N I G H T B R I N G E R . S E
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A TORTURED CAT
The manor house of Oxenby in England, erected during the reign of Edward VI, was a gloomy building, faced with flint and buttressed with gray stone. Its ill-lit interior was not unlike "a subterranean chapel or charnel house," according to a schoolmistress named Mrs. Hartnoll, who had lived there as a girl.
According to the late Elliott O'Donnell, a former pupil of Mrs. Hartnoll's and a collector of ghostlore, the lady was a no-nonsense sort, not a person given to fantasy. But even she ascribed a pervasive eeriness to the old house. She told O'Donnell that one day she was walking along one of its shadowy corridors when a door creaked open and a huge black cat crept slowly through it. The creature had been horribly maltreated. One of its eyes and a hind paw were missing. It seemed to want comfort, but as it fell at the girl's feet it somehow vanished into the floor. That evening, the future schoolmistress's brother was killed in an incident.
She did not see the spectral cat again for another two years. Then it appeared to her near the same cobwebbed spot where she had first seen it. As before, the pathetic animal was maimed and bleeding, apparently in its death throes. That same day, the girl's mother died of a stroke. Nearly four years later the cat appeared to the girl yet once more, and by evening the father of the family was dead.
The manor's dark history includes the chilling tale of an orphaned boy whose father had once owned the estate. The monstrous guardian who had been named to care for the lad finally murdered his ward and tried to install as heir his own illegitimate son - but not before forcing the true heir to watch while he and his bastard mutilated and boiled the boy's pet cat.
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