Phantom Felines And Other Ghostly Animals - Gerina Dunwich 2006
Tortured Souls
Phantom Felines
by Mary Beth Reisner
In September of 1988 my husband and I, along with our six-year-old daughter, Stacey, moved into a rented three-bedroom Cape Cod—style house in a quiet residential neighborhood outside of Milwaukee.
The first night we spent in the house we were awakened around 1 a.m. by the sound of our little girl sobbing loudly. I got out of bed and went to Stacey’s room to see why she was crying. I found her sitting up in her bed, clutching one of her stuffed animals, and looking terrified. She told me she had been frightened by the sight of a strange animal moving around in her room. She thought it was a large white cat with yellow glowing eyes, but she wasn’t sure because it didn’t have a tail. I reassured her that it was just a bad dream, then sat with her until she went back to sleep.
A few days later my husband had a strange experience while working downstairs in the basement. Something caught his eye and he looked up to see a large white cat with blood trickling from its nostrils peering in at him from the basement window. In a matter of seconds the cat’s image faded away before his eyes. He felt sure he had just imagined it and thought our daughter’s earlier “bad dream” about a white cat was purely coincidental.
Several weeks passed without anything out of the ordinary happening in the house. Halloween arrived and my husband and I took Stacey trick-or-treating around the neighborhood. As we returned home we all spotted what appeared to be a white cat sitting in the upstairs window of Stacey’s bedroom. My daughter immediately became terrified and said she didn’t want to sleep in that room anymore because she was afraid the “spooky cat” would get her. We checked Stacey’s room for the cat but found nothing. My husband then searched the entire house from top to bottom. No cat.
We invited relatives over for Thanksgiving dinner, and I nearly choked on my food when one of my husband’s elderly aunts asked him what our cat’s name was! He told her we didn’t own a cat, and she replied that that was odd because she was sure she had seen a cat in the hallway earlier when she went to freshen up in the bathroom. I asked her if the cat she saw happened to be a big white one with a missing tail, and she gave me a bewildered look and laughed. The cat she had seen was a little striped tabby. She added that it was a “shy puss” because it took off running as soon as it saw her. We all laughed and joked about the mystery cat, but somehow I couldn’t help feel in my heart that there was something disturbing about these strange cat sightings.
One day I was outside chatting with our next-door neighbor, Connie. She was filling me in on all the neighborhood gossip, so I asked her what the previous tenants who occupied our house were like. She replied that the Housers were a nice older couple who were quiet and mostly kept to themselves. I then asked Connie if they had any cats, and she shook her head no. She said they had a couple of pet birds, parakeets or canaries; she wasn’t sure which.
She then said, “It’s a funny thing that you mentioned cats because the family that lived there before the Housers had a teenage son who was nothing but a little monster. He got his kicks from torturing stray cats.”
I felt nauseous as she told me a story about how her husband once caught this obviously disturbed young man trying to hang a kitten by its neck from the clothesline in the backyard.
That night I lit a candle and said a special prayer for all the cats and kittens that had been tortured and killed at the hands of the cruel boy who once lived in the house that my family now called home. It must have done some good, because we continued to live in the house for another year and a half without experiencing any further incidents of feline hauntings; I’m now convinced that’s what they were.