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It’s Halloween, my dears, and Halloween is a day to share tales of the inexplicable and the other-worldly. The story I am going to tell you is true and it is my story. And if you do not like ghost stories, you may not like this one. However, if you are not afraid of ghosts but instead find them a matter of wonder rather than alarm, you may like my story very well.

Nert was our first “baby.” We found her at the end of a rutted dirt road, in a ramshackle machine shed somewhere deep in rural Minnesota. The sign at the end of the drive had read, “FREE KITTENS” and we were young, just married, and eager to start a family of our own even if that family, perforce, was one of cats and dogs. So we chose the smallest, muddiest looking female kitten from the litter, wrapped her in one of David’s old tee-shirts, and took her home. She did not cry during the thirty mile drive home. She entered our lives without making a sound.

Nert never grew a whole lot larger and her colors were never much prettier, though in our fond eyes she was elegant and subtle. Until the day she passed on, she never weighed much more than six or seven pounds and she never spoke much. A silent, light-footed, svelte little creature with a fine sense of humor and a gypsy soul. That restless nature ended up being the death of her.

In her eighth year, soon after we moved to a new state and a new house, Nert dashed across the street and was hit by a passing van. The poor man who drove stopped and brought her to me. He was crying. We ended up crying together. We buried Nert beneath the lilac bushes in the backyard, even though the house wasn’t her home. We missed her. She’d been our companion, our baby, or jester, and our confidante. She had sat beside us while we studied, ambushed us from under the Hosta leaves and slept curled between my knees at night.

Sometime after she died, I awoke one night with a vague sense of anticipation. Not fear, mind you. Simply, a drowsy expectation. Then I felt the bed by my feet give way, ever so slightly, and heard the almost inaudible poof! of the duvet giving way beneath some sudden small weight. What I had felt was, quite unmistakably, a cat jumping onto my bed. I knew that feeling intimately. I had felt hundreds of times before. Anyone who has lived with a cat as a family member knows that feeling...like a powder puff being dropped into a box of talc, a soft alighting, a settling.

Without thinking, still slumberous, I reached down to pet my friend. She was, of course, not there. Or was she? Over the course of the next few weeks, almost nightly I felt my ghostly companion join us in our bed late at night. Finally, I told David about it and without much surprise, learned that he, too, had heard and felt the little cat’s nightly arrival.

A year passed, then two and three and we moved back to Minnesota and I thought perhaps now we would have to say a final goodbye and leave Nert, or her spirit behind, beneath the lilacs in New York. But just as she had come with us to New York, she returned with us to Minnesota. For many more years we felt her springing onto our bed at nights. Not every night and eventually, slowly, as inexorably as memory fades, her visits ended.

It’s been many years now since Nert has curled between my knees but I like to think that she hasn’t done with us yet and that some night when I fall asleep she will find me once again.

So tell me, my dears, have you ever seen a ghost or felt one brush by you?