A Year After Cat’s Death, Pet Cam Footage Shows Its ‘Ghost’

A Redditor believes she caught the ghost of her late cat on camera a year to do the day after he died.

Aw, shit. If this is true, you know what it means, don’t you?

I’ll never escape Buddy and his incessant meowing for more Temptations. I’m condemned to live out my existence hearing “Mrrrrrrrppp! YUMS NOW!” from spectral Buddies who will continue to demand turkey and turkey-flavored treats even in the afterlife.

I shall be a servant forever, scooping phantom poop out of a litter box and serving wet food to a nonexistent cat like a madman.

All jokes aside, people who read this blog know I’m a skeptic, and I don’t think it’s coincidence that every example of allegedly supernatural and extraterrestrial phenomena — from “ghosts” popping up on camera to “UFOs” tracking on military IR — can only be seen in grainy, low-resolution footage.

We are humans, after all, given to superstition and genetically hardwired to see patterns everywhere, even where there aren’t any. That’s precisely what’s happening when, for example, we see faces and familiar shapes in clouds. (We also have a long, repeatedly proven tendency to invent explanations for phenomena when none are forthcoming.)

So it’s with a grain of salt that I present to you this clip, which one Reddit user believes may show her late cat lazing on her living room sofa precisely one year to the day after passing away:

As you can see in the video, one of the woman’s living cats drops down from near the window and pads in the direction of the front door as she walks in. But on the couch a shadow starts to take shape, gaining definition in the dark until the woman flips on the lights and the shape becomes well-defined.

The Redditor says she believes the shape could be Blackjack, her late all-black kitty. As you can see in the footage, she appears to look right at the phantom feline, but she says she didn’t see anything until she was reviewing cam footage from May 24, the day it was recorded.

The shape is certainly convincing, but keeping in mind Occam’s Razor — favoring the explanation with the fewest assumptions, or “entities should not be multiplied without necessity” — what I see is the shadow of an object that, when viewed from a particular angle, happens to look like a cat. The mind looks for a pattern, so we see a cat.

That explanation also makes the most sense with the surrounding context: The shadow didn’t become solid until the lights flipped on, and the woman didn’t notice anything amiss when she was looking straight at the couch in the video. If we’re seeing a shadow that only looks like a cat from the right angle, it makes perfect sense that she wouldn’t see anything strange from her vantage point.

Her kitties don’t react either, which they’d almost certainly do if another cat simply materialized in front of them.

“That most certainly looks like a cat,” one user wrote, “but hey, I’m no expert, I’m just some idiot on Reddit [who] enjoys strange memes.”

Note: Buddy doesn’t have an opinion on this, but he would like you to know he’s absolutely NOT hiding behind my legs while producing faint, terrified mews.