Black Cat

Credits

• Adam: Adam Musa

References

• Almost Plausible: Bones
• Crieff
• Drummond Castle
• Drummond Castle Gardens
• Brigadoon
• Drummond Arms Hotel
• The Library of Innerpeffray
• H.M.S. Pinafore
• Maine Coon
• Michigan J. Frog
• Cat-sìth
• Ship’s Cat
• Osculum infame
• Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves
• Die Hard
• Phrogging
• Nicodemus
• Almost Plausible: Marshmallow
• Farmers’ Almanac
• Batman
• The Karate Kid

Transcript

EVIDENCE ITEM #2025-1021-A // CASE #25-77972 // RECOVERED: 21 OCT 2025
DESCRIPTION: Audio recording, digital file (incident: 25-77972)
HIGHLY CONFIDENTIAL

[BROWN]
Okay, we are recording. Emily, can I get a level check from you?

[EMILY]
Hello, this is Emily. I’m ready to record.

[BROWN]
Great, Shep?

[SHEPARD]
Hello? Hello? Rutabaga (inaudible) beer. Red leather, yellow leather. Unique New York.

[BROWN]
Okay, all set. Before we start, is everyone good?

[SHEPARD]
No! We’re in the woods! At night! Again!

[EMILY]
Yeah, but we’re indoors this time. How can you complain about this cabin?

[BROWN]
Yeah, it has central heating and toilets.

[SHEPARD]
But it’s still in the woods. And I hate the woods.

[BROWN]
Whoa.

[SHEPARD]
See? The outside is still a problem.

[EMILY]
Will it be a problem?

[BROWN]
Um, it might make editing a little tricky, but otherwise it just adds ambiance.

[SHEPARD]
Great.

[BROWN]
Okay, so are we ready? This is a last chance for a bio break before we start.

[SHEPARD]
Wait, I need my tea.

[BROWN]
Ah.

[EMILY]
So whose cabin is this? Someone you work with, you said.

[BROWN]
No. A guy I worked with when I was at the TV station. He and I were pretty good friends while I was there, and we stayed in touch after I left the company. I think you actually might have met him before. I don’t remember. Anyway, he talked about this place a few times. So when I was looking for somewhere for us to record this year, I asked him if we could use his cabin, and he said, “Yes.”

[EMILY]
That’s cool. Pretty nice place. You’ll have to thank him for us.

[BROWN]
For sure. And, yeah, it’s a lot nicer than I was expecting.

[SHEPARD]
Yeah, when you said cabin in the woods, I was picturing something smaller and without electricity.

[EMILY]
Yeah. I’m sort of sad we didn’t need to build a fire. I brought s’more stuff, as usual.

[BROWN]
Well, don’t worry. It’ll all get eaten.

[EMILY]
That’s good.

[BROWN]
Okay, are we ready now?

[EMILY]
I’m ready.

[SHEPARD]
I’m ready.

[BROWN]
Okay. Well, as we established last year, I’m not someone who goes around believing in ghosts, demons, and spirits. Then again, I used to say the same thing about Hawaiian legends, and we all remember how that story turned out.

So, here’s something that happened to me in the summer of 2003.

I had just graduated from college, and my family took a trip to England and Scotland. We started in London, which was fantastic, but we also ventured to smaller cities, like Dover, Salisbury, and Torquay. It was also a bit of a heritage trip, so we stopped in Southampton to visit relatives and see where my grandmother grew up, and eventually headed up to central Scotland, to a tiny town called Crieff.

We were there because my family is descended from the Drummond clan. The main draw in Crieff is Drummond Castle, just outside town. You couldn’t go inside the castle itself or any of the buildings back then, but you could wander around the incredible formal gardens, which we did. It was gorgeous. Intricate geometric hedges, beautiful flowers, stone statues and staircases. It was absolutely worth the trip.

Crieff itself is this bucolic, old-world Scottish town. Stone buildings, narrow streets, and rolling hills with fields all around. It has a timeless charm, like a touristy, modern Brigadoon. For the most part, the locals were pretty friendly. I don’t know how much of their income is derived from tourism, but I know the castle is a pretty big draw to what is otherwise a mostly agrarian area.

While in Crieff, we stayed at the Drummond Arms Hotel, right in the center of town. It was this big 19th-century building—three stories high, not counting the lobby or tower—with carved stonework and huge windows. The inside was definitely worn with age, but still had a stately dignity. It smelled of wood polish, old smoke, and that musty note you get in antique shops.

My room was up in the tower. And I don’t just mean the top floor—I mean the tower. It was the only room up there. You’d walk up a whole bunch of stairs, and then there was just a door, with a large, static knob in the center, and the latch nearly at shoulder height. It was surprisingly roomy, though, with a tall ceiling, an en suite bathroom, and a single, small window that looked out over the rooftops of Crieff and down to the fountain in the town square below. The stone walls were cool to the touch, the creaking wooden floor was covered with a large and faded emerald-green rug, and the room had the tiniest fireplace I’ve ever seen. It was beautiful and cozy—but also weirdly isolated.

Crieff was a magical place, and I do mean magical, because in the few days we spent there, a bunch of weird stuff happened.

