Didn't occur to me before when I posted about my recently dead (and still not revisiting) cat.
But we had a relevant experience a couple of years back. Driving back around midnight, from town - have to drive through about 10 miles of relatively empty countryside. My family have lived here literally for centuries and I've driven and been driven up and down this particular road my entire life, so it's not a place I am mentally 'primed' to 'see' anything untoward.
It was incredibly foggy. But this is the Vale of York and it's often incredibly foggy.
That did mean we reached a certain low point, where the fog is always thicker, and were driving virtually at walking pace (blind bend coming up, and woods to one side).
So husband is driving along at a total snail's pace and we se, up ahead of us, just within the headlight's beam (zero visibility beyond a certain point), this shadow on the road. Just that. Pitch black (apart from our lights), no street lights for miles, and night time so... shadows? The fact it was anomalous made me stare hard at it. And I realised it was about the size of a cat. And moving across the road from right to left (towards the woods). We were going so slow we saw the shadow (it wasn't a cat - there was nothing there - just a shadow moving on its own) reach the grass verge. (At the time I was transfixed by this so didn't look to see if my husband, who was driving, had clocked it - in fact assumed he hadn't).
Now I was knackered so 100 things are racing through my head but as a natural cynic, my first thought was "You're imagining this - you're tired." But as I looked at the shadow, hitting the grass verge something weird happened. Where there had been nothing whatsoever - just a shadow - there now was a cat. But it was transparent (nuts, I know) and its eyes didn't glow in the car light. So it was a shadow on the road but the second it hit the verge it was a cat. Then it passed into the woods, just as we reached level with it.
Can't say here what I said, immediately but it was anaughty word, but having seen weird things before (and more than once in the company of a second person) I thought I'd not give anything away - chances were it was me being tired - but ask husband if he just saw what I just saw. Turns out he did. I kept quiet so as not to influence his account whilst he proceeds to tell me he saw this shadow, about the size of a cat - that morphed into a see through cat on the grass verge, then disappeared into the woods. The only way his account differed from my observation was, he insists it wasn't just the cat but the vegetation around it, that was different. He said there were bigger plants on the grass verge that he knows in daylight, aren't there. (He drives that way every day to work).
I didn't notice the background, just the cat. We were still shaking and laughing five minutes later when we got home. My teenage sons were still up and knew something weird had happened but when we told them they didn't believe us. (Still don't).
Next day we went past and slowed right down at the same point. And realised there is in fact a metal fence now, at the point we thought we saw it disappear into the woods. The mesh is too small for even a small cat to get through. Even if it had been a solid cat (and it wasn't), it couldn't have passed into the woods.
We go past most days and can still both lcoate the precise point where we saw it pass into the woods.
Although it was foggy, within the first few metres we could see clearly the road. It was not a cat. There was nothing there. (In fact I looked overhead to see if there was a bag or something caught in the trees casting a shadow although I've never seen a shadow at night, like that, is why it caught my eye in the first place).
I will know til my dying day my husband wasn't just chiming in and agreeing because I kept utterly schtum til he had recounted the whole thing. And he saw what I saw - except he saw some different vegetation.
I'm aware of pareidolia but it simply wasn't that. We both interpreted it as a cat - something about its size and speed then also when it materialised, it was a cat. Just see-through! The cat, when it materialised, was not at all solid - transparent - yet also not entirely transparent.
I have searched online to find anyone else's account of any weird sightings on that stretch of road but can find nothing. My own family were farmers and gamekeepers in that area and would have known those woods like the back of their hands. I said afterwards I'd rather have seena coach and four or a highwayman. A cat seems such a stupid 'ghost' to see.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareidolia
