In Brief
Visitors to Hammond Castle in Gloucester, Massachusetts keep reporting a black cat walking the rooms — one nobody can catch. It was built by an inventor obsessed with cats and the occult, and the legend holds he came back the way he always said he would.
The Full Story
There's a black cat that walks the rooms of Hammond Castle in Gloucester, Massachusetts, and visitors who report it say no one can ever catch it. They keep seeing it anyway, year after year, slipping through a stone fortress that stands on a cliff above the harbor. As the story goes, it's the man who built the place, come back the way he always said that he would.
His name was John Hays Hammond Jr., and he was not an ordinary man. He held 437 U.S. patents, second only to Edison, and the world knew him as the father of radio control. Between 1926 and 1929 he raised this castle out of Cape Ann granite and shipped-in pieces of medieval Europe — a 13th-century French courtyard with bakeshop and butcher facades, Roman tombstones set into a church front, secret doors and hidden passages, an indoor pool he could drain with a switch and fill with seawater. The Great Hall held an organ of more than 8,000 pipes. Gershwin played it. Walt Disney screened Fantasia there in 1940.
He and his wife Irene shared an interest in the occult. They hosted mediums and séances among the artifacts, some of which they believed held spirits still attached to them. In 1951 Hammond sealed the psychic Eileen Garrett inside three nested copper Faraday cages in that same Great Hall, a scientist and tape recorders beside her, a switch hidden a quarter mile away, to test whether thought traveled on radio waves like one of his own inventions. He decided it didn't.
He loved his cats more than that. When a Siamese died, he'd preserve it in a jar of formaldehyde and drive it to its funeral at a slow crawl, headlights on. Three of them were buried with him. One account holds that he feared his grave being disturbed so badly he had poison ivy planted over it. In 2008, after vandals broke into his mausoleum and stole the preserved cats, his body was moved out to the courtyard for good.
In 2012 the Ghost Hunters team spent a night here. On the balcony they chased voices they couldn't trace. In the basement a chandelier swung wildly on its own, with no draft and no vibration to move it. And on a recorder, plain enough that viewers at home could hear it, a voice cried out one word — "Hammond."
Nobody catches the cat.
