It’s officially spooky season! Now that it’s October, everyone’s got ghosts and ghouls on the mind. Of course, most of my Halloween décor is up all year round, including this delightful art print of spectral kitties by Heather Franzen Rutten. Staring at it the other day got me thinking: Do animals have ghosts? There’s been plenty of philosophical and religious debate on the subject (often hinging on whether animals have souls), but if we turn to Gothic literature, the answer is a resounding “yes!” Below are a few of my favorite stories that feature spectral animals:
“Kerfol” by Edith Wharton
You may know Edith Wharton from reading her classic novels The Age of Innocence or Ethan Frome in English class, but she was also a prolific ghost story writer. “Kerfol” was one of the stories originally published in her 1916 collection Xingu and Other Stories, and which I first encountered in Women’s Weird. The story is told from the perspective of a young man who is interested in buying an old castle in Brittany. He arranges to visit Kerfol and explore its grounds, but when he arrives he finds no one there—except a strange pack of dogs in a variety of breeds that watch him warily as he wanders around. After investigating the history of the castle, the man learns that these were the beloved pets of the Kerfol’s old mistress. In a twisted tale of domestic abuse, the castle’s cruel lord had killed each dog to make his wife suffer. But when they came back as spirits, the dogs took their revenge and freed their mistress from his grasp. Now the dogs continue to haunt the castle for one day out of every year.
“The Black Cat” by Edgar Allan Poe
Speaking of vengeful animal specters, perhaps the most famous of these is the title character in Edgar Allan Poe’s 1845 short story “The Black Cat.” Like many of Poe’s stories, this one is told in the first person by a potentially unreliable narrator. The narrator considers himself to be an animal-lover and has had a particularly close relationship with his black cat, Pluto. When drunk, however, the narrator is prone to violent rages, which lead him to gouge out the cat’s eye one night and later hang it from a noose on a tree. The narrator eventually finds a new cat that looks just like the old one except for some white markings that come to resemble a noose. In his next drunken rage, the cat escapes him and he kills his wife, instead. He hides her body, but the cat’s shrieks alert the police to its location. It is never explicitly stated in the text, but it is heavily implied that this second cat is the specter of the dead Pluto, come back to take vengeance for its owner’s betrayal.
“The Rats in the Walls” by H. P. Lovecraft
Another slightly ambiguous case is one of H. P. Lovecraft’s most popular stories, “The Rats in the Walls,” first published in Weird Tales magazine in 1924. The narrator is the last descendant of the de la Poer family, but is only vaguely familiar with his family’s history. Seeking to reconnect with his roots in his old age, the narrator purchases the ancient family home of Exham Priory and has it rebuilt and restored. After he moves in, however, he claims to hear the sound of rats scurrying within the building’s solid stone walls. His cat (which shares the same racial slur of a name as Lovecraft’s own childhood cat), hears the scurrying sound as well and tracks it down to a secret passage in the priory’s sub-cellar. When the narrator and his companions investigate, they find only gnawed-on bones, which suggest ancient dark rites and recall the legend of a horde of rats that burst forth from the house and infested the English countryside after the house was initially abandoned. As with many of Lovecraft’s narrators, this one is deeply unreliable and has been driven quite mad by the end of the story, so it is difficult to know what to make of the rats: Are they real? Are they ghosts? Are they merely figments of the narrator’s disturbed mind? The text leaves the answer ambiguous, but given that no rats are ever seen, no corporeal rats could logically be inside solid stone walls, and no other humans can hear them but the cats can, I think it is safe to categorize these as a case of spectral animals.
What other spectral animals have you come across in literature? Do you believe that our pets can leave ghosts behind? Let me know your thoughts in the comments!