For example: On the drive into town, we had seen a sign pointing down a side road that read, “Drummond Library,” and since we were in Crieff to see Drummond-related stuff, and since my dad has a Master’s degree in Library Science, and since he and I are both huge nerds, we spent part of our vacation going to a library.

[SHEPARD]
That sounds amazing. Like, why are you harshing on nerds?

[EMILY]
Yeah.

[SHEPARD]
Like-

[EMILY]
I have a list of libraries I want to visit around the world.

[SHEPARD]
Right.

[EMILY]
Like, specifically go to locations to see this one library.

[BROWN]
I do too actually, so. Well, my mom and sister, on the other hand, went horseback riding in the Scottish countryside.

[SHEPARD]
Okay, so they’re the cool ones. Got it.

[BROWN]
Actually finding the library was harder than you would expect. Oh sure, there was that sign, but what the sign didn’t make clear is that we had to walk down a long, gated-off driveway, through a cemetery (which was part of a medieval chapel built by the Drummond family, which we explored and was very cool, but has nothing to do with this story), and then behind the chapel, tucked away in the trees, we finally found the modest, two-story, Georgian building that is the Drummond Library.

Actually, it’s called The Library of Innerpeffray, but the sign I saw said “Drummond Library,” so that’s what I’m going to call it.

When we arrived, the librarian looked startled to see us. Apparently, at the time, it was rare for anyone to show up at the library unannounced. Although it had been the first lending library in Scotland, that practice ended in the late 1960s, and now it’s more of a historical research archive. The library was on the second floor of the building, and we went up to check it out. There were ancient books in glass cases, some of which I’d read about in other books.

At one point, I spotted this weird-looking thing sitting on a table, and I asked the librarian what it was. He picked it up and he handed it to me, saying, “Guess.” It appeared to be made of leather and was shaped sort of like a wineglass, but the top was domed, had about a dozen quarter-inch holes, and was stained with dark spots.

I flipped it over and saw “1624” written on the bottom, and immediately wondered if I should even be holding it. Turns out, it was a quill-carrying case. The dome with holes kept the quills upright, and there used to be a tall cover that fit over the whole thing, but apparently that had been lost to time.

On the morning of the library trip, I woke up with a song from the play H.M.S. Pinafore in my head. Even at the time, I thought it was strange for that to randomly come to mind. We had staged Pinafore at my high school, but that was like 5 or 6 years prior, and I hadn’t thought about any of those songs since then. And yet, I hummed it all morning while I got ready.

So imagine my surprise when I heard the librarian quietly whistling the same song! Just to make sure, I asked him what he was whistling, and he said, “Oh, just some old Gilbert and Sullivan tune.” I excitedly told him I had been humming that song all morning, but he just shrugged and said, “Oh. Okay,” like it wasn’t a huge coincidence, but instead, a normal thing that happened all the time. I thought, “That’s it? What are the odds?”

Anyway, that’s the sort of vibe Crieff had. Beautiful and quiet on the surface… But ancient in its roots, and with an undercurrent of odd little occurrences.

Over the next couple of days, I started noticing something else.

I kept seeing this massive black cat around town. Actually, the first time was in the cemetery I mentioned earlier. We had wandered around a bit, looking for Drummond headstones. At the far end of the graveyard, there was a low, mossy wall, and the cat was sitting on it, staring at us.

It was far bigger than any housecat I’d ever seen. And I don’t mean fat. This wasn’t a chonker, this was just a really big cat. Like, at least as big as a large bobcat. But at the time, I didn’t really realize that. I had seen it at a distance, and the wall it was sitting on was kind of small, and you know how it is when you see something your brain can’t logically comprehend, so you come up with a sort of hand-wavy explanation. Anyway, I assumed it was just a big, black Maine Coon or something.

Being a cat person, I started to walk toward it, but as soon as I did, the cat lazily stood up and jumped down the backside of the wall. What was strange was when I got to the wall and looked over, it was a sheer drop about thirty feet to the river below, and no cat in sight.

When I mentioned the cat to my dad, he said he hadn’t seen it.

The next night, as we were headed home after dinner, I saw the cat again. I turned toward my family to point it out, but when I turned back, it was gone. And then another night, the cat crossed the road under a streetlamp. Each time it silently watched me with its big, yellow eyes, and each time I was the only one who saw it. My sister quickly became incredulous, and began teasing me, saying, “Oh! The cat’s right behind you!”

[SHEPARD]
It would also sing like that frog in that cartoon.

[BROWN]
Yeah, Michigan J. Frog.

[SHEPARD]
Yeah.

[BROWN]
At one point, I went into an internet cafe to check my email (because, again, 2003. The hotel definitely didn’t have the internet). There was a beautiful red-headed girl who seemed to be around my age sitting at the computer next to mine. Best of all, she had a Scottish accent, so how could I not flirt a little?

Well, I’ll be honest and admit it wasn’t going super-well. She probably wasn’t interested in an American tourist, which, OK, fine, I get it. Anyway, suddenly it occurred to me that surely the locals will know about this giant black cat, right? So I asked her, “What’s the story with this big black cat?” And she asked something like, “What black cat?” So I told her how I had seen, in various places around the town, an enormous black cat with a white spot on its chest. (I don’t think I mentioned that part before, but it was all black with a white spot on its chest.)

[SHEPARD]
So it’s a tuxedo cat.

