It’s like something you’d expect to hear while sitting around a campfire telling scary stories, or when watching a segment of Urban Legends, about a cat who if he jumps on your bed you’ll be dead in a few hours, expect that it’s not an Urban Legend it’s true. The latest issue of the New England Journal of Medicine (Volume 357, Number 4) contains a short article about Oscar, a cat that seems to possess the ability to predict when people are about to die. Oscar's home is the Steere House Nursing and Rehabilitation Center in Providence, and while he does not usually like human contact, everyday he stalks the halls of the nursing home searching for people on deaths door. When he finds the right person he curls up next to them. A few hours later…their dead.

Does this cat have the uncanny ability to detect people about to cross over or, is it actually stealing their breath and giving them that extra little push into the afterlife? Is it really less plausible to think that the cat is somehow directly causing the death of patients than the belief that the cat can somehow use psychic powers to predict when a person is mere hours from death. There are certainly still folks that believe wholeheartedly that cats suck the air out of sleeping infants.

Either way, could you imagine the stress this cat must cause for the people in the home?  Oscar comes rolling around the corner each morning.  The joyful moment of ‘whew it’s morning and I’m still here’ quickly becomes tense as the little fella rolls into your room.  He sits down, looks at you and … yawns.  Then a quick tail flip and he’s out the door. Another day alive.