Ghost Cats of the South

by Randy Russell

  Laura missed her sister, but she had her oven to keep her company those last several years. And she had her cats. Laura loved baking. Laura loved cats. And she loved Halloween more than any other time of the year. Halloween was the best part of living in America. It was her opportunity to contribute to the town, to make children happy.

  By the end of summer, the cats began stacking up at the stone cottage off the ridge road above Sylva. As everyone knew who provided homes for God’s stray pets, cats multiplied in spring and summer. By the time the leaves turned, there were too many for the porch. The new cats wanted their own homes. They wanted forever homes, where they could be the cats in charge, instead of being eighth or ninth at the end of a row of cats on the porch.

  At Halloween, the children came to Laura Peasy’s house. She wanted them all to come to the stone cottage, as many children as the road would hold. For the magic, ghostly night of trick or treat, Laura went all out. She made popcorn balls in three different colors. She made caramel apples and cinnamon apples on sticks. She baked thick sugar cookies cut into the shapes of Halloween.

  She baked witch cookies and pumpkin cookies decorated with jack-o’-lantern faces. Ghost-shaped cookies. She had a scarecrow cookie, too. For the older boys, Laura made cookies in the shapes of spiders and flying bats.

  The old witches in England cast spells by boiling eggs. Laura made cat-shaped cookies, the cats both sitting and standing up. Laura had twenty-seven colors of frosting with which to decorate the cookies. The cat cookies all had whiskers, and the correct colors for fur and eyes.

  Laura made a small sack of goodies for each child who came to her door on Halloween.

  “You have to do something, you know,” Henry Williston said, leaning his bicycle against a shrub along the pathway to Laura Peasy’s house.

  Henry was eleven. He was dressed as a pirate. His long underwear sported tattoos in black felt marker. A skull and crossbones were on his chest. He wore a magic-marker mustache.

  “Like what?” Paula Andrews asked.

  She was his nine-year-old neighbor. Paula hadn’t been to Laura’s before. Henry’s mother made him take her along.

  “Sing or dance or tell a story.” Henry adjusted his father’s necktie, which was tied around his head like a bandanna. “If she likes what you do, you get a special bag of treats. She has them done up in advance.”

  Paula didn’t know a song she could sing to a stranger except the one she’d learned for the Christmas program at church. She was dressed as a fairy princess, and she worried that a fairy princess wouldn’t ever sing a Christmas song. She wore her jeans under a red felt skirt decorated with glitter. She carried a magic wand of aluminum foil wrapped over a cardboard star on a stick. Paula liked Halloween because she was allowed to wear her mother’s lipstick and have rouge on her cheeks. Maybe she could tell the lady she was an angel.

  The only other song she knew was “Ruby, Don’t Take Your Love to Town,” because it was on the radio. And she knew only part of it.

  “Maybe just answer questions,” Henry said. “If you get them right, you get the special treats. They’re like the other treats, except you get one of each, and something added to that.”

  Laura’s little brown bags of treats were special indeed. This year, she had six of them. Each one contained a cat cookie that matched one of her porch cats that needed a home. Even the whiskers were the right colors. She mixed her icing colors like Michelangelo mixed paints.

  “Here,” Henry said, “hand me the flashlight and hold my hand. You go first.”

  “Oh, my,” Laura said when she answered the door. “You must be a fairy princess with a magic wand!”

  A cat from the porch walked to Paula and rubbed against her jeans. It sat and looked up at her glittering skirt, then watched the aluminum-foil stick in her hand. Paula leaned down and petted the cat with her free hand, trying all the time to see around Laura, to see what things were in her house.

  “Do you have a kitty at home, dear?”

  Paula shook her head.

  “I only know one song,” the little girl said.

  The cat walked around her feet and rubbed the other leg. Henry took a step backward on the stone porch.

  “You are Sarah Andrews’s girl, I bet. I knew your mother when she was your age. She looked just like you.”

