A Mummified Cat Puzzle
Posted by: Nick Redfern on July 25th, 2012
Over at the Center for Fortean Zoology’s On the Track blog, you can find a story that, for me at least, is one of the strangest that has surfaced in a long time. It all focuses upon the discovery of a distinctly out of place mummified cat in a little town in England.
Someone’s idea of a joke? Something to do with with witches and their “familiars”? The jury is still out, and the investigation is still ongoing, but it’s an odd one, to say the least! And there are a couple of interesting photos to accompany the article, too…
Here’s the CFZ link and here’s a link to the original article on the affair at the Cambs Times.
About Nick Redfern
Punk music fan, Tennents Super and Carlsberg Special Brew beer fan, horror film fan, chocolate fan, like to wear black clothes, like to stay up late. Work as a writer.
The cat’s pajamas of Apotropaic (as in secreted/concealed) objects! I curated a ca. 1770 Colonial home in the Tar Heel State that boasted dozens of quirky artifacts & specimens deliberately placed within the walls, among them a half dozen or so shoes (Offerings to the restless spirit of a child? Talismans to promote fertility?~~ think Old Woman in the Shoe, as well as footwear thrown at weddings. A bit of Voodoo mojo from one of the slave builders?). We joked that we had some interesting SHOEPERSTITION at play. There’s a society/website devoted to Apotropaios, and several other Internet links with references to dessicated kitties et al.
Cats mummify comparably easily for a simple reason. They climb around a lot, and sometimes they fall in chimneys or get accidentally caught in other “architectural” traps. If this are dry places, especially below roofs, such a carcass can dry and mummify. If it is mummified, it’s quite hard to say if it’s only a year or a century old, so I wouldn’t go so far to estimate the age of the cat from the appearance alone.
It looks like an escapee from a Disney remake of Lifeforce the film based on Colin Wilson’s The Space Vampires!