These days, I ask everyone if they have ever seen a ghost or had a strange experience. It’s been great for material for the My Haunted Life books. Everyone – and I mean even the most cynical people I know – has a story to tell. Some of them are terrifying and some just weird but everyone has a story.
Since I write, I tell stories. I do it all of the time whether it’s a client white paper or a story in one of my books. I tell stories. Sometimes, I am so busy telling stories I forget to listen to other people’s stories. So, to go around asking people about their stories and hearing such a diverse collection of really scary and interesting stuff is an exercise in listening for me.
Listening is a key skill that we often forget to develop. In this dog eat dog world, the people that shout the loudest get ahead fastest whether they deserve it or not. We learn to market ourselves early and we are constantly learning how to interest people, deliver what they want and be popular. In fact we are so all about ourselves and creation of an image – multiple images in fact – that it is very easy to forget that listening is a key skill that we need to actually be successful.
I sometimes think that we are all stood shouting at each other but no one is actually listening. We have ears, lets use them more…..
Meanwhile, I am really interested in your stories…… please do leave comments and tell us your creepy stories.
Hi Michael! Here’s a little story that happened to my husband and I, which I wrote down in September of 2011:
Over the last month I’ve twice seen a cat in the apartment. Well, PART of a cat – just the tail. In itself, not so strange, as we have 2 cats – an orange girl with a huge fluffy tail, and a grey tabby with a skinny striped tail. The odd thing was, the tail I saw did NOT belong to either of our cats.
A few weeks ago I had finished my shower in the master bathroom and had turned to leave when, out of the corner of my eye, I saw a dark grey to black medium-sized cat’s tail disappear under the bathroom sink cabinet. The cabinet is off the floor about a foot, and the cats like to go under there and redistribute the dust once in a while. My reaction was “Wrong color for Bonnie….wrong shape for Ky…what the?” ……so down on my knees I went and peered under. I saw nothing but undisturbed dust. “That was odd”, I thought….but I dismissed it.
Maybe a week later, I was brushing my teeth facing the mirror, and out of the corner of my eye saw the same tail go under the cabinet. “I’m not falling for that one again” I thought to myself, but I did glance under – only to see no cat, of course. Again I dismissed it, and quickly forgot about it.
Until last night.
My husband Adam had taken a shower and had just finished drying his hair. He came out of the bathroom with a perplexed look on his face and asked me “Hey, have you seen a shadow cat around lately?” He described the exact thing I’d seen in the bathroom, but he’d been seeing it all over the house about 4 or 5 times already. Since I had dismissed my “sightings”, I had never mentioned them to him.
There’s only one cat I know with a tail that matches the description of what we both saw, and that’s our old Ivan. He died December 8th, 2008. Once my husband and I discussed seeing the shadow cat, we haven’t seen him since. Thanks for stopping by, Ivy. We love you.
What a super story and thanks so much for sharing it with us….. Funny though how you saw just a tail…..?
I know – that’s the oddest part! That’s all that both of us ever saw. 😉