  Paula took a deep breath. The song, “Silent Night,” was a hard one. Paula started it, holding her magic wand and moving it with each syllable. The cat sat at her feet and stared straight up, its head moving with the aluminum-foil star.

  Laura Peasy held a finger to her lips. “Here, I have something for you.” The old lady stepped back into the house and handed Paula one of the brown paper lunch sacks. “Trick or treat, dear,” Laura said.

  “Trick or treat,” Paula said.

  “Now, honey, that cookie on top is just for you. You eat that one yourself and don’t give it to anybody else.”

  Paula Andrews nodded and turned away with her prize. Other kids were lining up in the yard, waiting their turns on the porch.

  “And you must be a buccaneer from a pirate ship,” Laura said to Henry, who turned his flashlight on and pointed it at his face. Five cats watched Henry without moving. Laura always let the cats decide. Henry picked out two popcorn balls for his treat.

  A cat the color of the special cookie in Paula’s bag followed her home that night. Though it was a long trot for a cat, the route from Ridgeway Drive was mostly downhill. Paula’s mother said she could keep the cat, but she had to take care of it herself.

  There are 107 steps to the Jackson County Courthouse, 108 if you count the last one. People in Sylva say that’s how many cats Laura Peasy found homes for before she died. Before the little stone house fell into ruin.

  Everyone in Sylva knows the number of steps up the hill to the courthouse, just as everyone knows that Laura Peasy was always a witch at baking, and that she always made her cookies from scratch.

  SAVANNAH, GEORGIA

  Chimney Cats

  Charles had lived in Savannah all his life. When he married Nancy, they moved into a two-story Victorian in the historic River Street district. The former owners had painted the front door red. The house was famous for its brick chimneys, but Charles was not aware of that when they moved in.

  When their son, Brandon, was four years old, he started hearing noises on the roof at night and didn’t want to sleep in the upstairs bedroom across the hall from Charles and Nancy’s. They told him the sounds were baby doves and roof rabbits. They were nothing bad and wouldn’t hurt anyone. They helped keep the house warm at night.

  The next evening, Brandon came into their room crying. He said he was afraid the bunnies were going to fall off the roof and die.

  Nancy told him that roof rabbits were a very special type of bunny that couldn’t fall off anything. And if they did fall, she told him, roof rabbits would drift softly down like cotton balls, then bounce right back up to their place on the roof.

  “Next, he’s going to be afraid of cotton,” Charles said, once Brandon have finally gone back to sleep.

  “You mean like you’re afraid of taking out the trash at night?” Nancy said.

  Charles made a face.

  It wasn’t cotton that Brandon was afraid of next. It was the bedroom fireplace. He screamed at the fireplace one night when he was six.

  Brandon wet the bed that night. Charles and Nancy found him crying. He was shaking from head to toe, pointing at the little brick fireplace. Nancy carried him from the room and cleaned him up. Charles stripped the sheets from the bed.

  “He won’t remember it in the morning,” Charles predicted.

  Brandon remembered it. He said he saw long, furry animals coming out of the fireplace and shooting across the floor like racecars. The six-year-old said they had glowing eyes and made motor sounds.

  Nancy talked it over with Charles. “Maybe it was a squirrel or something,” she suggested.

  “The chimneys are screened. He’s jus
t imagining it.”

  “We don’t use the bedroom fireplaces anyway,” she said. “Maybe we could have Brandon’s bricked over. It will still look nice if we paint the bricks.”

  Charles purchased a cast-iron fireplace cover at a local antique shop and had it bolted into place. The iron plate featured a high-relief image of flowers in a basket. Nancy painted the basket light blue and the flowers white. Charles kept his fingers crossed that his son would find nothing in the flowers to be afraid of in the middle of the night.

  By the time Brandon was ten, he was over his night terrors. In early October, he informed his father that he wanted to go on one of the ghost tours of Savannah. All the kids in his class at school were doing it.

  But Charles wasn’t convinced that a ghost tour was a good idea just yet.

  “Maybe when he’s twelve,” Charles told Nancy. “The stories are all butchery and bloody murder. Anyplace anyone in Savannah experienced a violent death, they say a ghost lives there.”

  “He’s hearing the stories at school anyway. It doesn’t seem to do him any harm. Boys his age love that sort of thing.”

  “I looked it up on the Internet. Savannah has thirty-one different ghost tours. You can go on one ghost tour every day for an entire month.”

  “Is that official?” she teased. “Did you use the calculator?”

  “Okay, have your fun. In 2002, the American Institute of Parapsychology recognized Savannah as American’s Most Haunted City.”

  “And they don’t even know about the roof rabbits,” she said.

  “But get this, every single ghost tour includes the Colonial Park Cemetery.”

  “And?”

  “Who wants to walk around a cemetery and listen to ghost stories? It’s disrespectful, Nancy, to talk about ghosts in front of the dead. Good people are buried there. Somebody’s relatives.”

  “You’re afraid of graveyards, Charles! You’re the one, not Brandon. You’re just a scaredy-cat, is what you are.”

  He gave in. “Well, he wants to go at night. He says the daytime tours aren’t the good ones. So it will be at night, if you don’t mind taking him.”

  “Charles! I will not. Shame on you.”

  “What?”

  “No boy Brandon’s age wants to go on a ghost tour with his mother. He’d be embarrassed. What if the boys at school found out?”

  Charles selected a tour that started in the early evening, one that drove by the Colonial Park Cemetery but didn’t stop there for a casual stroll among the rotting bones. Only one portion of this tour was a brief walkabout. The remaining ghost stories were told on the tour bus, so the haunted delights of old Savannah would be enjoyed through the windows. It was nearly perfect for a ghost tour, and one that Brandon eagerly agreed would be lots of fun.

  The October evening was cool. A moon hung over the old port city. Nancy made hot cocoa and filled a thermos. Before leaving, Charles laid a fire in the downstairs parlor. As always, he experienced the strange sensation of someone or something standing right behind him as he leaned forward to start the fire. It never failed to raise the hair on the back of his neck. The sensation went away as soon as he lit the fire.

  It was the same sensation he had when he took the trash out at night. He felt as if something were behind him on his way back to the house, getting closer at every step. It was something much taller than a cat, something on two feet. Charles often broke into a run, rushing to the door of the house. His heart raced. If he didn’t hurry, he would be caught. Someone, he felt, was chasing him, wanting him to linger in the night.

  The overwhelming dread of being chased, of being caught, slowly evaporated as soon as he closed the door and stood once more safely inside his house. His heart rate returned to normal, and he felt silly about the whole thing. Most people were afraid of bears or bats or snakes. These were reasonable things to be frightened by. Charles was afraid of taking out the trash at night.

  Nancy had caught him once. He was breathless and flushed. His pulse pounded. He had just closed the door behind him. She asked what happened. Charles must have looked as if something had.

  “Do you believe in ghosts?” Charles wanted to know. He tried to ask the question casually. He even grinned a little.

  “Why, Charles, do you think ghosts are in our yard?”

  “Of course not,” he said. He noticed that Nancy hadn’t answered his question.

  Charles never brought it up again. It was childish, he decided. Still, every time he lit a fire in the house, someone seemed to be standing behind him, ready to give him a push.

  The night of the tour was no exception. He rose from the fireplace to tell Brandon it was time to go. As he walked across the room, Charles stumbled over something that wasn’t there. It wasn’t a slight stumble or a mere misstep. He tripped over something large and heavy and nearly fell. Nothing was there. It felt like a body as much as anything. That happened in the house from time to time. Charles had never mentioned it to anyone.

  On the bus, Brandon listened intently. He sat next to the window with his hands folded in his lap. The tour was more interesting than Charles had anticipated. He recognized most of the buildings and houses.

  The tour guide was young and spoke passionately of the history of Savannah.