[BROWN]
Kinda, yeah.

[EMILY]
That’s what I’m hearing.

[BROWN]
So it’s Michigan J. Cat. Where she had seemed disinterested in me before, now I had her full attention. She looked at me with a very serious expression and then pointedly said, “There’s no cat like that in the village. You shouldn’t bring it up again.” Well, that was a weird vibe, so I apologized and got up to leave. As I did, she told me to be careful, warning that sometimes they follow people home.

[SHEPARD]
These things that don’t exist.

[BROWN]
Right. So I asked her what it was, but she said she wouldn’t speak its name, and then basically just started ignoring me after that. So.

That night my family had dinner in one of the pubs. It was a little family-run place that had a great local vibe. The table next to us had a bunch of rowdy, older Scottish guys who were drinking when we came in and still drinking when we left.

While we were waiting for our food, my sister mockingly asked if I had had any more sightings of “the big black cat.” I didn’t take her question seriously, so I didn’t answer it, but a moment later one of the men from the other table said, “You’ve seen a big black cat?”

I looked over and realized the men at the formerly-rowdy table were all now looking solemnly at me. So I told them what I had seen. They eyed each other nervously as I talked. Another man said that wasn’t a good sign. I asked why not, and I’ll never forget his creepy, cryptic answer: “Best not to call things that listen.”

Well. Both of our tables were quiet for a bit after that, but eventually our food came, and the guys kept drinking and carousing. Although I did notice a couple of them kept looking sideways at me while I was eating.

My family decided the pub had gotten a bit awkward after the cat conversation, so after dinner we decided to have a nightcap in the hotel’s parlour instead. While we were sitting there talking, the church bells tolled several times. One of the other guests asked a staff member about the bells. She said there’d been a death in the village, and that a wake was happening that night in someone’s home.

Now despite being the middle of summer, the nights in Crieff got surprisingly cold. That night, up in my tower room, I felt especially chilly, so I lit a fire in the tiny fireplace. I had my doubts that it would be enough to heat up the whole room, but actually, it did a pretty good job.

So, with the fire crackling away, heating the place up and adding a sharper smoky scent to my little room, I decided to lay in bed and read a book (because remember, this story takes place at a time where when you went on vacation, you would take an actual physical book with you).

[EMILY]
You don’t do that now?

[SHEPARD]
No, it’s like you put ebooks on your phone or you bring a Kindle.

[BROWN]
Yeah.

[EMILY]
No, no. Gotta have a physical book. You’re wrong.

[BROWN]
So I lay there on the bed, basking in the fire’s warm glow, enjoying my book, my eyelids getting heavy…

Some time later, and I’m not sure how much later, because I was half-asleep at this point. In fact, I remember I kept trying to finish this one page and then I was going to go to sleep, but I kept dozing off and having to start the page over.

[SHEPARD]
That happens to me all the time.

[BROWN]
Yeah.

[EMILY]
So much.

[BROWN]
So it was while I was in that half-asleep, half-awake state that I heard a faint scratching outside my door. Not loud, just enough to wake me up a bit and go see what it was.

I opened the door, peeked out, and there was the giant cat, just sitting at the top of the stairs, looking up at me. The cat looked utterly calm, as if it had never doubted that I would open the door for it. Without making a sound, it padded past me into the room and headed directly for the fireplace. It sat in front of the fire, gazing into the dancing flames.

Like I said, I’m a cat person, so of course I was into this. Although there was definitely a part of me that was a little worried about getting in trouble for letting an animal into my room. But it’s not like I snuck the cat in from outside, it was already in the hotel when I opened my door. At any rate, I decided I’d cross that bridge when I came to it, so I shut the door and got back in bed.

I watched the cat, increasingly unsure of whether I should try to interact with it. Now seeing it up close, it was a lot bigger than I had previously realized. If the men at the pub were to be believed, I probably shouldn’t have let it into my room in the first place, but it seemed to want to hang out with me. In fact, I remembered a time years before when I surprised a woman because her cat was letting me pet it. She had said, “That cat hates everybody,” but it seemed to like me, so maybe this was a similar situation?

Suddenly, the cat turned and jumped up onto the bed. I held my fingers out for it to smell, but it just rubbed against my hand and started purring.

I had been lying on the bed, and the cat had jumped up beside my legs, but now it climbed up onto my chest and settled into a loaf. It closed its eyes, and at first, this was really cute, but the purring got a lot more intense, and the cat seemed to get heavier. Really heavy. Like, I couldn’t move. I could barely breathe. My arms felt pinned to my sides, and a strange sound filled the room—whispers swirling around me, speaking words I couldn’t understand.

I don’t know how long that lasted. My vision tunnelled, and all I could hear, hell, I could feel was that low, rumbling purr.

Suddenly, the cat’s eyes snapped wide open and the purring stopped. It looked toward the window, as if it had heard something outside that caught its attention. Then the cat leapt off me and darted toward the door, but the weight on my chest stayed behind, like invisible hands pressing me into the mattress.

I heard the door open and close, the latch clicking into place. When the pressure finally lifted, I sat up gasping for breath, my heart pounding. I stumbled across the room to the door, and it was locked. I opened it and looked out into the stairwell, which I found dark, cold, and empty.

The next morning, I couldn’t shake what had happened.

