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Pet Cemetery Spelled Correctly:
The Ghost Cats Of North America
Welcome!
We're so glad you've decided to take our (semi-translucent) hand and come with us on a journey to spookiness! In this issue we'll be going over some of the best-known cases of feline shenanigans from beyond the grave.
Stay tuned for tales of cat hauntings, special offers, plus, did a fringe-science conspiracy theorist capture the first definitive proof of cat ghosts on the most 90's website imaginable?*
Away we go!
*the answer is no, she for sure did not do that.
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The Four Saints Of Buenaventura
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Almost two centuries ago a priest named Francisco Uria passed away in Ventura, California. In life he had served at the Buenaventura Mission, known as the "Chapel By The Sea," spending his days spreading the teachings of the Catholic church. Almost everything else that is still known about Father Uria involves his pet cats.
Father Uria was well-recorded as being surrounded by his four "massive" cats at all times. The cats, each named for a Catholic saint (San Francisco, Santa Barbara, Santa Clara and Santa Ines), would eat, sleep, and go everywhere with the father. It is said that upon the father's passing in 1834 his cats lined up and padded down the halls of the mission in a procession of sorts. Reaching the bell tower, the little saints worked together to pull the bell ropes, tolling out the news of their master's death.The cats apparently hung around a good deal longer than the padre: the LA Times on March 28th 1937 reported that "on stormy nights the sound of padding feet can [still] be heard about the old mission and the spectral wailing of the cats can be faintly heard."
At almost two centuries these cats are the oldest specters on this list, but with their relatively altruistic purpose they are also possibly the least devoted to that most sacred cat mission of making oneself a nuisance and interrupting human attempts at productivity at all cost. Luckily, several of our other subjects seem well-versed in upholding these catly tenets from beyond the grave.
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Trenton Evening Times Headline March 30th 1911
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The Classical Music Hater Has Logged On
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On March 30th, 1911 the Trenton Evening Times reported an incident of cat haunting at the Waldorf-Astoria in New York City. The victims were almost exclusively members of the hotel's orchestra, who found themselves loudly interrupted by angry yowls each time they attempted to play. After two days of searching for a cat trapped in the walls or ceiling yielded no physical results, the staff arrived at a theory of the cat's identity. They believed it to be the ghost of a German musician's cat who had fallen to its death at the Waldorf years earlier, returning from the grave to prevent the spread of classical music. The orchestra noted that they were, after all, playing a German composition at the time of the disturbance.
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The Tunnels Beneath The Capitol Building
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The Demon Terror In Washington
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For more than a century now guards and visitors alike have reported sightings of a demonic cat with glowing eyes prowling around the United States Capitol Building. In life, this cat was supposedly one of the many mousers employed to keep the tunnels beneath the Capitol free of rodents. In death, D.C. (Demon Cat) seems far more interested in terrorizing humans, reportedly growing from the size of a kitten to a ten-foot-tall beast when alerted and leaping at its victims before either exploding or vanishing. The cat is known for appearing around the Capitol just before a national crisis: it was reportedly spotted just before the 1929 Stock Market Crash and in 1963 preceding the Kennedy assassination. This go-getter even has a reported death toll: in the 1890s two guards purportedly opened fire on the cat and a third guard died from a heart attack after seeing it. Sightings of the cat became harder to verify in the 1940s when guards "found out that they could get a day off if they saw the demon cat."
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The House Of Seven Hearths in Hillsborough, NC circa 1900s
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Nancy Drew And The Case Of The CatManFaceGhost
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It's hard to keep escalating the oddness factor after stories of cats ringing bells and single-handedly battling entire orchestras, but North Carolina seems to always provide.
The small, historic, and perpetually Halloween-ish town of Hillsborough, NC has no shortage of ghost stories to its name. Our personal favorite takes place in the House Of Seven Hearths on King Street, also known as the Reed-Hayes House. The house is verified to be over two hundred years old; it originated as an ordinary (old-timey word for pub) owned by a man named Reed before passing hands a few times and ending up as the homestead for a family named Hayes for almost a century. The home is reported to hold two spirits, both originating with the Hayes family. The first specter is rather routine, the ghostly apparition of a little girl named Jane who died in the house in 1854. The second is where it gets interesting:
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"The second ghost is a much more odd apparition. Said to be another member of the Hayes family, this one a Dr. William Hayes, who practiced out of the building in the 1920s. William Hayes was a devoted spiritualist, who believed that humans were reincarnated as animals after death. Hayes seems to have gotten halfway there, as his spirit has been seen roaming the halls of Seven Hearths in the form of a large tabby cat with the head of a man."
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And that paragraph is literally all that is written about this ghost.
Rest assured that we at Ghost Hole have exhaustively reached out to local Hillsborough ghost hunters and will notify our loyal readers the second more information on this man-headed cat spirit emerges.
Our most pressing question: does the spirit meow, speak English, or perhaps, most sinister of all, does it say the word "meow" but in a person voice?
We may never know for sure.
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An unrelated photo we took of a different cat in Hillsborough. It is unlikely that this cat is a ghost but on the other hand it is scientifically impossible to prove that it isn't.
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In the course of our research for this issue we came across a couple of cases of cat hauntings which, while in no way convincing, were truly so stunning in their incredulity that they must be shared with all of you.
The first is a whole webpage run by a fringe "scientist/ visionary/ UFO researcher" named Starfire Tor which appears to be solely devoted to proving that her two deceased cats, Kristabel and Zechariah, are hanging around her house in a supernatural kind of way. And she's got photos to back it up.
The second is a breathtaking video courtesy of YouTube user TacoSoft.
Truly no words will be able to due justice to its contents, so we'll just leave you with the link.
Thanks again from all of us at The Ghost Hole for subscribing to The Ghostletter, and if you liked it please share with a friend!
Happy Hauntings,
G. Host
Editor-in-Chief
The Ghost Hole
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Want More Ghost?
You can continue to follow our investigations into local hauntings here, or just click on the photo of me next to these here ghost chairs!
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References for Issue 1: Pet Cemetery Spelled Correctly
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