A Walk to the Haunted Cathouse

In honor of Halloween

Mama and Spooky 2 hanging out inside the house next door

I currently feed five semi feral cats that live in a house abandoned after the husband and wife who lived there died five months apart in 2020. Thai family members packed up everything except six cats and four chickens which were inadvertently left to us. They believe the house is haunted, or at the bare minimum very bad luck, so no one will stay there again.

Nawan and Naloon were our next door neighbors in 2019 and they ended up signing as witnesses for our marriage on Thailand. We didn't plan on legally wedding in the spooky season but after a series of summer setbacks it was just the way it happened. The neighbors had six girl children and no boys. Nawan had joked with me about that a few times. Most were under 10 years old. Their baby girl, then about two years old, came with them to the Amphur as they had no one to watch her. The final paperwork was signed at around 2 PM on November 1, 2019, just a hair before the stroke of midnight on Halloween night in the West Coast of the USA.

I

I like collecting official legal documents in this language for some reason

Buy me a coffee

Halloween is far from the only spooky holiday around this time, as our marriage certificate falls on both All Saint’s Day and Dias De Las Muertes. I used to ponder too much if perhaps our marriage was cursed somehow with the odd deaths of our two witnesses though in general I feel a supportive sense. The house is not haunted in a malevolent way. Naloon (the wife) came to me in a dream not too long after she died. She wanted to know if she could borrow bread and sugar because she was worried her girls were hungry. As a silver lining if I were ever to come into riches I would dedicate a fund to their six beautiful girls. Since they signed for our marriage I should have a way of tracking them down even though the family is gone from the area.

For now I feed seven cats, and hope they will manage without me here. A neighbor on the other side sometimes leaves out food for them too, but he is not consistent about it. The five that are semi-feral are best left in the neighborhood. There is no reason to put them in a cage and hope somebody will adopt them, especially if one were to euthanize them afterwards. They serve a valuable purpose hunting rats and lizards.

I worry most about Sprout and Feisty, who are not feral at all and sleep on our bed every night. Here’s a video of Sprout following my daughter from bed to bed.

This video of the haunted house cut off before I could show the cats. I am actively looking at alternatives to YouTube. My heads up to people who rely on the platform is that my videos (almost all posted by my daughter) seem to get artificially suppressed, boosted, and copyright claimed so they can’t be seen from certain markets (like the USA). This may be affecting a lot of people with say parody songs so it is just a heads up. Most likely they’ll just demonetize. But really why should the record label for Mariah Carey own the video I posted of the Siam Bar just because her song was playing in the bar when I posted the video (almost certainly from a CD I bought personally). Does she own the bar too?

Those questions are for another post. Happy Halloween and all around spooky season…and anniversary to me I suppose…