Phantom Felines And Other Ghostly Animals - Gerina Dunwich 2006

The Legend of the Cat Lady
Phantom Felines

by Maureen Gabrinetti

A strange story about a cat lady was told to me when I was a young girl growing up in an Irish immigrant neighborhood in south Boston. I don’t know how much of it is fact and how much is urban legend, but the person who told it to me swore on a Holy Bible that it was the God’s honest truth.

The story goes that there was this elderly woman in the neighborhood who lived by herself in an old shabby house. She was a recluse and seldom ventured out of her home. Some say it was because she didn’t like or trust other people. She did, however, have quite a fondness for cats and took in every stray cat and kitten that wandered into her backyard until her house was overrun with felines.

Many of the neighborhood children were afraid of the cat lady and some believed she was a witch. All sorts of weird rumors were spread about her, even among some of the adults, and on every Halloween the nasty little trick-or-treaters would bombard this woman’s house with stones and apples and then run off into the shadows of the night as fast as they could.

When the cat lady died, her body wasn’t discovered until about a week later. By that time, the horde of hungry cats that were trapped inside the house without any food had devoured much of the old woman’s flesh. She was so badly eaten that the authorities had to use dental records to properly identify her.

Animal control officers rounded up all of the cats. Some of them had diseases and infections from being in catfights, and some were downright vicious. All of them were destroyed. Afterward, the house was cleaned out and put up for sale by a relative.

It was about two years later when the house, which was still vacant, mysteriously burned to the ground. Although no one was ever charged with arson, it was rumored that some of the neighbors banded together and torched the house because they believed it was haunted by the ghosts of the old lady and her cats and was bringing bad luck to the families in the neighborhood.

A few years after this story was told to me, I heard a slightly different version from someone else. They claimed the reason the old lady’s house had been set ablaze was because some of the more superstitious people in the neighborhood believed that because the cats had eaten part of the woman’s body, their ghosts returned as demons every Samhain eve (October 31) to feed upon more human flesh.