I went back to the internet café to try to look up… Something. Anything about giant black cats in Scotland. What I found was a Geocities page that collected folklore from around the world. That site mentioned a creature from Scotland called the cat-sìth. It said it was a huge black cat, sometimes with a white patch, that could steal souls. But that was it. No details about how, or why, or what it meant that I kept seeing it. Was it trying to steal my soul?

In that moment, I thought about the librarian back at the Drummond Library. The guy who had been whistling the same tune that I’d been humming. Who seemed like maybe he wouldn’t find this situation so surprising. So I went back there.

I told him about the cat—how I’d seen it around Crieff, how it came into my hotel room, how it sat by my fire and then pressed me into the bed like it weighed a couple hundred pounds. I told him what I found on the internet that morning. He listened silently, and when I finished, he confirmed that it sounded like a cat-sìth.

He explained that it’s a fairy creature from Celtic mythology. A giant black cat with a white spot on its chest that’s said to steal the souls of the dead by walking over the body. It’s also drawn to warmth and fires in particular, which is why there’s an old tradition where they keep a candle burning next to the body during a wake. As long as the flame continues to burn, the soul is safe. But if the flame goes out, that’s a sign the cat-sìth has claimed the soul.

I realized the wake had been happening the same night the cat came into my room.

Almost as if he could read my mind, the librarian added, “Maybe your fire kept it busy. Kept it out of the MacGregor house.”

The way he said that made me think he was grateful that I’d kept it occupied, but he looked at me with a cautious, measuring expression. Like he didn’t quite trust how easily the creature had come into my room and sat by my fire.

Then he said it does sometimes choose to follow people, and he told me to wait a moment and ducked into what looked like a cluttered closet. He came out and handed me a heavy key that was smooth with a dark patina. He said it was just an old key, but that iron’s good for keeping certain things away.

I tried to ask him more, but he held up a hand and shook his head. He said we had discussed it enough, and then abruptly turned and went back to his work.

The rest of the day, I felt like the townsfolk were looking at me. I don’t know if they really were, or if I was just being paranoid. People’s attitude toward us was definitely different, though. Whereas before most of the locals were friendly, now they were… Not rude, just brusk.

It was our last full day in Crieff, and that night, back in my room, I set the iron key on the small table beside the bed. Despite the room being cold, I wasn’t about to light the fire again.

I lay in bed, but had trouble falling asleep. At some point, I heard a noise outside my window. It sounded like voices. I cautiously opened the window a crack, and the voices got louder.

[SHEPARD]
What are you doing? This is the part of the horror movie where I yell at the screen.

[BROWN]
I could hear them echoing in the streets and realized they were coming from below. I opened the window more and peered down to the town square. It was just a group of local teenagers hanging out around the fountain.

A gentle, chilly breeze blew, and I looked out over Crieff. It was peaceful, and the amber lights of the town glimmered in the dark. That’s when I noticed a particular pair of yellowish dots. I realized they weren’t points of light, they were eyes. The cat-sìth was sitting on a rooftop not far from the hotel. It was looking at me again. I shut the window and latched it, but the cat never broke its gaze. I quickly grabbed the key off the bedside table, and when I looked back, the cat was gone.

I drew the curtains and huddled under the covers, clutching the key tightly. I don’t know how long it took me to fall asleep, but my parents woke me up the next morning by knocking on my door. I had to rush to get ready and finish packing.

We left Crieff that morning. After everything that had happened, it felt strange how easily the world went back to normal. Crieff was the last stop on our trip, and the journey back to London and eventually the States was uneventful.

I went home, got a job, moved on with life. But every once in a while, late at night, when the house is quiet and the lights flicker for no reason… I wonder if the cat-sìth followed me home.

Either way, best not to call things that listen.

[SHEPARD]
You keep saying, “Best not to call things that listen,” but you mentioned the cat-sìth by name, several- And you got me saying it now!

[BROWN]
Well. Yep. Hopefully it’s not listening.

[SHEPARD]
Let’s not- Oh, golly.

[EMILY]
Hey. I had a freaky encounter with black cat once.

[BROWN]
Okay, Sounds good. Let’s hear it.

[EMILY]
In some countries and cultures, black cats aren’t seen as bad luck or evil. Like in Wales, they’re an omen of good health; some sailors believed th-

[RECORDING INTERRUPTION – POWER OUTAGE]

[BROWN]
It’s working.

[SHEPARD]
Finally.

[ADAM]
You said it’s working.`

[BROWN]
Yeah, the recording is going again. Yeah, it all seems okay.

[ADAM]
Generator too loud?

[BROWN]
No, I can hear it, but it’s really faint. Shouldn’t be a problem.

[SHEPARD]
Does it add more ambiance?

[BROWN]
Ha. Well, I don’t know about that.

[EMILY]
Thanks for coming all the way out here.

[BROWN]
Yeah, I don’t know if I could have gotten the generator going without your help.

[ADAM]
Oh, don’t mention it. Storm’s pretty bad in town as well, so I tried to call and make sure you were okay. When you didn’t answer, I decided I’d better come check on you.

[BROWN]
Oh, sorry. Our phones are off because we were recording.

[ADAM]
Ah, yeah. Good. Well, I see one of you got the fire going, though. That’s good, sincethe furnace won’t run off the generator.

