calico."

My brother, capable of doing complex physics equations in his head, looked away from me, his face doing that slack thing people do when they are thinking hard. Finally he said, "That doesn't make sense."

My mom, extremely mathematically gifted herself, once told me she didn't totally trust the study of physics, not that that physics didn't exist, just mostly that what we thought we knew about physics probably wasn't right. This only further proved that to me.

Fast forward about a year. It was my weekend, my husband had left hours ago to go to work, and I was in my bed, gently waking up, and then, I heard it.

Breathing. Very close. Heavy. Loud. Nearly on top of me.

But I had done this before. I knew it wasn't a human. It probably wasn't a ghost. It was probably that ten pound cat who seemed to have an unusually squashed nasal passage and extremely inflexible knee joints.

But she wasn't on the bed with me. And she wasn't around the bed. And recently we had reorganized the storage under the bed, so she couldn't be under there.

But she was. She had found the one little space that the storage bins didn't occupy. Her little lair was directly under where our pillows were. And she was there, snoring like an adult man.

So the breathing wasn't on top of me, it was coming from below me. I decided it was time to get up.

A few weeks later, I was visiting my parents and my husband messaged me early one morning.

I can hear someone breathing.

At this point, I knew the game.

It's the calico. She's under the bed below the pillows.

A few minutes later, I got a text confirming this was correct.

Why is she so loud? He asked.

But I realized that wasn't the correct question. The question that struck me was, Why does she only do this when one of us is alone in the house?

Maybe it's not the ghosts I should be afraid of...