SOME THINGS DEFY EXPLANATION

I’ve always been told there is a logical or scientific explanation for everything, but sometimes things happen that defy explanation.

Take the other day, for example. It was dusk and I was taking a quick walk down my road. I was alone because it was really humid out and just too hot for my dogs to be out walking.

About a half-mile from my house, I spotted something sitting on the guardrail along the right side of the road. It resembled a large, long-haired cat, but its fur was all puffed up. It reminded me of the way birds puff up their feathers in the winter when they’re cold. Hanging down over the railing was a long, fluffy tail.

As I walked closer to the area where the cat was perched with its back to me, the animal didn’t move, which seemed unusual. Most cats, or any other animals in my neighborhood, bolt into the woods the minute they see anything coming their way.

This cat on steroids, however, just sat there. When I moved to the other side of the road to distance myself from it, it turned its head and stared at me. I debated whether I should go back the way I’d come or continue to move ahead, even though I had a terrible feeling this cat creature was going to leap at me and attach itself to my jugular vein at any second.

I moved forward and the animal just continued to stare. And when I was a good distance away and turned to look back at it, it was still sitting on the railing.

The next afternoon, I took another walk, this time with my dog, Willow. As we walked toward the guardrail, I wondered if the puffy cat would be there again. I didn’t see anything on the rail, but Willow spotted something that looked like a big pile of twigs lying in the road

For some reason, Willow really wanted that pile of twigs. When I was close enough to see what the pile was, I was shocked to discover it was the skeleton of an animal. It was old, brown and decomposed, as if the animal had died ages ago. I didn’t get near enough to really examine it, so it could have been anything from a porcupine to an extraterrestrial, but I did notice the remains of what looked like a fluffy tail lying there.

When I got home and told my husband about it, he said, “I’ll bet the animal you saw on the guardrail yesterday actually was the reincarnation of that skeleton, and it was returning to the scene of its death!”

The look on his face clearly told me he was pulling my leg.

“Then where has the skeleton been hiding all of this time and how did it get out into the middle of the road?” I asked.

“The reincarnated cat must have dragged it out there because he was ticked off that no one ever gave him a decent burial!”

His teasing about the cat made me think back to something that happened one night back when we were first married – something we vowed never to tell anyone.

We were coming home from a drive-in movie late one Saturday night, and were on a dark, country road in Allenstown. Suddenly, what looked like a woman in a white flowing gown appeared from behind the trees and began to cross the road. There was something really weird about her (other than the fact she was out roaming around at midnight in what looked like her nightgown)…she wasn’t walking, she was floating!

I blinked and she was gone. That’s when I told myself I must have dozed off for a second, because no way had I actually seen a floating woman crossing the road. I decided not to breathe a word of it to my husband because I was pretty sure he’d be on the phone in a flash, telling the men in the white coats to come haul me away.

I’d been too preoccupied with the floating woman to realize my husband had slammed on the brakes and stopped the car in the middle of the road. I looked over at him to ask him what was wrong. He was staring wide-eyed at the road, a look of shocked disbelief on his face.

“Did you…um…just see…um…” he stammered, his eyes still fixed on the road.

I took a deep breath and decided to blurt out what I’d seen, even at the risk of being hauled off to a padded cell. “A footless woman in a white gown?”

His head snapped in my direction. “You saw her, too?”

I didn’t know whether to be relieved that I wasn’t hallucinating, or terrified that some floating woman was lurking nearby. “Let’s get out of here,” I said. “Fast!”

When we got home, we vowed never to speak of the incident to anyone, mainly because we didn’t want people to think…well, who knows what people would have thought!

I did, however, in a moment of weakness a few years later, happen to mention it to one of my friends.

“Was there a swamp nearby?” she asked.

I gave her a puzzled look. “I think so, why?”

“Simple!” she said. “Your apparition was swamp gas! It bubbles up and forms a kind of steam or mist that can look like all sorts of shapes. Was the woman kind of see-through looking rather than solid?”

I nodded.

“Then that’s what it was, nothing but swamp gas!”

I felt a lot better, a lot saner, after talking to her, even though I’d never even heard of swamp gas before.

Now that I think about it, that puffy cat I saw on the guardrail the other day was sitting right above a stream that crosses under the road.

Maybe he was nothing but stream gas.