[EMILY]
Yes, Shep, thank you for building a fire.

[SHEPARD]
Well, I’ve had lots of practice. As you know, I grew up in the woods.

[ADAM]
You grew up in the woods?

[BROWN]
Don’t get him started. We still have to record the rest of this episode.

[EMILY]
Okay. But afterward, we’re going to make s’mores, right?

[ADAM]
If you want, I’ll make some hot chocolate to go with the s’mores.

[BROWN]
I mean, I won’t say no to more chocolate.

[EMILY]
Yeah, same here.

[ADAM]
Fantastic. Well, I’ll let you get back to it. I’m gonna go get another diesel can from the shed and probably chop some more wood, but I’ll try to be quiet.

[BROWN]
Okay, thanks again.

[EMILY]
Thanks, Adam.

[SHEPARD]
Thank you.

[BROWN]
Okay, Emily, back to your story. You know what? Why don’t you just start over?

[EMILY]
Okay. In some countries and cultures black cats aren’t seen as bad luck or evil. Like in Wales, they’re an omen of good health; some sailors believed this and kept black cats as the ship’s cats, and sometimes their families would have one at home, thinking it would bring more good luck to the men at sea. But in the Middle Ages, they became associated with witchcraft and the devil. I guess at one point the Church believed that black cats specifically were needed to summon the devil by having members of the coven kiss their butt (the cat’s but, not each other’s butts; clearly someone had some intrusive thoughts and needed a way to explain them).

[SHEPARD]
That’s good luck. That’s good luck.

[EMILY]
It’s good luck.

[BROWN]
Look, the cats get to kiss their own butt all the time. Must be fun.

[EMILY]
I never really thought about black cats one way or the other. Other than, you know, they’re cute, cuddly kitties that need all my hugs and kisses. As all cats do.

[BROWN]
Yes.

[SHEPARD]
Yep.

[EMILY]
Until I had a very strange and horrifying incident with one. A few years ago, I lived in that big house that was 120 years old. It was my dream house, with a huge porch and a swing, a bay window, a giant dining room.

[SHEPARD]
And a ghost. And a…

[EMILY]
Generous master bedroom that overlooked the front yard. God, I loved that house. And I loved the ghosts that live there, too, Shep. This was the first house I moved to after I separated from my husband. The kids really liked it because there was plenty of room to play loudly and be wild all over the place.

[SHEPARD]
And also a ghost to play with.

[EMILY]
100%.

[SHEPARD]
Sorry. I remember that house. It was 100% haunted.

[EMILY]
Oh, definitely. And it was sad when we moved out.

[SHEPARD]
Yes. And the ghost was crying.

[EMILY]
It was. Wailing all night.

[SHEPARD]
Yep.

[BROWN]
He’s going “Boo. Boo.”

[EMILY]
But when the kids were at their dad’s and I was home alone, the house felt, you know, cold and empty. I mean, it was 120 years old, and it was totally drafty. And a 2,500 square foot is kind of overkill for one person. For the first few months, I had trouble sleeping when the house was empty, and I would stare out my bedroom window and watch the quiet neighborhood or talk to the moon.

Three months after moving in, I started to notice this little black cat across the street. It would cross the street every night. It came down the side street, rounded the corner, crossed the street, went under my car, and disappeared along the fence line between my house and the neighbor. Same route every night. Since I got accustomed to seeing it every night, I decided to name it. I mean, it would have to have a name when I talked to it from my window, right? So I named him Nekodemus, a combination of neko for cat in Japanese and Nicodemus, the name of the cat in Robin Hood, Prince of Thieves. Every night when I saw little Nekodemus run his route, I would make up stories about what he was doing. Sometimes he was running from the cops because he was caught dealing nip on the streets, or he was a ninja master patrolling the neighborhood. Mostly, I assumed he was going to meet up with a special lady cat, if you know what I mean.

[BROWN]
Well, probably.

[EMILY]
When the weather got nice, I started spending more time on the porch at night. One night, I watched Nekodemus scuttle down the neighbor’s fence line, carrying, like, a small frog in his mouth. A few moments later, I heard loud barking and a cat yowling out in pain. And I ran back to the alley to see poor little Nekodemus lying under the street light, bleeding. He had been attacked by a dog. I didn’t know what I was going to do. He was clearly still alive, but in a lot of pain. I didn’t have a lot of extra money for things like an emergency vet visit, but I couldn’t leave him lying there waiting to die. I scooped him up and I brought him into the house. I cleaned him up as best and gently as I could. He definitely had some bite marks, but they didn’t seem too deep. It seemed very superficial. The bleeding let up as I was cleaning him up, so I decided to wait to take him until the morning. I brought in some water and left him in the tub overnight. I thought that was the safest, cleanest option.

When I got up in the morning, I went to check on Nekodemus first thing. But he wasn’t in the tub anymore. The door was still closed when I got up, so he didn’t get out that way. And my bathroom was not big enough for him to hide away from me.

[SHEPARD]
He crawled through the air vents like John McClane.

[EMILY]
That’s a better explanation. I was alone all night. Kids weren’t coming home for a couple more days. Checked around the house on the off chance he’d gotten out and shut the door behind him. I didn’t find him on the first or second floor, and I thoroughly searched every nook and cranny. Don’t want a bleeding, dying cat just hiding in your house somewhere.

