Haunted Welcome
The first rule of giving a walking tour—any walking tour, haunted or otherwise—is not to fall flat on your face in the first thirty seconds.
I broke that rule spectacularly.
“Dobrodošli—welcome to—” I began, arms spread wide in what I hoped looked like theatrical confidence and not mild desperation, when something small, furry, and deeply offended tangled itself around my ankle.
There was a sound—not quite a scream, more like an indignant prrrrt—and then the world tilted.
The polished limestone of the square rushed up to meet me, the way it does when it has been waiting centuries for precisely this moment. I windmilled. A German tourist gasped. Someone dropped a water bottle. And I landed, hard, on my dignity.
Silence fell over the square.
The cat sat down.
Right on my chest.
We stared at each other.
It was a thin, ash-colored stray with one torn ear and the calm, ancient expression of something that had watched empires rise and fall and found them all equally stupid. Its tail flicked once, lazily, as if to say: You should really watch where you’re stepping.
“Well,” I said, because I have always believed that confidence is mostly about speaking before your brain catches up, “I see you’ve already met him.”
The tourists leaned in.
A woman with a wide-brimmed hat whispered, “Met who?”
I gently nudged the cat, which did not move. At all.
“This,” I said, patting its dusty back, “is our official tour mascot.”
The cat yawned.
Someone laughed. Someone else took a photo.
“Is he… part of the show?” asked a man in cargo shorts, his voice trembling with hope.
“Absolutely,” I said. “He appears only to those who are worthy.”
The cat blinked at me, unimpressed.
I stood up, brushed limestone dust off my shorts, and decided—right there, with my pride still stinging and my knee already threatening to bruise—that if the universe wanted to embarrass me, I would at least make it entertaining.
“My name is—” I paused. There was no reason to give them my real name. Names made things personal, and personal led to expectations. “—Ana. And this is the haunted heart of our beautiful town.”
Behind me, the Adriatic glittered innocently, all blue and sunlit and aggressively un-haunted. The square smelled of coffee and sea salt and sunscreen. Bells rang somewhere above us, not ominously at all.
The cat, meanwhile, leapt onto a low stone wall and sat, tail curled neatly around its paws, like a creature preparing to be introduced.
“This,” I continued, gesturing grandly to the square, “is where it all begins.”
“What all?” asked a teenager, chewing gum.
I smiled. “The mistakes.”
That got another laugh. Good. Laughter was forgiving. Laughter meant they might not ask for refunds later.
“Now,” I said, clapping my hands once, “before we proceed, a few rules. One: stay together. Two: don’t touch anything older than your grandmother. Three: if you hear whispering, pretend you didn’t.”
A woman raised her hand. “Is there really whispering?”
“Only if you listen too closely,” I said. “And that never ends well.”
The cat flicked its tail again.
I ignored it.
We started walking, the group following me across the square, shoes clicking on stone worn smooth by centuries of footsteps, arguments, lovers, soldiers, and drunk locals trying to find their keys at three in the morning.
“This town,” I said, “has survived pirates, plagues, earthquakes, bad architecture, and one truly unforgivable mayor in the seventies. Naturally, it’s also full of ghosts.”
“Real ghosts?” someone asked eagerly.
I shrugged. “Define real.”
They laughed. I smiled. The cat trotted ahead of us, as if leading the way.
That was when I noticed it.
The cat stopped at the edge of a narrow alley I hadn’t planned to include. It turned its head slowly and looked back at me. Direct eye contact. Deliberate. Intentional.
“Don’t,” I muttered under my breath.
The cat sat.
The group stopped.
“What’s there?” asked the woman with the hat.
I stared at the alley. It was dark, cool, unremarkable. A dead end with a fig tree growing out of the wall and exactly zero ghost stories attached to it.
“Well,” I said, because lying is sometimes just improvisation with confidence, “that’s… interesting.”
The cat meowed.
It echoed.
A man near the back inhaled sharply. “Did you hear that?”
“Yes,” I said quickly. “That’s the echo.”
“It sounded… strange.”
“Stone acoustics,” I said. “Very temperamental. Like spirits.”
I immediately hated myself for that last part.
“Spirits?” several people repeated.
I cleared my throat. “Metaphorical ones.”
The cat stood, stretched, and disappeared into the alley.
The group stared at the alley.
Then at me.
“Does the mascot usually do that?” someone asked.
“No,” I said. “He usually waits until the third stop.”
That was a mistake.
“Third stop?” the cargo shorts man said. “So this isn’t one?”
I glanced at the alley again. The shadows seemed… thicker somehow. Or maybe that was just my imagination reacting to the fact that twelve people were now expecting something haunted to happen.
“Well,” I said slowly, “this could be considered a… preview.”
The wind shifted. The fig tree rustled, though there was no reason for it to.
Someone whispered, “I’ve got goosebumps.”
Another person whispered, “Is that normal?”
“Yes,” I said firmly. “Very.”
We stood there, all of us, staring into the alley like it might blink first.
Nothing happened.
Of course nothing happened.
I laughed. “See? Completely harmless. Just a cat. Definitely alive. Very rude.”
Relief rippled through the group. Someone chuckled. Someone unclenched.
And then—
A sound.
Soft. Low. Not a meow.
A whisper.
I froze.
The tourists leaned closer.
“What was that?” the teenager asked, suddenly not chewing gum anymore.
I opened my mouth to say wind or pipes or absolutely nothing, please continue walking—
But before I could, the cargo shorts man whispered, reverently, “It sounded like a voice.”
The whisper came again. Indistinct. Almost words.
The woman with the hat grabbed her friend’s arm. “Ana?”
I swallowed.
“Well,” I said, forcing a grin that probably looked like dental distress, “it seems our mascot has… friends.”
Silence.
A phone camera turned on.
“Is this part of the tour?” someone asked.
I thought of the rent I was late paying. The café owner who had laughed when I said I might try something “creative.” The fact that I had no other plan, no other job, and no intention of becoming sensible anytime soon.
“Yes,” I said. “Of course it is.”
The whisper stopped.
The air felt suddenly normal again—warm, salty, unremarkable.
A collective exhale.
“That was incredible,” the woman with the hat said. “So authentic.”
I nodded solemnly. “We pride ourselves on authenticity.”
The cat reappeared at the other end of the alley, sat down, and began washing its paw.
I stared at it.
It stared back.
For just a moment—just a flicker—I could have sworn it smiled.
And that, I would later realize, was the moment the rumor was born.
Not with a scream or a shadow or a tragic death.
But with a stray cat, a bad lie, and a whisper that no one could quite explain.
I clapped my hands.
“Alright,” I said brightly. “Onward. The ghosts hate it when we linger.”
They followed me.
The cat followed too.
And somewhere behind us, in the alley I hadn’t planned to include, something listened.
