Patterson Hall on the Columbia campus is haunted by the ghost of a kitten that appears from time to time on the ninth floor, but only in December. It is known to crawl into the beds of sleeping students and knead them with its front paws, sometimes biting just a little, other times scratching at the students’ shoulders and chests. Though a wee kitten, the ghost animal is strong enough to climb into a bed by snagging sheets or covers that reach over the edge. Once contented with its nibbling, the kitten will purr itself to sleep curled against a sleeper’s neck.
The hungry kitten only goes through the motions of finding food. In doing so, it satisfies its hunger. Feeding itself is the only thing the kitten learned to do in its brief life as an earthly being. The kitten is felt, then seen briefly when a student wakes up in the middle of a night’s sleep.
“It was on my neck,” one Patterson Hall student reported. “When I woke up, it felt like I was wearing a fur.”
Fawn Cherie Dwyer, a ninth-floor freshman who woke from the kitten’s nocturnal visit, was convinced she had been attacked by a man in her sleep. The signs were obvious to her. Some deviant had broken into her dorm room and taken uncivilized advantage of Fawn Cherie while she slept. She had scratches to prove it. She had her roommate drive her to the hospital emergency room immediately. There, she insisted that the police be called so they could collect DNA to catch the night stalker.
Certain a marauding male was on the prowl in Patterson Hall, Fawn Cherie demanded an investigation be conducted on her behalf. Only God Himself knew what had been done to damage her dignity in the middle of the night. Fawn Cherie was convinced that even in sleep she must have done something to defend herself, whether she remembered it or not. Her fingernails must be checked.
“I was senior drum major in my high school,” she said,“and this sort of thing could not happen to me unless I was asleep. I would never allow myself to be scratched like this. I think I may also have been kissed. I must have been given a powerful drug against my knowledge and then slept deeply through the worst of it. If he kissed my ears, you will find DNA there.”
The emergency room physician informed her that the shallow bruising on her shoulders was, in fact, the worst of it.
“Spare me no detail,” Fawn Cherie demanded. “I want to know everything. Will I be scarred? Will I be capable of bearing children?”
The doctor explained that the bruising was incidental. She had not been physically violated in any other way.
“The bruising is shallow and drawn to the surface, rather than being the deeper bruising caused by blunt force. This injury is more in line with a hickey than an assault.”
“I assure you, I do nothave a hickey on my shoulder!” Fawn Cherie exclaimed. “Or on my neck, for that matter.”
“Yes, ma’am,” the physician said. He took a deep breath and continued. “Close medical scrutiny reveals tiny scratches to the surface of the skin. The scratches appear to be the imprints of small animal claws.”
“Oh, my heavens! Are you saying that I have been kissed by rats?”
“No, I was thinking—”
“I’m going to throw up!”
“Take a deep breath, miss.”
He handed her a small, kidney-shaped bedpan, just in case. She set it aside. Fawn Cherie would not vomit in front of anyone.
Fawn Cherie’s eyes teared. She opened them wide and blinked twice at the emergency room physician. Then she sobbed. The doctor handed her a tissue.
“My entire body must be disinfected. Do you do that here? My daddy’s insurance will cover it.” She paused, swallowed hard, tried to stop crying. “Rats are filthy vermin,” she said. Fawn Cherie was in college, so she knew these things.
“I was thinking more along the lines of a kitten,” the physician said. “And you have not been assaulted by anyone, young lady.”
Fawn Cherie Dwyer wanted to be sure.
“Not rats?”
He shook his head.
“No man did this to me?” she asked.
“Not unless he was a leprechaun with a mouth the size of a kitten’s. Do you have someone who can take you home?”
“My roommate,” she said. “She forgot her shoes and decided to wait in the car.”
