Looking to do something different the summer of my freshman year (and make some money) I agreed to work with a buddy of mine selling books door-to-door. Which proves I’m an idiot, but let’s move on.
We wound up getting sent to North Carolina and I was in a rural area knocking on doors to sell a Webster’s dictionary that I had an addendum with basic math, science social studies, history, etc. It was geared toward parents with school age children… you know, to help with the “new math”. Anyway, rather than drive to the next farmhouse I decided to stretch my legs and take a walk because it was a nice day. I walked down the dirt road toward the other house, and the cicadas noise was rising and falling as I neared a large oak tree with a white cat sitting in front of it.
As I walked by the cat looked at me and made a meow. Now this was not the meow sound that cats make. It sounded exactly like a calm, clearly human voice going slowly “meow… meow” as its eyes tracked me moving past
It freaked me out enough that I sort of jogged toward the other house to get away from the cat. I went to the porch and knocked on the door, but no one was home. As I walked toward the bend in the dirt road where the oak tree stood, the cicada noise suddenly stopped completely. Ten seconds later I saw the white cat - laying on its side with its eyes open, dead. Not sleeping, I’m talking not breathing dead. And I really can’t explain it. The hair on my neck stood up and everything in my gut and soul said danger, get away from there fast. I literally ran all the way to my car and drove away.
I completely understand intellectually that the cicadas have to stop at some point. And I completely understand intellectually that a cat can drop dead at any given moment. But all I can tell you is at that exact moment I was completely overwhelmed by a tidal wave of fear and uncertainty of a dangerous unknown threat
i’m not frightened at the possibility that energy or souls or a negative of our being somehow lasts after our death. My late mother told me that my late father had appeared to her a couple months after he died and told her everything was going to be fine. She asked him why he waited a couple months, and he told her that she needed to move past her grief before he delivered the news. To her dying day she insisted it was real. But none of that “scares” me. I’ve been to the Myrtle’s plantation and spent nights without being scared.
That goddamn cat was the one thing that has terrified me most in 70 years