Man Found 400-Year-Old Mummified Cat in Wall

1. MadMolecule
   April 23rd, 2009 at 3:14 pm

   I want to see a picture of the 400-year-old house.

2. Ben B.
   April 23rd, 2009 at 3:25 pm

   "Adds charm"?

   What a gross idiot this person is. Dead cat in the wall. Mummies -- an absolute insult to the natural process of nature's recycling of materials. Superstitions causing such bizarre practices.

   Reading this was like running into a goodly chunk of what is wrong with people all at once.

   *I* thought "charm" was what employed when serving tea and speaking politely and kindly without pouring said tea down your guest's blouse.

   Apparently, it's not for this maroon. It's a dead cat in the wall. Go figure. "Charming."

3. Talula
   April 23rd, 2009 at 3:27 pm

   I'm not sure I'd be so casually handling any corpse I found in my walls, good luck charm or not.

4. Kalel
   April 23rd, 2009 at 4:16 pm

   Cat clause in the old building code, maybe?

5. Billie Mills
   April 23rd, 2009 at 4:35 pm

   Bravo! The best post I've read in days. Do tell us more! I too would like to see the house.

   My family is in the home renovation and remodeling business here in Northern California. We have found a number of creatures - alive and dead - in the course of business, but never anything remotely as exciting as a mummified cat! Well, houses here in Sacramento are typically less than 100 years old. A few are older, but certainly not 400 years old. A pity.

   The icing on the cake in this case is that Mr. Parson is a funeral director! I imagine that he knows something of mummies - perhaps very much indeed given his line of work. I wonder if dear old pussy underwent procedures to ensure mummification - as opposed to ordinary decomposition. If not, just imagine the foul odour! Zounds!

   Tell us more about this exciting discovery. I know I will look, with great excitement and anticipaton, for a mummified cat, or small dog, or some other sort of beast, every time we tear down a wall for the remainder of my career.

   Well done!

   B.P. Mills - Sacramento, CA (USA)

6. Mytake
   April 23rd, 2009 at 6:19 pm

   Poor kitteh, it looks tragicomic in that "I can haz oxygen?" rictus. BTW, Edgar Allan Poe wrote a short story vaguely reminiscent of this one. The "adds charm" nonsense is just your typical realtor spin.

7. Greengirl
   April 23rd, 2009 at 6:43 pm

   I think he uses the term "charm" to refer to keeping with the history of the house. I think he is able to handle it so freely because he is a funeral director.

   My cousin was renovating his backyard in Halifax and came across bones. He called the police and the bones turned out to belong to a horse that died during the great Halifax explosion.

8. Bill
   April 23rd, 2009 at 6:47 pm

   "Alex, the National Enquirer is on line 2, they say they have an offer you can't refuse!"

9. Alisa
   April 23rd, 2009 at 10:26 pm

   I found a mouse mummy in my closet once. It was pretty cute.

10. Ali S.
    April 23rd, 2009 at 10:40 pm

    @ Kalel

    That made my day!

11. MIchelle McCormack
    April 23rd, 2009 at 11:01 pm

    Seriously, you couldn't get a bigger shot than that?

12. nickolas_warner
    April 24th, 2009 at 12:30 am

    Once I found a bag of weed in my new houses closet. Although thats not nearly as cool as a mummified cat. What a conversation piece!

13. Evilbeagle
    April 24th, 2009 at 2:34 am

    This is what people used to do when they built a house. I think it's a great find.

    As for messing up the natural recycling process, I'm sure that there are just a few more cats that weren't mummified throughout out history so it's probably going to be okay.

14. Foreigner1
    April 24th, 2009 at 3:37 am

    Well, I'd rather find a bag of weed in my house than the charm of a dead animal. With the weed you can have a nice little party. With the dead animal... Best put it back where you found it and hope you didn't break the goodluck-spell or something like that.

    But I defintely don't agree with Ben B. - However tragic for the animal in question- or in some other cultures in Days and cultures Past even the dead adversaries... that has been the cultural-natural way of things. It is fact and part of history. Perhaps good that we have in a sence grown over such practices, but still not a reason to just say the people of those times and practices were just backward fools. Different times and different knowledge. That's all. We nowadays most likely do other things that to them would look utterly daft. And this funeral director has a sence and respect for that part of history. So to my mind he's also definitely not a narrowminded moron- on the contrary I should even say.

15. GQ
    April 24th, 2009 at 5:06 am

    Ah, I thought this was in America which made me seriously question the existence of a 400 year old house! But yeah, in Devon, not that unlikely. It's an area with a lot of history.
    Beer Mill Farm in Clawton is a self-catering place that's over 400 years old, for example.

16. Noelegy
    April 24th, 2009 at 7:56 am

    Considering the attitudes toward animals 400 years ago, the cat was probably alive at the time it was walled up.

17. Noelegy
    April 24th, 2009 at 7:56 am

    I should have said, the attitudes toward cats. Cats always seem to have borne the brunt of superstitious idiocy, with the possible exception of Egypt.

18. Gauldar
    April 24th, 2009 at 9:58 am

    Carefull not to ask it for anything, or else you'll become it's slave forever... oh wait, those are live cats that do that.

