Do You Believe in Ghosts? - Part 1
As we approach Halloween and turn our minds to all things spooky, it seemed timely to write about a strange experience I had back in 2018. As with the cosmic communion experience I wrote about in my previous post (you can read it here), this was another key moment in my spiritual journey - a moment when my perception of ‘normal reality’ got significantly challenged…
The events I am about to write about, and that of my cosmic communion, happened around the time of the Spring and Autumn Equinox. This is a time when there is a lot of ‘cosmic noise’ in the universe due to the powerful cosmic and electromagnetic forces which prevail at these moments in the planetary calendar. This cosmic microwave background radiation (CMBR) is believed to be a relic of the Big Bang, and some of the strongest vibrations are produced by the densest dark matter, such as black holes - which some see as portals to the multiverse. In other words, you could argue that science corroborates our permanent energetic connection to Source, to Creation, and that connection is strongest around the Equinoxes when, in spiritual circles, it is believed that the ‘veil thins’ between our reality and an alternative reality, between the physical world that we know and the metaphysical world that we can only guess at, allowing a greater ebb and flow between the two…
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This story begins in late March 2018, around the time of the Spring Equinox and Easter. It starts and finishes with our pets, Lily, Mildred and Tallulah.
Lily
Lily is our beloved border collie who joined the family as a puppy in September 2011. She is the sweetest soul whose entire focus on life is to please us, to keep a safe eye on us all, and to chase balls, sticks and frisbees - all of which she does to the point of obsession.
However, back in March 2018, her character and behaviour started to take on a subtle change. She would normally happily chase after at least 10 ball throws in the garden, tail eagerly wagging for the next one, but suddenly she would chase just one, then look at me as if I was mad, and want to go back inside. The gardener who comes to help us out once a week also noticed a change in her: normally she would hang outside with him, waiting for him to look up from his tasks and throw her frisbee, but, again, she started to lose interest and was increasingly just inside in the kitchen. She seemed to have lost her mojo and I was sufficiently concerned that I took her to our vet, but after a thorough examination he declared that there was nothing clinically wrong with her. So I kind of just put the changes down to her getting a little older (though it didn’t quite stack up as she was only seven at the time).
That summer we went on an extended trip to the States and were away for five weeks, leaving Lily with a friend who came to housesit. I cannot therefore say how she was during the time we were away, but certainly by the time we got back, and then took her over to France for a week in September, she seemed almost back to her old self.
Mildred and Tallulah
Mildred and Tallulah are our two rescue cats. We got them as kittens from a local cat sanctuary in September 2017 so by the time we got to late summer 2018, when we returned from our holidays, they were only about 18 months old. Mildred is the archetypal ‘witch’s cat’: quite petite but with a glossy jet black coat and mesmerising clear green eyes. She miaows a lot and is very much ‘my cat’; inclined to be neurotic (I put that down to the trauma of being separated from her mother as a kitten) she has clear abandonment issues and follows me around the house most of the time, plonking herself down on anything that I’m reading, sitting on my computer, on my lap, on my head, nudging my arms and licking my hands and generally being quite annoying but also heart-wrenchingly sweet in the intensity of her emotional needs.That said, she is also happy to go outside and ‘do her thing’, so she is certainly capable of great independence too, often out all night until you hear the relentless miaowing outside the kitchen door as she waits to be let back in. She also has a very particular habit of licking the water from the kitchen tap…
Tallulah, meanwhile, is quite a different proposition. She’s a large tabby, and had a mischievous streak as a kitten, untamed without a mother to show her the ropes. She quietened down as she grew up and turned into a very self-contained sort of moggy who would be as happily outside as curled up in a chair in the kitchen. She’s never been one for cuddles, but she’s very happy to be stroked and will often go up to Mildred and touch noses or lick her, and she will also nuzzle up to Lily too from time to time.
It was in October 2018 that the next bit of my spooky story begins. As I said, we had returned from our travels and one thing that I had noticed on our return was that there was an area of the kitchen that felt particularly cold. Cold enough that I would keep touching the floor to see if the underfloor heating was working and the surface of the floor tiles always felt colder than they should, despite the fact that the heating was on. We also have an Aga in the kitchen which gives out constant warmth, so it was strange that this part of the kitchen was suddenly so cold. Given that the fridge was located here, I rationalised that perhaps this had something to do with it - but if I was being honest that didn’t really make sense as I’d never noticed this phenomenon before. More importantly, it turned out, this was the area of the kitchen where I fed the animals, in a nook under a staircase…
And indeed, the next thing I started to become vaguely aware of was around the cats eating habits. Tallulah has always had a healthy appetite and, frankly is a bit of a greedy gobbler, whereas Mildred is a grazer and decidedly fussy. At around this time, I found Mildred particularly challenging as she didn’t seem to like anything I put down. I was reduced to leaving out biscuits (which probably Lily and Tallulah ate) and trying Mildred on cat soup and all sorts of other expensive alternatives. Nothing tickled her fancy it seemed. I also noticed that she wasn’t going outside much anymore and spent most of the day curled up on a chair tucked under the kitchen table.
Life was busy and I probably didn’t pay enough attention until one Friday evening in mid October when I went to feed the animals. As per usual, Lily and Tallulah came rushing, but Mildred took her time. When she eventually got off the chair under the table, I suddenly saw how incredibly thin she had become (almost overnight) - literally skin and bone - with her once glossy black coat all greasy and dandruffy and virtually no energy even to walk. I was absolutely horrified at what I saw and suddenly realised that perhaps she hadn’t even been eating the biscuits I’d been leaving out for her to graze on at her will. I felt terrible at how I had let her get to this point, but it had all happened so quickly - I guess like anyone who is trying to lose weight, it takes a while to shift it but suddenly it starts falling off and I suppose this is what happened with Mildred after a few weeks of eating so little.
I called the vet straight away but it was after hours on a Friday evening and all I could do was book an appointment for the Monday morning. I then started researching what might be wrong with such a young cat in such a sorry state - kidney failure sprang to mind and during my researches I realised that one of the things that could have caused a problem was ingestion of lily pollen which is highly toxic to cats. Given that at the time I would always have a vase of lilies on the kitchen island, I feared that this was the cause of her sudden decline. However, it also suggested that if this were the case they would die very quickly in a matter of a day or two (if untreated) and the lilies had been thrown out longer ago than that, and the sick I had noticed on the chairs (which I put down to a fur ball) was about a week ago. However, by Saturday evening I was in such a state about her, I phoned the emergency vet and got an appointment for the Sunday. Examining her, he conceded that she looked ‘a very sick cat’, but that he could find nothing clinically wrong with her (as had been the case with Lily) and said that only blood and urine tests might explain what was going on.
So the following day, I took her to the appointment at our local vet, and left her there for them to take blood and examine the urine sample I had collected for them. Deeply troubled by all this, and a disturbing sense that all was not well in the house, I had, the previous evening, decided to contact the Dowser who had done a house healing on our home a few years earlier. I did not tell him what had been going on as I didn’t want to influence his feedback - I simply asked him to check out the house energies for us. His response was astounding…
(To be continued)
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