Show me a story about beer-swilling Scottish witch cats, and, naturally, my immediate reaction is to yell for joy and start typing.  A blogger lives for that sort of thing.

Our little tale opens in late 1718, at the Burnside of Scrabster home of a mason named William Montgomery.  He and his family had a cat problem.  Of late, a number of highly sinister felines had mysteriously invaded his home.  They terrorized his servant into quitting, (after hearing the cats talking among themselves in human and intelligible voices,) and left Mrs. Montgomery so frazzled that she threatened to leave her husband and retire to the less cat-plagued town of Thurso.  Worst of all, the diabolical kitties drank up his ale.

Montgomery decided serious measures were called for.  Arming himself with a sword, a dirk, and an ax, he launched an assault on the unwanted guests, killing two of the cats and wounding several others.  At least, he thought at the time that two of them were dead. Curiously enough, by the following morning their corpses had mysteriously vanished.  He also noted that the wounds he had inflicted drew no blood.

Then things really got weird. A local woman, Helen Andrew, who had long been suspected of being a witch, died unexpectedly.  Another reputed sorceress named McHuistan killed herself by leaping into the sea.  Most startling of all, an old lady named Margaret Nin-Gilbert had one of her legs suddenly fall off.  The local residents--who could put two and two together as well as anyone--immediately concluded that the three women were among the cats who had infested the Montgomery home. Nin-Gilbert’s “black and putrefied” leg was presented to the local sheriff (something which must have really made his day) and he was ordered to take the appropriate steps.

Margaret was quickly arrested.  Under what was probably not very gentle questioning, she soon admitted that she had been inside Montgomery’s house in the form of a “feltered [shaggy] cat,” and that the loss of her leg was due to the injuries his dirk had inflicted.  Nin-Gilbert stated that the trouble began when a woman named Margaret Olson had been evicted from her lodgings due to the “wickedness of her behavior.”  The Montgomery family moved into her former home.  As a result, Olson solicited Nin-Gilbert to “do mischief” in revenge.  

Besides Olson, Nin-Gilbert named four other women as her cat-confederates.  Naturally, they were arrested as well.  Margaret died in jail soon afterward.  (Accounts vary as to whether she succumbed to natural causes, or if she was murdered by the women who were, thanks to her, fellow inmates.)

Eventually, the whole affair reached the ears of Lord Advocate Robert Dundas.  He wrote a stern letter to the sheriff scolding him for proceeding on such a matter without his authority.  The entire case, to his mind, was so utterly absurd that he ordered the investigation to cease.  The women Nin-Gilbert had accused were freed, and that, it seems, was that.

Unfortunately, history does not record if Montgomery ever saw the cats again.

Via Newspapers.com

About all I ask from the Blog Gods is that every so often, they send me stories about towns haunted by sinister witch cats.  The “Buffalo Enquirer,” January 22, 1897:

Toledo, O., Jan. 22. About twenty-one miles out of Toledo in a little town known as Richfield Center, a remarkable condition of affairs exists, and the German country residents are panic stricken. Nearly twenty families are down with a disease which baffles them completely. They can find no explanation for it, and tell extraordinary tales of the singular manifestations of some evil influence among them. They believe they are bewitched, and nothing can move them from this opinion. 

The afflicted ones insist that they can neither eat nor sleep, and that many of their number are slowly dying from witchcraft. A. F. Miller, a farmer, came in from there last night after a daughter who was in the city and whom he wanted to go home and assist in nursing her mother who is down with the disease. In his family there are also four sons stricken, and one of them is near death. He says, and in this Henry Nieman, another farmer, confirms his story, that at night their great trouble occurs. Black cats, in some mysterious manner, enter the bedrooms, no matter how securely the doors may be fastened, and hiss, snarl and caterwaul about the room, leap up on the bed and follow the inmates about the room when they arise. If the bedrooms are vacated the animals disappear as miraculously as they appear. 

The epidemic, affliction or plague started three or four weeks ago, although a disease somewhat similar existed in the community last autumn. The youngest son of one of the families who is afflicted cannot sleep in a bedroom, but lies down in the kitchen beside the stove. He will not go into a room where there are any beds. It is claimed this is true with the children in at least a dozen other families. 

One woman, who has three children, says that they have all been sleeping in one room recently, and that as many as four of the black cats have entered the room at a time and their actions are such as to frighten the strongest hearted. A farmer, Andrew Wolson Miller, it is related, put up a stove in his barn and took his family there to sleep, but they experienced the same illusions as in the house. The livestock also became frantically alarmed. 

Miller says the farm horses, which have been in good condition until recently, will suddenly snort and rear around their enclosure, wild with fright. Sometimes the animals will do this for several hours at a time, until completely exhausted. Several have died as a result of fright and exhaustion. The milk of the cows in these families, it is alleged, is red, and this is cited as one of the surest evidences of witches.

Another remarkable part of the story, as told, is that the feathers in their pillows and beds have been found to be formed in perfectly made wreaths, hard and compact. Mrs. Miller says that she has destroyed at least ten pounds of feathers in a hope of removing the spell, and that the other women in the neighborhood have burned whole feather beds for the same reason. One man says that wooden chips in a box near a bedroom door curled into wreaths.

Doctors seem unable to give any relief or diagnose the condition of affairs. They are of the opinion that the trouble arises from some sanitary arrangement from which a disease which plays havoc with the imagination grows and which is slowly spreading in the neighborhood.

As late as May of that year, newspapers continued to report weird, mysterious illnesses and deaths in Richfield Center, for which no cause could be found other than our goblin cats.  Then, as generally happens, the story seems to have quietly faded away with no known resolution.