19. MadMolecule
    April 24th, 2009 at 10:03 am

    Ben B., you don't get invited to parties much, do you?

20. Zoe
    April 24th, 2009 at 10:58 am

    I'm from Seattle so my first thought was "Wow, I wish we had houses even half that old around here." I once saw a mummified cat from around 500+ years ago when I was visiting France. It was disgusting, especially up close (and that was behind glass.) Needless to say, I would not be handling that thing.

21. Gauldar
    April 24th, 2009 at 11:35 am

    @Zoe

    Well concidering that America was just being colonized at that point, it makes perfect sense that a house wouldn't be that old. I did a google maps search for Ugborough. Apparently that town has been shrowded in darkness for hundreds of years, and I bet that cat has something to do with it!

    http://maps.google.ca/maps?hl=en&q=plymouth%20Ugborough&um=1&ie=UTF-8& sa=N&tab=wl

22. Foreigner1
    April 24th, 2009 at 11:49 am

    Gauldar what do you mean with that Ugborough was shrouded in darkness? It was the centre of the agricultural/religious world with a church dating from 1121 that once even was called the cathedral of the South Hams.

23. Ben B.
    April 24th, 2009 at 12:08 pm

    > But I defintely don’t agree with Ben B.
    > - However tragic for the animal in
    > question- or in some other cultures
    > in Days and cultures Past even the dead
    > adversaries… that has been the cultural-natural
    > way of things.

    Slavery was cultural. It was never admirable. The Inquisitions were cultural. They bear only the very worst of messages from their perpetrators. Repression of women was (and is... I'm looking at you, moron Arabs) cultural. It was never admirable.

    Anthrax is natural. It is not beneficial. Cyanide is natural. You still shouldn't ingest it. Animal venom is natural. Doesn't mean you should go out looking to be snake-bitten, or collecting tissue that has gone necrotic from a brown-recluse's bite.

    Learn to see the world for what it is, not with some nonsensical veneer of "cool" you manufacture because something is unfamiliar or foreign. Sometimes, when something is discovered that looks odd or highly unusual, it isn't because "cool" people did these things or it's "a lost art." A lot of past practices were stupid at best, and superstitious nonsense at worst. Putting a dead animal in your wall is one of those things. Reacting in any other way than respectfully and carefully interring it and sterilizing the area where it was found is barbaric, not to mention stupid.

24. Greengirl
    April 24th, 2009 at 12:39 pm

    Ben B.
    "............Repression of women was (and is… I’m looking at you, moron Arabs) cultural. It was never admirable."
    Wow, where are you from? I want to know where in the world women are so free that you feel you can point fingers

25. Gauldar
    April 24th, 2009 at 12:50 pm

    @Foreigner1

    Have you seen the satalite footage of that google maps link I posted? It's the cats doing!

26. Foreigner1
    April 24th, 2009 at 1:14 pm

    "Anthrax is natural. It is not beneficial. Cyanide is natural. You still shouldn’t ingest it." No but both have their uses, so just discarding them as bad is somewhat selling these compounds short.
    "Animal venom is natural. Doesn’t mean you should go out looking to be snake-bitten, or collecting tissue that has gone necrotic from a brown-recluse’s bite."
    Yep, but it also doesn't mean that you just go out killing these stupid snakes because they could harm you.
    "A lot of past practices were stupid at best, and superstitious nonsense at worst."
    Okay, I can go along with that one.
    "Reacting in any other way than respectfully and carefully interring it and sterilizing the area where it was found is barbaric, not to mention stupid."
    Why barbaric...?
    So if you find -burial- rituals of past civilisations in the USA that don't fit your Christian? modern ways, you just discard of them and you just sweep aside any objections to your actions from anyone that honours these practices from his or her forefathers because you think they behave barbaric and stupid...?

    If how you think would be the correct way, lots of historic stuff in Europe and elsewhere and in the USA should be cleaned up pretty fast because they are relics from stupid barbaric times and actions and nowadays they are looked after with great care.

    Wel... I hope you are not how the majority thinks. I think I begin to understand why Native Americans partly have so much problems with the way modern white folks treat the historic artifacts of those Natives...!

    And please, Ben B. do not call all Arabs morons- They do not all suppress women, or ride camels and shoot AK47's at infidels.

27. Foreigner1
    April 24th, 2009 at 1:22 pm

    Yeah Gauldar I checked it out- Wwwwwwwweirrrrrd...!
    Spooky in fact...! Some years ago and not far from that place more towards Modbury I once saw a cropcircle. ...Perhaps that also was a doing of The Cat...?

28. Gauldar
    April 24th, 2009 at 1:39 pm

    @Foreigner1

    Oh I wouldn't put it past... wait a minute, whats that scratching sound. Dear god! He's in the house and he's trying to kill me! Lucy, board up the doors and get my shotgun!

29. Foreigner1
    April 24th, 2009 at 1:59 pm

    ...Ladies and Gentlemen- It saddens me to convey to you that The 400 year old Cat got Gauldar and his wife.....

    

30. ted
    April 24th, 2009 at 8:18 pm

    I would just be a little leery of handing the corpse of a loved one over to this funeral director.

    Interesting story, but I don't think I'd shove a dead cat back in the wall. I guess it's a tradition of a sort.

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