The Purring - Phantom Felines

Phantom Felines And Other Ghostly Animals - Gerina Dunwich 2006

The Purring
Phantom Felines

by Brandy Hoffstedder

When I was in my sophomore year of high school, my family and I moved into a large old house on the west side of Binghamton, New York. Built in the late 1800s in the Queen Anne style and gated all around by an ornate fence of rusted wrought iron, it was a house filled with many dark secrets and restless spirits.

One of the invisible occupants of the house was a woman who had lived there in the 1930s and had taken her own life shortly after the death of her only child. Another was an elderly man who died in his sleep in the bedroom I named the Rose Room because of the design of rose bouquets on the room’s faded wallpaper.

Strange happenings took place in the house, occurring mainly during the evening hours and experienced by all members of my family. These consisted of lights being turned on and off, the sound of footsteps on the stairs, and mysterious tapping on the stained glass window at the end of the upstairs hall. There was a definite cold spot in one corner of the Rose Room, and even if the furnace was running and the rest of the room was warm and cozy, that corner still felt like the inside of a refrigerator. Sometimes things like keys, books, and saltshakers disappeared for a while and then turned up later in the same spot where last seen, as though they had never been moved.

A few times I heard the distinct sound of a woman gently sobbing. It was very faint and came from the kitchen when no one was in the room. I believe it was the spirit of the woman who committed suicide, and even in death she continued to grieve the loss of her child. My mother and sister and even a few of our guests (all females) also heard the crying woman at different times. But for some funny reason, she only allowed other females to hear her cry. My father, brothers, and male guests never heard her.

The ghost of a cat also haunted the house. None of us actually saw it, but we could tell it was a cat because every now and then we heard a purring sound, and we didn’t own a cat at the time. The purring would last for a few seconds, sometimes longer, and if you walked over to where it was coming from, it would then seem to come from the other side of the room. After a while, we started affectionately referring to this unseen cat-spirit as Casper, after the cartoon ghost.

Our dog, Molly, sometimes started barking for no apparent reason and chased after something that none of us were able to see. Since dogs’ senses are far sharper than ours and they are able to see and hear things that are normally invisible and inaudible to the eyes and ears of most humans, I believe it’s possible Molly could have seen or maybe even picked up Casper’s scent and was simply following her natural dog-chase-cat instincts.

It has been many years since my parents sold the haunted house in Binghamton and moved away to another city. I drove past the old place on a rainy day about a year ago and could have sworn I saw a big ginger tabby cat peering out at me from the rainstreaked living room window. But when I blinked my eyes it was no longer there. I’ve wondered ever since if it might have been our Casper revealing himself to me for just an instant.