  “Ghosts may be dead people,” he said,“but they are our living links to the past. Whenever someone experiences a ghost, that person is being touched by history. Though a ghost may feel cold to many, it is that icy touch that keeps the history of an individual warm and alive, if only for a moment. Ghosts are reminders that history is personal, that all things we call history were experienced in a different place or time by people. People just like us in so many ways.”

  Charles learned that most ghosts, the ones experienced over and over through the years, are the results of unhappy deaths or improper burials.

  “Most ghosts have unresolved issues,” the tour guide said. “Most ghosts want to be laid to rest. It is actually their desire to go away. A ghost of a person who was improperly buried cannot rest. So it stays.”

  Brandon also learned what his father had discovered on the Internet, that Savannah has more ghosts than most places.

  “You can’t count the number of ghosts in Savannah,” the tour guide continued. “There are too many of them. It is said of this old port city that a ghost is under every tree.”

  Brandon asked his dad if he knew how many trees were in Savannah. Charles smiled and shook his head.

  The tour bus stopped alongside the Colonial Park Cemetery.

  “There really shouldn’t be too many ghosts in a cemetery,” the guide said. “After all, these people all received proper burial. And their remains lie undisturbed, each in his or her own appropriate place. Sounds good, doesn’t it?”

  The guide paused, looking from face to face at the people on the bus.

  “But not all burials are proper ones, even in a cemetery. Bodies of people without church affiliation, bodies of people without family, bodies of the unloved and the unwanted are sometimes hastily buried in cemeteries, at the back in unmarked graves. Over time, other bodies are added to existing graves.

  “Women who were thought to be witches were buried face down in their graves. This was to keep them from returning and to have them pointed in the wrong direction, should they try. Murderers executed for their crimes were sometimes buried the same way. And because they deserved punishment beyond bodily death, because neither a murderer nor a witch should be allowed the luxury of eternal rest, colonial Americans would bury the worst of them face down under heavily traveled crossroads.

  “From what we know of ghost lore and the history of the South, however, some people really do turn over in their graves. They slip out from under the heavy traffic of roadways and find their way, in moments of sheer terror for us, to touch the living with the icy cold fingers of their histories.”

  The guide informed them that in 1967 several bodies had been unearthed in Savannah while roadwork was being done on Aberco
rn Street. “Right here,” he said,“next to the Colonial Park Cemetery.” The street and sidewalk had been laid out in 1896. No record existed of bodies being removed. Either the workers had taken away tombstones to lay a street atop existing graves or the street cut through a portion of the cemetery with unmarked graves, where the outcasts of Savannah society had been haphazardly interred.

  “Some Savannah ghosts may simply be trying to tell us where they are buried,” the young guide continued. British soldiers holding the port city in 1779 had come under heavy assault by colonial forces in what some historians say was the bloodiest hour of the American Revolution. While the British managed to repulse the attack, they suffered heavy losses.

  “The dead from that battle alone numbered eleven hundred. Existing records note that the dead were buried in a mass grave within what is now the historic district of Savannah. The location of that grave has never been discovered. It is entirely unknown to us even today.

  “The wheels of this bus may be upon that grave at any moment during tonight’s tour. Every structure erected in Savannah after 1779 may have beneath its foundation a thousand or more ghosts.”

  Brandon asked his dad about their house. He wanted to know if it had been built before or after 1779. Charles didn’t smile. He turned his palms up and shrugged, as if he didn’t know.

  After a few more streets, and following a brief discussion of the Great Fire of 1820 and a handful of yellow fever outbreaks, the tour came to a pause in a residential section of the River Street district. The group disembarked for a stroll among some of Savannah’s oldest homes.

  Charles and Brandon recognized the streets and most of the houses in their neighborhood. Even familiar things looked different at night. Especially tonight, a night filled with stories of ghosts.

  The Savannah ghosts in this section of town had proper names. They were the names of former residents of some of the homes. An occupant had died. Someone decades later heard a noise in the attic or saw a light come on when no one was home, and, bingo, you had a ghost story for the tourist trade. Charles bet he could come up with a ghost for every house on his block. He hoped Brandon was mature enough to figure this out for himself.