With Hallowe’en just around the corner, Louis Catorze has ramped up the creepy to Expert Level.

He has started opening doors and shutters, and he is remarkably good at it. However, when we wake up to find the wardrobe doors open it can feel very unnerving. Think Sixth-Sense-meets-Poltergeist and you will understand what I mean.

Naturellement, he hasn’t worked out how to shut doors after himself – unless it is to shut himself in a room, and then he decides he can’t be bothered to let himself out and screams for us to do it.

When my sister and her family came to visit, Cat Daddy and I assumed that, if anyone made trouble, it would be the kids. Not so. Catorze prowled around the house all night, opening bedroom doors repeatedly and scaring my sister by projecting strange shadow shapes on the baby monitor. (The moving vertical candy cane shape really foxed her until she finally realised that it was his up-tail with the silly kink at the end.) Once dawn had broken he was clearly bored of scaring everyone quietly, and that was when he came crashing into our room, screaming.

At breakfast that morning we discovered that everyone had a complaint about him, except for my eldest niece (aged 3) who said, “Louis came to look after me in the night! I love him!”

Cat Daddy: “I guess someone has to.”

My sister just about managed to catch him in action in the picture below. As if a black cat with vampire teeth weren’t already sinister enough: