Newspaper Clipping of the Day

Via Newspapers.com

This heartbreaking little tale appeared in the “Hull Daily News,” July 27, 1928.  The author used the pseudonym “Perambulator”:

I like ghost stories and have read a good many; but I know only one which, to me at least, is absolutely convincing, and that is the story that I tell you to-day. The trouble to me about the others, to my own mind, is that they are too vague; names, and dates and places are not precisely given in the printed books or papers which contain the yarns; and, if someone tells you, by word of mouth, what it was that is supposed to have happened, it never (in my experience) happened to the man himself, but only to someone he knows or once heard about. However excellent the setting and apparently authentic the ghosts, the evidence for their appearance at any particular place or time, and to any particular persons, always seems to me too shaky to make a genuine demand upon my powers of belief. I do not, that is to say, really "believe" any of the many "ghost stories" that I have read or been told.

I live in a house where, if anywhere in Hull, it should be possible to "see ghosts," and there are stories stretching over its hundreds of years of history which should encourage "psychics " to see and to hear all sorts of amazing and inexplicable sights and sounds; but I am obliged to say that though I have heard of these things, as happening to people who lived here before me, I have heard of them only at second or third hand, and not from anyone to whom the marvels actually happened. 

I am, that is to say, prejudiced against the “ghosts," almost to the point of arguing that “there ain't no such things." 

Having said this, I trust you will accept what I now write as a truthful account of an experience, which I give with full references to place and time and persons, as being a faithful record of what I still regard as altogether inexplicable, and which I now relate with all the respect for absolute truth of which I am capable. 

It was in July, eight years ago, here in my own garden, and it happened to me myself, who writes these words; so there you have the date and the place and the person all complete, since the Editor knows who I am, and that I really live in Hull, and am a more or less truthful and reliable fellow. 

I had gone to London for the first Anglo-Catholic Congress at the Albert Hall, and on the morning after my arrival in town I had a letter from Perambulatrix saying that she was very sorry, but on the afternoon of my leaving home (i.e., on the previous day), she had been obliged to have our cats destroyed, since she had found them sleeping in the baby's cot, along with the baby, and was afraid lest they should get over the child's face and smother him. 

These two cats were my peculiar property and care. I had brought one of them from Gloucestershire soon after the Armistice, and the other, a mere kitten, had been born a few months before, at Bridlington, just before we removed to Hull. The mother-cat was undersized, and the kitten was black, with white waistcoat and gloves, and they belonged especially to me in the sense that it was I who attended to their food and gave them shelter whenever they wanted it in my study, where they could come in and go out as they pleased, and where nobody ever interfered with either of them. 

Whether because of the regular feeding, or by reason of the peace and quietness of the room into which nobody ever came except myself and these cats, the animals attached themselves particularly to me. and used to follow me about and wander round the garden with me; "Daddy's cats" the children called them. Especially, when in the evening I cut the grass, the creatures would walk beside the machine or sit under the mulberry tree which is the patent of our garden's nobility and watch what I was doing, or perhaps dream, for all I know, of what I should be doing in a little while, when the time came for their supper. 

I knew the two animals pretty well, you see, and as far as any mere man can care for a cat, or cats allow themselves really to bother about human beings, I was fond of them and they managed to appear as though they were interested in me. 

And so that morning in London, when I heard that they had been done in, I was, first of all shocked, and then afterwards very sorry indeed! There was nothing to be said or done about it. of course. If Perambulatrix feared for the well-being of a child she did right when she gave the fatal order. And the Porter, his name was William Carltorn, did but his duty when he put them in a sack with a couple of bricks and dropped them into the Hull River. I myself should have taken them round to a vet. or a chemist, but they were not the first pussycats that have gone overboard like that nor will they be the last. 

Writing home I said nothing about the tragedy, nor when i returned at the end of the week did we talk about what had happened. The thing was done, and probably rightly done, however sorry I felt, and however much I missed my cats there was an end of it! 

But, as you are to hear, not quite the end! The grass, naturally, had grown while I was away, and on the Saturday afternoon I began my job of cutting it. The task took four or five hours, and I was accustomed to finish up near the mulberry tree. On this Saturday evening, round about half-past eight, as nearly as I remember. I had made good going, and was within a few minutes of the end of the job, when I noticed my two cats sitting, as they were wont to sit, under the tree, side by side, waiting, as it seemed, and as they had done a score of times already that summer, for the moment when I should drag the machine away and go indoors with them and give them their supper. 

I thought nothing about it until I realised, very slowly, that the two creatures simply had no business to be there! 

I stopped my grass-cutting and walked towards them, looking closely at them from a distance of three or four yards. snapping my fingers and saying something about “Pussy-tats. Pussy-tats," as I had said so often, in similar circumstances before. 

Instead of coming to me, as I think I expected them to do, the under-sized tabby mother moved deliberately round to the back of the tree, and the little black kitten with the white waistcoat and gloves skittered off among the shrubs and disappeared, and that was the last I ever saw of either of them. 

So far the thing seems simple and explicable enough; but there is more to come. I myself thought, as I left my unfinished lawn and walked towards the house, that my imagination was working too vividly; that I had perhaps been over-excited by the week in town and by the little domestic tragedy of the death of the creatures I knew so well; and that was what I went on thinking for another week or two; nor did I speak of the matter to anyone, in the house or out of it. 

Until a fortnight later, when the Vicar of Drypool—l am anxious, you notice, to give as many exact details as I can—was having supper with us one Friday evening after preaching in a neighbouring chapel. 

I told him the story of the cats as I have told it to you: their violent death and their subsequent reappearance under the mulberry tree, and it was at this point that the real difficulty began, for Perambulatrix burst out excitedly, and all that she said was supported by a cousin who was staying with us at the time, the wife of the Vicar of St.. Leodegarius, Basford, in the Diocese of Southwell, who had been our guest while I was away in London, and who had been sitting with Perambulatrix while I cut the grass, and who together with her had, unknown to me, seen my rencontre with the cats that had no business to be there, and had wondered what in the world to make of it. 

People to whom I have told the tale have offered three separate "explanations,'' none of which, however, seems to me satisfactory. 

(1) I imagined the whole thing, and that as I say, was my own opinion at first. Against that, there is the fact that while I left the machine and called to my cats under the tree, two other people were sitting thirty or forty yards away; that they had seen the cats before I did, and wondered why they were there, that they had watched me, as stated, go towards them, had seen the cats get up and disappear, and then had seen me come into the house, but had not cared to speak to me about it all. "Imagination" does not cover these facts, unless we accept the statement that the three of us imagined precisely the same unexpected and inexplicable things at precisely the same moment and in exactly the same spot. 

(2) They were not the same cats, but some others that chanced to come into the garden and to sit just there just at that moment Truly, a multitude of cats lives hereabout and in those days before a new dog took charge of this garden, many of them were accustomed to dig and scratch and howl therein at all hours of the day and night.  But none of them were friendly with me, none of them ever sat down in my presence, but rather fled for their lives when they saw me coming. No! Those were my own cats, and no other, for a man recognises animals that belong to him as surely as he knows his own hat or his own pipe; and there was no mistaking the size and the markings and the behaviour of that mother and daughter who sat, not for the first time in one special spot under one particular tree and quietly watched me cutting the grass! 

(3) The cats were not really drowned by the Porter, and had somehow found their way back, as cats do to the familiar hunting-grounds. It it true that for a few weeks after these things happened, my children would sometimes say that they had seen "our pussies" in the garden; but I think they made the easy mistake, for them, of thinking that strangers and trespassers were the creatures that used to come in and out of Daddy's study and follow him in the garden, though they never had much to do with other people in the house. I made careful enquiry at the time, and there was no room for doubt that the Porter did exactly as he was told, and got rid once for all, of those two unfortunate cats. I have never seen or imagined that I saw anything of either of them, except on that one occasion on a Saturday evening, as here related. 

What explanation then do I myself offer? I have nothing of the sort to give. As far as I know the meaning of truth, I have told this story truly; but it remains as one of the most puzzling incidents in my life, and until someone provides an adequate and reasonable solution of the whole inexplicable business, it will be, for me, the one occasion on which I have "seen ghosts," even though the ghosts were merely those of a couple of quite ordinary cats.

I have to say, I was hoping this narrative would end with “Perambulatrix” being stuffed into a sack and tossed into the river.  Oh, well.