[SHEPARD]
Right.

[EMILY]
That’s gonna smell.

[BROWN]
Right. That’d be not ideal.

[EMILY]
No. And I headed down to my basement. Do either of you remember or spend a lot of time in my basement?

[SHEPARD]
Yes. Your haunted basement with the murder room.

[EMILY]
My very haunted basement.

[BROWN]
Yeah, the murder room. That’s what I was thinking, too.

[SHEPARD]
Yeah.

[EMILY]
It was super creepy. I checked behind the boxes, on the ledges, behind the furnace.

[SHEPARD]
You’re not gonna explain the murder room? I don’t think that you’ve mentioned it on the podcast before. So, like, listeners like, “Oh, yeah, she has a room where she murders people. That’s in character. This all tracks.”

[EMILY]
That’s what I’m saying. Nobody- They’d be more surprised if I hadn’t had one.

[BROWN]
It’s probably true.

[SHEPARD]
That’s why you missed that house. It had a dedicated murder room.

[EMILY]
Dedicated murder room.

[SHEPARD]
You didn’t have to do it in the bathroom.

[EMILY]
Nope.

[SHEPARD]
In the bathtub every time.

[EMILY]
No. You just stirred up the dirt on the floor, and it was good as new. Time for the next victim. So I checked-

[SHEPARD]
It was a coal room. It was a coal- Explain. Explain your murder room. It was a coal room.

[EMILY]
All right, all right. So I checked all over the basement. And finally I went to check what I called the murder room. Which was actually an old coal room where they used to keep the coal for the boiler to heat the house in its original time.

[SHEPARD]
Thank you.

[EMILY]
It had nothing but stone walls and a dirt floor. Hence the bleeding in the dirt floor and mixing it up. I’d been having trouble sleeping lately, and that always makes my dreams a little freaky and sometimes pretty vivid.

I sleepwalk occasionally, but it had never been this bad. I mean, it could possibly have been a crazy sleepwalk dream, but it was way too real, to be honest. I spent a little more time before work wandering around the yard, calling Necodemus. Nothing came of it. I went into my office and worked. I had a really stressful job, and when the kids weren’t home, I would end up working late hours. That night, I worked until I realized it was dark out. I went to make myself some dinner and heard scratching at the front door. I opened it and there’s Necodemus. He looked totally normal and I bent down and gave him pets and got a closer look. And there were no marks on that cat, no wounds. That was super weird.

[BROWN]
Yeah.

[EMILY]
I asked him if he was alright and if he wanted a snack, and he did that little chirpy meow meow cats do sometimes when they’re saying “Sure, I could go for a little bite.”

He walked behind me into the house and straight to the kitchen. He clearly knew where the food was. I got a bowl out and filled it with water, and then opened a can of tuna for him. I sat on a stool at the counter and ate my microwaved meal. After I ate, I picked him up, put him on the porch. I sat outside on the steps and gave him pets for a little bit. Eventually, I went in. He tried to follow me, but I reminded him he did not live here and he had his patrol to do, or drugs to sell, or whatever he did every night. He gave a sad little meow and stayed on the porch.

I looked out the bedroom window before I got into bed, and I could see Necodemus sitting under that street light, staring into the window directly at me. Surprisingly, that night, I fell asleep pretty easily. But I was woken up by a very loud crash somewhere downstairs. I went down to find out what it was. I couldn’t see anything on the first floor that would have made that crashing noise.

[SHEPARD]
Right. Ghosts are invisible. So-

[EMILY]
This is true.

[BROWN]
That noise came from the murder room, anyway.

[EMILY]
Everything- Everything looked like it was where it was supposed to be. Then I realized it sounded like the ladder in the basement had gotten knocked over somehow. I went down to check, but it was upright in the corner like it usually was.

Something must have crashed somewhere outside, and my sleepy brain was like, “Oh, that was inside.” So I just went back to bed.

A couple of hours later, I heard scratching at my bedroom door. A little bit afraid of a mouse or something. I didn’t really want to go look, but I had to know. So I grabbed a big shoe because, you know, I would totally have been able to smash a mouse if I found one. But when I opened the door-

[SHEPARD]
It was a cat-sìth! No, I said it again. Dang it.

[EMILY]
A little tiny one. His name was Necodemus. He was sitting there staring at me. I don’t know how the hell this cat could have even gotten into the house. I don’t sleep with my windows open or unlocked, especially when I’m home alone. Clearly, this freaked me out. I mean, the cat vanished from my bathroom overnight. His wounds were magically healed, and now he’s just waltzing into my house without any way to get in.

I swiftly picked up this shady-ass cat. I just opened the front door when I heard a loud thud coming from upstairs. I dropped Necodemus, and I ran to the kitchen for a knife. Necodemus ran back into the house and up the stairs, and suddenly, like, I heard this really loud crash and thuds and howls from both the cat and a person!

[BROWN]
Uh…

[EMILY]
I went to pull out my phone to call the police, but of course, I left it in my room, charging on my bedside table. I froze with panic and just stood there trying to decide what I was going to do. I’m sure I made the decision a lot quicker than it felt, but I bolted out the front door and ran to the house across the street, where a bunch of college boys lived. I figured they would be up and willing to help out a scared single mom. They called the police, and a couple of them talked about going over, but they opted to wait for the cops, thankfully.

