I am lucky enough to run a paranormal club – nicknamed Spooky Club – at school. This is something that would terrify most headteachers and parents but, luckily, ours are progressive and trusting and let me get on with it. Our most recent session was about thermal cameras and the creepy things that show up on them.
You can sense where this is going, non?
I decided to tell my students about The Curious Incident with Chris the Heating Engineer on the Infra-Red Camera. They’re a cynical bunch and they think everything is Photoshop or Fake News, so I was ready for them to debunk my story with some sort of perfectly logical explanation.
Kid 1: “What colour is your cat, Miss? And what colour is the floor?”
Me: “Black cat, grey floor. Why?”
Kid 1: “Oh, right. I was gonna say that if the cat and the floor were the same colour, maybe they’d absorb or reflect infra-red waves in the same way. But they’re not.”
Kid 2: “Had the cat been outside, Miss?”
Me: “Yes, but he’d been indoors for ten minutes at that point. So he should have warmed up.”
Kid 2: “Maybe he was still cold from being outside?”
Kid 3: “That still shouldn’t mean he was the same blue as the cold floor, though. If you’re showing up as blue on the camera, you’re basically dead.”
Kid 4: “How long have you had your cat, Miss?”
Me: “Nearly ten years.”
Kid 4: “And is this the first time he’s done weird stuff?”
[Silence, tumbleweed, crickets.]
Anyway, after spending the rest of the session Googling pictures of cats on infra-red cameras to see if there were any that resembled what I saw on that fateful day (nope) and begging the headteacher to spend £2,000 on an infra-red camera so that they could mess about with it and attempt to recreate The Curious Incident (also nope), the kids concluded that, perhaps, Catorze was possessed and needed an exorcism. I already knew this anyway.
Oh, and my colleague who teaches Physics confirmed that what I’d witnessed makes no scientific sense. I already knew this, too.
louiscatorze.com 
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