While I don’t really decorate my home for Halloween, that doesn’t mean we haven’t had our share of creepiness around these parts.  Want to hear a spooky story?  Well, good, because I’m gonna tell you one.

Early this morning, before the sun came up and before my alarm went off, I woke up feeling like I’d had a full night’s sleep.  I checked my phone at the side of the bed – it wasn’t even 5am.  Nature calls first thing and I scooted out of bed to the bathroom and then padded back to bed where Pablo was curled up in a little ball at the end of the bed.  Meisha was asleep in the guest bedroom with the door closed.  I laid in bed for a minute, thinking I still had 45 minutes until my alarm was going to go off and why was I so awake?  And then I heard it.  A low loud meow from the hallway.

Now if you have cats, you will know that their meows are as distinctive as our voices.  I have always been able to tell the difference between Pablo’s meow and Senna’s meow and Meisha’s meow is of course very kitten-like and high.  This meow… well, it sounded just like Senna’s… my cat who died in July.

She used to go ‘hunting’ at night and we’d often hear her meowing at whatever ‘prey’ caught her eye (usually a moth or a tiny spider).  It was exactly the same sound and clear as a bell.  Pablo immediately jumped off the bed and ran to the hallway to investigate.

I said to Wayne (who strangely was as wide awake as I was it turns out), “What the hell was that?!”

He responded hesitantly, “It sounded like Senna…”

*chills*

I could tell then his logical side kicked in because then he said quickly, “It was probably a cat outside….” but then hesitated, “…. although it did sound like it was inside the house.”

At that point, I told him to shut up because he was creeping me out.  Now, it couldn’t have come from a cat outside as we just replaced all the seals and the draught excluder around the front door.  And any time I’ve heard cats outside, it’s always muffled.  This was LOUD and CLEAR.

Spooky, no?  I like to think that Senna was paying us a little visit, letting us know she was okay and hunting.  I have no other explanation for it.  It wasn’t Pablo (he was in bed with us) and it wasn’t Meisha’s meow.  It sounded so much like Senna that my immediate thought was that it was her.  Until I remembered that she was no longer with us.  What was it??

(And yes, this is a totally true story.)

Anyway, now that I’ve spooked you out, I thought I’d carry on with my Halloween-themed post by sharing some of the cool stuff we’ve got going for Halloween on AO at Home.  It’s been a virtual Halloween-o-rama over there.

First up, we had Caroline of Patchwork Harmony (she’s a new contributor we have on board – pretty cool, no?) make up these really cute treat bags with free printables…

Then Carole from Mademoiselle Poirot made us up a fabulous chocolate cake with cream cheese frosting (my utter weakness) decorated with cool black cats…

I introduced the British to the amazing Halloween decor of my brethren across the pond and talked about how to get a classy look this Halloween…

And finally Carole got creative again and created these cute paper pumpkins that would work well long after Halloween passes for a bit of Autumn decor…

So as you can see, there’s lots of cool stuff going on over there that’s perfectly Halloween-tastic!  You can check out any of the posts by clicking on the images above!

So a very big Happy Halloween from Swoon Worthy!  Anything creepy happen to you lately?  What do you think our mystery meow was about?  How are you celebrating this year?