Fawn Cherie lied about that. Her roommate wore shoes but hadn’t had time in the emergency of the moment to fully dress for the drive to the hospital. She was still in her nightgown. No stranger, regardless of his professional accomplishments, needed to be informed of that. Fawn Cherie would see that no possible tint of shame ever tarnished her roommate’s sterling reputation through her association with this ugly and repulsive event. Her roommate had been vice president of her high-school student council and was active in debate. The nocturnal indignities had been visited upon Fawn Cherie herself, and she alone would bear their weight.
The Columbia Police Department filed a report of the alleged assault on the ninth floor of Patterson Hall as a false alarm, in agreement with the signed conclusion of the woman reporting the event. Fawn Cherie Dwyer soon after changed dorms. She never owned a cat or dog. Fawn Cherie tried to keep goldfish once but found she could not tolerate the way their mouths moved when they ate.
The history of the Patterson Hall ghost kitten is not a happy one. Linda Mossey, the eldest daughter of a fiery Free Will Baptist minister in a small town near Greenville, was an entering freshman at the University of South Carolina in the late 1960s. She had managed to hide her pregnancy from her conservative parents until college classes. Linda kept almost entirely to herself, spending most of her time in the library stacks, avoiding the normal social life of a college freshman. Her roommate rarely saw her except when Linda was already in bed.
In early December, huddled alone in pain, Linda gave birth in a dorm shower stall. Her baby didn’t survive the ordeal. The premature baby was small, and the birth was, though excruciatingly painful for Linda, a relatively simple and direct process. She cut the umbilical cord and managed to heal physically.
Mentally, Linda was a wreck. Heavy with grief for her tiny child, feeling as if she were entirely alone in the world, she quit going to classes. She stopped talking to other students altogether. She hid out behind buildings during class changes, when the campus walkways were crowded with students. Emotionally exhausted and entirely focused on her inner turmoil, Linda was almost run over by a garbage truck one day.
That was the morning a small miracle occurred. Linda found a stray kitten abandoned near the dumpsters behind her residence hall. The little thing was only a week or two old. It had survived its birth, while Linda’s own baby hadn’t. She hid the kitten in her room and mothered it when no one else was there. Linda hummed lullabies she had learned as a child.
She kept the kitten in a box under her bed when necessary. Other times, she carried it with her, hidden inside her winter coat. Allowing the kitten to cuddle was the only way Linda felt comfort.
Within a week of Christmas break, when she would have to return home for the holidays, Linda could no longer face what she had done. She committed suicide. As an act of devoted companionship, she first strangled her beloved kitten to death.
Linda Mossey is gone now. The details of her suicide are unclear. The kitten, though, cannot rest. It returns to the ninth floor of Patterson Hall every December.
You should never kill a cat, especially a defenseless kitten accustomed to, and deserving of, the milk of human kindness.
BIRMINGHAM, ALABAMA
Run-Over-Flat Cats
Every year at Christmas, Burton Halliday receives one hundred dollars in cash in the mail. There’s never a note or a letter. No return address. He thinks he knows who is sending it. And heck, everyone can use a little extra money at Christmas.
Burton piloted an eighteen-wheeler on Highway 78, pulling out of Birmingham, Alabama. His pet cat, Day and Night, snoozed away most of the day in the sleeping loft behind the seats. The growl of the big diesel motor was a giant, comforting purr to Day. The black-and-white cat slept like a tiger when that en
gine was running. The cat liked sleeping during the day but stayed up with Burton all night, when the truckdriver needed company the most.
One thing truckers see far too much of is road kill. The number of domestic animals dead along American highways is staggering, each one a heartache. A crushed and mangled pet in or at the side of the road sucks the joy right out of a pleasant stretch of gentle downgrade under an otherwise appealing Alabama moon.
Burton found Day and Night as a stray at a rest stop on a divided four-lane. The scraggly creature meowed loudly for food just outside the driver’s door of Burton’s idling semi. He meowed and meowed until Burton woke up, climbed out of the loft, and opened the driver’s door to run the cat off. The cat stayed. The truckdriver didn’t mind. He found himself talking to the cat.
“You woke me up from a bad one,” he said to the pacing animal.
