NEIL ARNOLD: BLACK CAT WHITE HOUSE

‘Spooks In White House Recall Green-Eyed Kitty’, ‘Ghost Sounds Had Margaret Worried; Not So Ike, Mamie’. Just two confusing headlines pertaining (would you believe it?) to the same strange ghost story in connection to a phantom cat at Washington’s White house.

Several newspapers; such as the Spokane Daily Chronicle, the Eugene Register Guard and the Williamson Daily News; all reported on the ghost story. The Williamson Daily News was the first to report on the tale on June 13th 1955 under the headline, ‘Nichols Says: Black Cat Or Some Ghost Definitely Was On The Prowl In Statuary Hall’. The article, by Harman W. Nichols, a United Press Staff Correspondent, stated: ‘Washington – Margaret Truman claims that she heard ghost sounds around the White House when her pappy was president. Our present leader, Mr Eisenhower, claims she’s a sound sleeper and that he and Mamie don’t pay any attention to noises in the dark of night.

All of that sent me to the library to look up the business of spook's around the nation’s capital. Seems that back here in the 1920s, a ghost or something, showed up and scared the wits out of a Capitol floor-scrubber. This fellow finally got so worked up that he threw in his broom, disappeared and hasn’t been seen since. According to some fine research done by an unknown reporter for the National Tribune, on Sept. 8, 1927, a black cat, or some other form of ghost was on the prowl nightly in Statuary Hall – where live the marble and bronze likenesses of the great in our history. According to the reporter, who made a thorough study of the problem, the cat was black, as, indeed, all cats are in the dark of night. The fellow who wrote the story said that the cat was all over the place every night. Frightening the daylights, or nightlights, out of night caretakers. Before the floor-washer disappeared, the reporter got hold of the man. The cat, although he never saw her, must have been “big as a big tiger” on account of she flashed green eyes “as big as saucers” when she went running around statues of the likes of Uriah M. Rose of Alabama, the jurist, writer and world traveller. Not to mention Gen. James Shields, the only man who ever served in the Senate from three states.

The cat, and her offspring, according to the latest reports, also became quite fond of Gen. Lew Wallace, the soldier, statesman, and lawyer. Maybe the pussy had read, or heard about the wonderful tribute paid to the general Jan 11, 1910, be Sen. Albert J. Beveridge, of Indiana, from whence the general sprang. “General Lew Wallace loved liberty for all men and fought for it.”
Mayhap the cat, dearly loved liberty too, and was looking for a way out of the gloomy hall of the immortals which looks so eerie in the after hours. Samuel Adams, according to the old-time chroniclers, also was a favourite haunt of the kitty and her tribe. How could she and her young help but be impressed by the likeness of a man who signed the Declaration, and was the press agent, you might say, for what happened at the Boston Tea Party ? After all, Sam was known as the “father of the American Revolution”, and it says so right there under his statue.

Any smart cat also couldn’t help but cuddle to the likeness of Daniel Webster, “an expounder of the Constitution.” It is said that old Dan had a bunch of cats in his back yard and fed them catnip and other feline delicacies by the hour.

But, cats or ghosts I’ll go along with old Charles Anderson Dana, who once said: “I don’t believe in ghosts, but I’ve been afraid of them all my life.”