Mysterious Meow And The Shadow Cat

To lead into the first story I shall have to inform you all of some of my background. At the age of 8 I was made a 'Ward of the State' due to unpleasant home circumstances.

I spent a number of years bouncing from failed foster placement to failed foster placement. At almost 11 years old (I was there a month before my birthday) I found myself in Brattleboro Retreat. I was placed in their off campus child unit (thank god because the main campus is freaky... After all it started off as an insane asylum).

Bear with me now. This unit had a strict routine. At certain times of the day we had to wait quietly in our rooms for staff to prepare meals and tally the privilege point system for all 11 of us children.

Now to the story! Anyways I had been living at this place for nearly a year without any weird goings on. One day during one of the routine Quiet Times I was sitting and reading a book in my second floor bedroom. Suddenly, out of the blue, I heard a cat's meow. Just one quick 'meooow' nothing more. Like a cat had wandered into the room and asked for food or was saying 'hey'.

I went and looked out the window and saw nothing, just the yard. We weren't allowed pets on the unit so of course there were no actual cats running around inside. If it had been one of the other children making noise I am sure that it would have been muffled, as I said it sounded as if it was in the same room as me. Also if it was one of the other children I'm sure that the staff would have come up to tell them they were being too loud as there was a baby monitor upstairs. In fact, my bedroom at the time was one of the 2 upstairs that did not have a wall in common with any other bedroom! I remain stumped to this day.

Now to my second story. Back to the more recent past. My boyfriend and I have been seeing some weird shadow creature. It changes shape but most often appears as a feline figure. My boyfriend sees it more often and it appears to follow him. He has seen it at his previous girlfriends' houses, his grandma's old house, his parent's house, our old apartment, even our current one! I have only had 2 encounters with it.

Once, while I was living with him and his parents, we were fighting and I decided to pack and leave. I was sitting on the floor putting stuff into bags and swear to God I saw what appeared to be a motion blurred calico cat jump over my bags and disappear as quickly as it appeared. When I say calico cat I mean tortoiseshell calico, one with barely any orange and cream color but lots of black. His parents have never owned a cat. It was enough to startle the heck out of me as it was no corner of the eye thing.

The second time I encountered this thing we were living in our previous apartment. I was reading on the couch in the living room at the time. As I was reading I became aware of movement over the top of the book. It looked like a dark grey to black koala bear playing peekaboo over the rim of our laundry basket. I played 'now you see me, now you don't' with it for almost half an hour as it would vanish if I looked at it full on. Only when I was looking at my book could I see it in my peripheral vision.

In none of these cases was I scared. I felt nothing from the things and my own emotions merely ranged at startled. I don't know what it is about this shadow creature but from the way it seems to follow my boyfriend and appear at troublesome times I feel that it is someone close to him. I would wager its either his grandpa who died when he was young, or his birth mother who was murdered when he was one year old. What do you guys think?