The first officer arrived and asked me a few questions. Then another officer got there and they headed over to my house investigate. After about 10 minutes, they emerged with a scraggly-looking guy. It was one of the single most terrifying things I had seen. There was a man in my house hiding while I was there! Turns out it was a victim of Phrogging. That’s when someone lives in your house without you knowing it. Apparently, he’d only been hiding in the house for a couple of days. I was so relieved that he hadn’t been there when the kids were there.

Necodemus disappeared after that. He wasn’t in the house when the cops got there. He didn’t come back to the house. I stopped seeing him on his nightly patrol. I don’t know where he came from or where he went, but because of him, I now believe black cats are good luck.

[SHEPARD]
Are you familiar with the Nicodemus in the New Testament? He was a Pharisee that- who visited Jesus one night in secret.

[EMILY]
I’m vaguely familiar with this. Yeah.

[SHEPARD]
It’s an interesting coincidence that that’s what you chose to call the cat.

[ADAM]
Hey, I heard the last bit of that. Is that what your podcast is about? Is it one of those true crime ones?

[BROWN]
No. We tell spooky stories to each other at Halloween. The rest of the year, we’re coming up with movie plots based on ordinary objects.

[ADAM]
Oh. Well, hey, I made that hot chocolate.

[EMILY]
Thank you.

[SHEPARD]
Thank you. We have an episode about hot chocolate, by the way.

[ADAM]
Oh, yeah?

[BROWN]
Actually, that episode is about marshmallows, but hot chocolate does feature quite prominently.

[SHEPARD]
Ah, yes, that’s right.

[ADAM]
Wait. It sounds like the storm is calming down, so I’m gonna head out. Unless you need anything else.

[BROWN]
No, I think we’re good. Thanks for stopping by.

[ADAM]
Yeah, no problem. There is one more can of diesel out by the generator in case it runs out. And you’ll probably want to turn it off when you guys go to sleep. No sense running it all night.

[BROWN]
Do I need to do anything when the power comes back on?

[ADAM]
Obviously, you want to turn the generator off, and then where it’s connected to the building, there’s a big switch that’s currently on “Generator”. Just flip it back to “Line” and then you’ll be on shore power again. You can just leave the generator plugged in. I’ll come back and deal with it tomorrow.

[BROWN]
Okay, I think I can handle that.

[EMILY]
Thanks again for letting us use your cabin and making us hot cocoa. It was really nice to meet you.

[SHEPARD]
Yeah. Thank you.

[ADAM]
Oh, you’re quite welcome. Bye, everyone. Knock them dead.

[BROWN]
And then there was one-

[EMILY]
Bum bum bum.

[BROWN]
Story. Left to read. Shep?

[SHEPARD]
Do we need to restart the timer or something?

[BROWN]
No. I’m going to edit all this out.

[SHEPARD]
Okay. When I was five, my parents split up. When I was six, my mom (who was a super hippie) met a man living her idyllic life, which was subsistence farming in the woods. And we moved there, and he became my stepdad. Three years after that, I died. Here’s what happened:

We were living deep within the Central California woods on a tiny farm with no running water or electricity. It was my mom, my stepdad, my older brother, myself, and my younger sister. My stepdad was mean. He forced us to go out and, quote-unquote, “pick up litter”. But there was no litter. It was the middle of the woods.

[BROWN]
Right.

[SHEPARD]
The only litter was his cigarette butts that he would fling on the ground as he finished each cigarette. It was frustrating. We were subsistence farmers, meaning that we had to survive off of just what we could raise and grow ourselves. So, of course, we took it very seriously in the sense that none of us knew anything about farming. I was just a kid. My mom bought a farmer’s almanac once. My stepdad was a sheetrock contractor. We didn’t know anything. We farmed by vibes. We were vibe farmers! So, yeah, I grew up very hungry all the time.

Two years after we moved there, in the summer, there was a forest fire. The road around our farm was like a horseshoe. Both of the exits went into the fire.

[BROWN]
Oh, no.

[SHEPARD]
So we were trapped. We were stuck on the farm, watching the fire as it crept down closer and closer to the creek dividing our land from our neighbors. If it jumped the creek, it would burn up everything on the hill, including our farm. Luckily, we were so inept at farming, we had overgrazed the field facing the wildfire, forming a natural firebreak. So it reached our property and stopped.

After the fire was extinguished. For a long time, facing our property was just blackened woods. Behind us, everything was still lush and green. And ahead of us, nothing remained. And it was in that area where all those charred trees were that we found Sooty, a black cat, seemingly unaffected by the wildfire at all.

Where did Sooty come from? We didn’t know. We asked around to see if our neighbors had lost a cat, but nobody recognized it. So he came and lived with us. And just six months later, when my mom and stepdad had a fight and my mom went to stay with her sister in Lodi for a while, we took Sooty with us.

Sooty was a mountain cat and was not adapted to life in the city. He ran into traffic and got hit by a car, and died. It was very traumatic.

[EMILY]
I can imagine.