Burton had been dreaming of his deceased wife. He’d stopped counting the years since she died, but he still dreamed about her almost every night. She was always smiling in his dreams, happy to be with Burton again.
He told the cat all about her. How he had meant to save up money and spend more time with her, spend more time at home. He told the cat how she had always been waiting, day or night, when he came home from the road.
“She’d answer the door with her nightie on,” Burton said. “Even if it was noon. She could hear me coming, you see. She could hear that diesel coming up the road before the dog did.”
The cat sat still and listened politely. Whenever Burton paused, the stray paced back and forth, meowing to the truckdriver.
“Guess you had family too, at one time,” Burton said.
The cat meowed.
“She’d have her nightie on and the bathtub running both. We had one of those big, deep bathtubs in that old farmhouse. You don’t know how badly a trucker wants a long, hot bath after coming off the road. Those truck-stop showers aren’t worth a darn when you’ve gone six days without a bath.”
It was an hour or so later when Burton pulled back onto the highway. He brought along the cat. He scooped him up and tossed him into the cab. Burton wasn’t through talking.
“We knew each other in high school,” the truckdriver said. “But she didn’t like me then.”
Burton named his cat Day and Night but called him Day for short. At first glance, Day looked like a perfectly black cat that someone had spilt milk on. He was spattered with white everywhere except his tail. The tail was just the reverse. Day’s tail was entirely white with a black tip. It looked as if a decent length of daylight had been dipped into a small bottle of night.
Day and night were also the hours they spent together in that truck. Day and night were the hours any long-haul trucker spends on the road, until he stops driving or dies, whichever comes first.
“They say old truckers never die,” Burton told the cat. “They just stop talking.”
Day was Burton’s best friend. The cat would listen to anything.
“I went over to Louisiana and played the horses once,” the trucker said. He shook his head in memory of the most expensive three days of his life. “Hey, they say cats can talk to horses. Can you do that?”
Day meowed. Day always talked right back.
“Did I tell you she had a cat? When we first married, she had this cat. A black cat. I thought it was unlucky. Entirely black, not a speck of color anywhere. Black nose, black whiskers. I never had much to do with that cat.”
After a visit to the veterinarian, Day was outfitted with a leash harness. Burton found truck stops that would let the two of them come in and eat. Inside the cab, he strapped a cat kennel to the passenger seat. Small squeaky toys hung from elastic strings over the sleeping loft. Sometimes, Burton would clip a short leash on the harness and let Day ride along sitting atop the kennel. The black cat spattered with white could sit up, stand, stretch, and lie down. Whenever he wanted to, Day could watch the world coming at them through the windshield, or the world going by out the passenger side.
Bugs hitting the windshield always got a loud meow out of Day. The cat chattered like a monkey whenever the windshield wipers came on. At times the truck wasn’t rolling, Burton unfastened the short leash and let Day have a romp.
Burton told Day, when they saw run-over animals along the way, not to be sad about it. They’d found a shortcut to heaven, was all. When Burton said that, he was thinking about his wife.
“No, she didn’t like me in high school at all. She had a crush on a fellow who already had a girlfriend. She waited till those two got married before she noticed anyone else.”
Day licked the back of a paw and waited to hear more. Day was a patient listener. Most cats are.
“She always cried when she saw a dead dog on the highway. She’d just start bawling, then get mad at me because I hadn’t told her in time not to look. She’d sit in the car and weep while I walked back and took the poor critter off the road.”
He told his cat all the trucker stories about animals that had gotten hit finding ways to get even.
Burton’s favorite was the cell phone in the middle of the road.
“Anybody stops to pick up that phone, it starts ringing. Day or night, it’s always ringing when you get to it. When a person picks up that phone and answers it, he hears a cat meowing. Then he’s hit by a truck he didn’t see coming and is dead, just like that.”
Burton paused to scratch Day’s head a little.
“That’s a funny one, Day. I still won’t pick up a cell phone in the road if we see one, no matter what you say.”
That was just fine by Day.
