By Tim Binnall
An odd piece of footage from a home security system in Ireland shows a cat walking into a backyard and then seemingly vanishing into thin air, leaving some to wonder if it was an apparition. The spooky video was posted to Reddit last week by the bewildered homeowner who insisted that the footage was genuine and not edited in any way.
The scene is fairly straightforward, as far as ghost videos go, as it simply shows the cat meander onto the man's patio in the middle of the night before jumping onto his lawn and seemingly dematerializing in the process. Unlike similar videos that pop up online with dubious origins that provide almost no means for further investigation, in this instance, the individual behind the footage thankfully stuck around on Reddit to answer questions from users.
While a number of people were convinced that the oddity was a ghost cat, advising him to move out or congratulating on his new paranormal pet, others weren't quite as convinced. In response to the suggestion that the creature had merely disappeared into some shrubs at the edge of the patio, the man said that the plants there are quite small and that they "aren't really bushes that things can hide in."
With that explanation apparently crossed off the list, the consensus among skeptical viewers coalesced around the security system being the culprit behind the 'ghost cat.' The reasoning for this is that, based on the movement of the trees on the fringes of the video, the footage appears to have been compressed, probably as a way of saving space, and that the process inadvertently produced the perceived apparition.
The hypothesis was strengthened by one user who said that their three cats had also been rendered 'phantoms' by the same type of home security system. "Unless, of course, my cats can teleport - which I would love to believe," the pet owner mused, "but, you know...which is more likely?"