The cat came back : revenant pets and the paranormal everyday

This chapter is an attempt to make the kinds of connections that Davies and Bennett neglect. Through an analysis of visitation accounts shared in the anonymous online space of the subreddit, Paranormal-r, I aim to highlight the unique qualities of pet death, and the domestic relations that underpin the human-animal bond. The stories of revenant pets on paranormal-r are exchanged by strangers in an anonymous online sharing space. They offer mutual consolation in a ‘powerful fusion of shared experience’ (Walter 2007: 173) that confirms the experience as experience. The return of the dead animal to the home is a source of consolation. The more profound consolation comes from shared understandings that the animal’s purpose in returning is to offer comfort. The revenant comes back healthy and happy, untroubled by either its illness or the circumstances of its demise. There is an immediacy and an unprecedented closeness about pet death, and the online exchange of accounts of revenant pets constitute a powerful antidote to those pressing realities. The stories discussed in the chapter also show how the lives—and the dying—of pets are closely bound up with domestic spaces and routines. What Grier terms the ‘proxemics of pet-keeping’ (2006: 62) manifest in the continuing ‘closeness’ of the animal after death, and in the sensuous materiality of its return.