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GENESSA -- SPOOKED: A POLTERGEIST IN MODERN JAPAN!
Adventures in Everyday Paranormality, by Gail M Feldman
This is not a story about cats, but I should mention that I have 11 cats.
Okay, 11 cats have me, and furthermore they share me with a dog and a man, but there was a time (there was more than one time) when I was kept by only three members of the feline community. It is to one of those light-cat periods I wish to refer. We all resided in a ninth-floor apartment in Nagoya, Japan.
Wafer was a ferociously mild wild child, velvet to the touch and all black but for a small white scar on his nose and the occasional undergrowth of mink-brown fur. His vivid green eyes were commanding... and seductive. Wafer was the reason for the bungee cord around the refrigerator; I knew he was stronger-willed than I but still wished to maintain control over the household's broccoli and corn distribution.
Skybar loved and trusted me with all her heart and soul. She would have given me the last caramel stripe from her lithe little form to paste herself, inch for inch, against my body; she often slept pressed flat against me, her sharp teeth sunk gently into my nostrils. If any man ever gazed at me as she did with her glowing green eyes, I would probably dump my darling (whom I had not yet met at that time) for him and run off, possibly to a life of crime or cult madness, just to remain forever within that gaze.
Wasabi was, as a youth, a goof. His shiny blue-black muscular body was always in motion, his deep green eyes somewhere between exploration and exhaltation. Nothing could knock him down -- except a word. If I called his name, he immediately fell down, PLOP, and rolled over for a tummy rub -- even if he was halfway across the room.
My trio and I were somewhat alarmed to find we were not alone. We had a poltergeist.
Our ectoplasmic roomie introduced himself quite suddenly one evening when I returned from work.
Off the genkan and the dining room was a smallish office, shut off on the genkan side by heavy sliding wood-and-glass doors, and on the dining room side by light paper-and-wood shoji doors. The cats could slide the shojis around at will but even strongman Wafer could not budge the glass, and both sets of doors were installed firmly in their track-frames.
Not this evening they weren't. I found the shoji doors not in their frames but standing straight up against the dining room table, a yard out. My heart raced. Yes, I recalled, the front door had been locked. No, a scan of the apartment revealed, no stranger was present.
The office window was closed, and even had it been open, a strong wind in my wildest imagination might have knocked a paper door over, but could never have lifted it out of its track and stood it up as straight as a Buckingham Palace guard, three feet away.
Not one to linger over mysteries (I do dwell on them, but I get stuff done, meantime) I put the shojis back on track and closed them. Then I went around to the glass doors, which were open, and cleared all cats from the office. I cleared myself therefrom as well, and closed the door behind me. Just to be sure, I counted the cats: one, two, three. Yep. Everybody accounted for.
Nor did I have time to ponder for more than three minutes after that. I heard Skybar wail piteously from within the office. You know... the one from which I had just cleared cats and myself, and made sure all doors were closed behind us? That office. I opened the glass doors again and found Skybar trembling in the small room, scared out of her telekineticized wits. My wits weren't rock steady either at that point.
In the next few days, I often found things moved about that could not have been moved by cats and had not been moved by me. When after a week had gone by and things had not stopped relocating themselves about the apartment, I spoke up.,
"Look," I said, in my fumbling Japanese, "you probably died here or something, probably long before there was an apartment building on the spot. You probably don't even understand my Japanese because it's relatively modern. Try to understand. I mean you no harm and I suspect you mean me no harm. But don't hurt my cats. Hurt my cats and I'll exorcise you so fast you'll think you invented the subway, the elevator and a rocket to the moon, and tried them all out at once."
I received no reply -- not even a soaped message on the mirror. But things stopped moving around as much. Oh, once in a while he let me know he was still there, but his heart just wasn't in it. And he left the cats alone.
The friend who had arranged the lease for me was horrified when I casually told her about the extra tenant. It wasn't that she thought I should pay more rent; she was simply terrified of ghosts, in whom she believed absolutely. She chastised me, to put it mildly, for permitting such a cohabitation, and then never spoke to me again.
Myself, I still don't believe in ghosts, but I accept the fact that I encountered one (albeit not as directly as Skybar did). Spooky? Hey, life is one big mystery. Why should a poltergeist be any spookier than birth, death, or even love? (Or for that matter, a dog, a man and 11 cats!)
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