[SHEPARD]
My mom came out of my aunt’s house with a trash bag to pick up Sooty’s body and throw it away. And I insisted that we bury Sooty, despite this not being my house. And I took Sooty’s body into the backyard and dug a shallow hole near the vegetable garden. I sat there holding Sooty and wishing he weren’t dead. And suddenly he gasped. Then a shallow breath, and then another and another. He started breathing again. He had been dead for more than an hour, and somehow he was alive again.

Now, being an eight-year-old raised by a hippie who told me magic is real, I didn’t think anything of this. Cats have nine lives after all. Sooty must have had at least one left. So I ran into my aunt’s house and let my family know, and they, of course, did not believe my words. But they saw him in my arms, breathing. He was still injured. He had dried blood in his fur, and his tail was missing, having been torn off in that accident.

[EMILY]
Poor kitty.

[SHEPARD]
But he was unquestionably alive. He healed up relatively fast as well, other than his missing tail. He looked like a bob-tailed cat now, but other than that, he seemed fine. Around this time, my mom and stepdad reconciled, and we moved back to the farm. Farewell, civilization with its electricity and clean running water and television and libraries and other kids my age. Back to the woods! …It’s possible I’m still harboring some residual resentment for my childhood.

[EMILY]
Hadn’t noticed.

[SHEPARD]
Anyway, summer came again, and my stepdad was building us a house with his old workmates. He tried to get us kids to work on it too, but I wasn’t coordinated enough to drive a nail in without bending it over, no matter how many times I tried.

And my stepdad, who previously had us work even when there was no work to do, sent me off from the building site. That’s how bad at it I was. So I really had nothing to do. I’d spend my days in the local woods. One day, I noticed a huge tree by our garden had a broken branch, leaving a stump of a limb behind. I found an old rope, made a lasso, and threw it up to catch that branch. I was going to scale this tree like Batman. Or like a ninja, because this was the 80s and we were all ninjas back then.

[EMILY]
Yeah.

[SHEPARD]
I blame Karate Kid.

The rope was- I say “rope”. It was thin. It was very hard to get a firm grip on, hard to climb with it. If I’d been a little smarter, I would have tied knots in the rope before tossing it up over the branch. And if I had been a little smarter than that, then I wouldn’t have done this at all. The rope was so old and thin you could see the fibers snapping within it as I climbed. I wondered briefly if it was going to snap entirely, causing me to fall what was now a significant distance to my nine-year-old eyes.

…Here are my next memories as I recall them: I felt like I was falling through dark clouds, and then very suddenly, SNAP! I was awake. I was lying on my back on the rocks under the tree. My entire body was numb, like when your leg falls asleep, and I could not move. And like when your leg falls asleep, when sensation did start to return it was pins and needles over my whole body. That was awful.

Eventually, I could move again, and the first thing I noticed was that Sooty was lying on my chest, staring directly into my face. Which, it was unusual. It was unusual. Sooty didn’t like pets or cuddling. I think the only previous time that he had been on me was the brief time he was dead.

The second thing I noticed was that it was evening. It had been mid-afternoon when I had started playing my ill-planned ninja-ascent attempt. Somehow, I had been lying under the tree for hours.

I could eventually move well enough to hobble home. Sooty had long run off. I tried to tell my family about this strange experience I had just had, but nobody wants to listen to a nine-year-old’s adventures in the woods. And besides, it was dinner time, so I was ignored. I was also a middle child, so this was nothing new. I don’t think I’ve ever told anyone about this again, until now.

The following day, I was out weeding the garden not too far from the house, which was almost done by this point. They were putting the roof on, nailing down the large boards that the shingles would later be attached to. My stepdad was taking a break, smoking cigarettes in the shade of the house, which was quite tall, when suddenly there was a shout! From the roof came a scraping sound, and I looked up, and my stepdad looked up, just in time for one of those large boards to come slicing through the air, striking my stepdad directly on the head. There was no ambulance service this deep in the woods. Not that it would have mattered. His death was instantaneous.

There were a lot of shouts and panic that followed, so probably no one but me noticed, sitting at the peak of the new roof, was Sooty watching the excitement.

See, people say black cats are unlucky, but what if they’re just balancing the luck? I think… I think I died under that tree, and Sooty brought me back. And to balance my life, a death was needed. Is that fair? Well, life’s not fair anyway.

Sooty disappeared shortly after. “Eaten by coyotes,” my family decided. We moved away too, now that my stepdad had passed. We moved on with our lives and forgot about the past. I’d forgotten all about this until recently. The thing is, I’ve been seeing Sooty around recently. It can’t be. But it definitely is. The same black cat with no tail.

Is it my turn to be balanced out?

Wow, that boring, huh? Guys? Hello? Are you actually asleep? Whoa. I feel a bit dizzy.

[ADAM]
You’re still awake.

[SHEPARD]
What?

[ADAM]
What’s wrong? Didn’t like my cocoa.

[SHEPARD]
You poisoned us?

[ADAM]
Obviously. Yes.

[SHEPARD]
Of course. But why?

[ADAM]
Well, normally I have to find a way to convince people to come up here so I can kill them, but the three of you wanted to come. Poison is just so I can deal with you one at a time.

[SHEPARD]
So they’re not dead?

[ADAM]
Well, hopefully not yet, but they will be after I deal with you.

[VIOLENCE]

[ADAM]
Well, I think we’re done with this. Looks like it ended up being a true crime podcast after all.

[END OF RECORDING]