My girlfriend's neighbor got thrown in prison recently (probably drug-related). Anyway, when the owners of the apartment complex found out that he was imprisoned, they put all his stuff out by the dumpster for the garbage men to take away, and the people living in the apartments started taking everything, since otherwise it would get thrown out. My girlfriend and her roommate took this black wooden statue that looked like a little totem pole. They put the statue in the corner of their living room.

The weird thing is that their cat was absolutely terrified of the statue. It wouldn't even walk through the room past the statue to get to its litter box. It would glance around the corner only to see the black statue and run away. We tried putting the statue on the other side of the room, away from the litter box, and turning it around so that its "face" was looking at the wall. But the cat still wouldn't go in the room; once it saw the statue it would run away just like before. Then we thought that the statue might have a weird smell, so we sprayed it with air freshener stuff, but the cat was still just as scared of it. My girlfriend tried to pick the cat up and hold it up to the statue to show that it wasn't threatening, but the cat scrambled out of her arms and scratched her.

That night, we put the cat out into the kitchen / living room area for the night, and when we came back out in the morning, we found the cat hiding underneath the couch. It hadn't eaten anything all night and wouldn't come out. Later that day it came out only to pee in the bathtub instead of in the litter box -- I guess it was too scared to go in the presence of the totem pole.

The next day my girlfriend threw the totem pole out. For the rest of that day the cat was wary of going into the living room, looking around to make sure that the statue was gone. And I still don't know why it was so scared of the thing...