“Here’s another one I can tell you. It’s the old lady truck jumper and her cat. Now, that’s a scary one.”
Day meowed. He liked stories with cats.
“This old lady and her cat are supposed to jump trucks up the highway between Nauvoo and Natural Bridge. Well, the old lady jumps trucks, anyway. The cat does mostly cars. It shows up out of nowhere and plasters itself to the windshield and peers inside with big yellow cat eyes to see who is driving. Then it’s gone about as quick as it came.”
The poor cat had been killed on the highway by some kids in a car. They kept going after they ran over the cat.
“Didn’t stop to see if the cat was dead or anything like that,” Burton said.
An old lady in an Oldsmobile behind them saw what happened. She pulled over on the shoulder and got out to see whether the cat was dead or might be helped before it was hit again.
“That cat was dead, all right, and in another ten seconds so was she. Semi got her. It was night, and that driver must have been asleep, to hit an old woman standing in the middle of the road.”
Burton shook his head, thinking about it, wondering if it could happen to him.
“Anyway, that big rig slammed right into her at full speed. Knocked her flat and kept going. Driver must have been afraid of the law. Ever since, that same time of night, that lady is supposed to jump right on your truck cab. Would scare you off the road, that would.”
Day agreed with a short meow.
“Just like the cat,” Burton went on. “She clings to the outside of your cab window to see whether you’re the one who ran over her or not. She’s all bloody, with broken bones sticking out and everything like that. Her face is smashed, and one of her eyeballs is dangling. She looks right at you with the other one. Then she goes away. Don’t know what she’d do if you were the one who killed her. Guess she hasn’t found him yet. Maybe he quit driving rigs altogether after that, so she just keeps looking with her one good eye, just at the exact time she was hit on the highway. The bloody old lady keeps looking every night.”
Coming out of Birmingham on Highway 78 that night, before the hundred dollars in cash started showing up every Christmas, Burton told Day how his wife liked to drink her tea. He was laughing about it.
“She’d leave her teabag in the cup and just keep drinking her tea. Even if she was dunking a donut into it, she’d leave the teabag in her cup. When
the tea was about gone, she’d pour more hot water in and wait a little.”
Day started chattering deep in his throat. The cat stood on his kennel with a high, rigid arch to his back. Day yowled, then chattered like a monkey. The cat’s whiskers and ears were pinned back.
Burton stopped talking.
The cat stared at the windshield without blinking. He hissed.
It was Day’s way of telling Burton that something was about to happen. Day could see farther than most cats. He could see around corners and over hills. Once, they had to come to a screeching stop for traffic just ahead of them waiting out a car wreck. Another time, a dead deer had been in the middle of the road.
This time, this night, the truckdriver knew something was coming up. And coming up fast.
Burton eased off the gas and unhooked Day’s leash. The cat disappeared into the loft as soon as he was free. Burton downshifted. The truck lurched into a lower gear. He tapped the top of the kennel three times, and Day came out of the back like a shot and went inside the kennel to wait until it was over.
The truckdriver removed a bit of kibble from his shirt pocket and tossed it inside the kennel before clasping the wire door shut. Day usually meowed a thank-you, but not this time. He curled up in darkness at the back of the kennel and waited.
Burton found yet another gear and had slowed to about thirty-five when he finally saw it. It looked like a wedding cake in the middle of the road. A wedding cake with eyes. Burton hit the airbrakes and went quickly through the final downshifts. The tires barked on the dry pavement.
As the grinding, rapidly decelerating truck jolted forward, Burton saw that what had looked like a wedding cake was actually a white cat. Oddly, the white cat backed up in the road as Burton’s truck finally came to a stop. The cat stood on its hind legs, its eyes reflecting in the semi’s powerful headlights. Burton had the eighteen-wheeler mostly on the shoulder. He checked the mirrors. Nobody was behind him. The truckdriver tapped on the top of the kennel to let his cat know he would be right back. Day and Night didn’t answer.
Ghost Cats of the South Page 17