| We enjoy Halloween as a time for dressing up to
engage in ‘trick-or-treating’ around the neighborhood with our children. Ghosts
and spirits, now the focus of costume makers, were taken much more seriously a century
ago. Our ancestors were in fact very superstitious. The following is a true story. It
happened in Cynthian Township near the Miami-Erie Canal in the fall of 1880. This eyewitness account appeared in the Sidney Journal in
December of 1897:
"Winter set in very early
that year, and it was extraordinarily cold. By late fall, they were cutting ice two feet
thick on the canal, and storing it in the great ice houses which then lined the banks. A
certain man had died, when the weather was at its coldest, and I was one of the three men
chosen to keep the night watch.
The body was laid out in the parlor of the home on
an old-fashioned bier, which was too short, as he was a very tall man, and was covered
with a black pall, which hung down over the feet. There was no fire in the room, and the
window was opened about two inches, with the result that the corpse was frozen as hard as
marble. Notwithstanding
this, the undertaker left a jar of some embalming fluid, with which the body was to be
covered every two or three hours. We three sat in another room, and punctually at the
proper hours performed this gruesome function, whiling away the rest of the time as best
we might.
Just as the clock struck midnight we heard one of
the women come downstairs to prepare some coffee and food for us, and I suggested that
before we partook of it we should attend to the body again. We crossed the wide hall, the
wind moaning in gusts around the house, and the freezing atmosphere already chilling our
blood, and entered the parlor. I went in first, the candle in my hand. I had taken two or
three steps when I stopped, simply appalled. One leg of the frozen corpse was rising and
falling beneath the pall, silently, but unmistakably, as though kicking in convulsive
agony. Peterman, a powerful young German, who was next to me, caught sight of it the next
moment, and, throwing his hands, with a cry of "My God!" fell fainting to
the floor.
How long I stood gazing at the ghastly movement I do not know. The hot tallow fell
unheeded from my hand, until it formed a little mound. At length I was aroused by Peterman
coming to his senses, and commencing to vomit terribly. This changed the current of my
thoughts, and I ran out for a basin. Before I could return he saw the leg move again, and
fell in another swoon. Finding him thus, my fear suddenly left me, and I was determined to
solve the mystery. I walked to the bier and pulled back the pall.
I found there a lean and savage black cat, gnawing at one of the frozen legs, and the
arching of whose back, in the effort to tear the flesh, had caused the horrible
appearance. Though I knocked it away and kicked it, the brute, with eyes glowing like
coals, sprang back each time to its awful meal and I dared not touch it with my hands for
fear a bite or scratch from those tainted fangs and claws should cause blood poisoning. It
was literally mad with hunger. At length I fetched a long, heavy bootjack, and beat it
over the head with that until it lay still, when I threw it out of doors. The only way it
could have gotten in was through the window, but how it squeezed through such a narrow
aperture is a mystery. Peterman was sick in bed for months after the shock, while as for
our third companion, he ran at Peterman’s first scream and did not appear at
all."
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