I was cat-sitting for a friend of mine one summer vacation because she had gone back to Canada. One week during summer vacation was O-Bon. O-Bon is a Buddhist holiday in Japan where people think the souls of the dead come back and have to be appeased. My friend has two cats, Touya (a black cat) and Jubei (a white cat). I was using the computer, and out of the corner of my eye saw a white blob on top of the TV. I whirled around, yelling, "JUBE--eh?" because I had expected Jubei to be on the TV (the white blob was cat-sized), but he was no where near the TV, and there was nothing on it. I figured my eyes were playing tricks on me, and went back to netsurfing. A little while later, I saw a white blob on top of the TV, and once again whirled around yelling, "JUBEI, GET OFF THE--what the?"
Jubei, who was nowhere near the TV, looked at me fuuny.
I blew it off again and figured the angle must be hitting my eyes strangely.
A little later, as the sun moved, I got up to do something to the blinds. That put me very close to the TV, at a completely different angle from I'd been at before. And this time, out of the corner of my right eye (it had been left before), I saw a white blob on the same spot on top of the TV. So I turned to face it, once again yelling, "JUBEI! Get off the T...the hell?" Because once again, there was absolutely NOTHING on the TV.
I was there a whole month, and it only happened that one day, which was one of the days of O-Bon.
There were also flickering lights one day in a room during O-Bon that didn't have lighting problems. I yelled that I was American and didn't do this shit, so unless some bloody kanji showed up on the walls (my friend had told me about a TV show she saw before she left where a 'ghost' had written on a wall in bloody kanji), it wasn't getting my booze (usually people leave alcohol out for the ghosts, and I'd just opened a can of chuuhai).
Suddenly the lights stopped flickering, and they never flickered again the whole time I was staying there. And I laughed, because if the family lore is to be believed, my mother once scared a ghost of a suicide out of the house they had just moved into (my mom apparently yelled up the stairs when she'd had it that "One of us has to go, and it AIN'T GONNA BE ME," and boom, no more creaky footsteps on the second floor or the dog going crazy for no reason; everyoe who has met my mom can fully believe she scared away a ghost), and that meant I was definitely my mother's child.
