Spooky, 2009 - 2026

 Spooky died in my arms at 4:30 AM on Thursday, February 5, 2026.

Spooky, July 23, 2025

Spooky was the last of his cohort of cats. We took him in on January 1, 2010, when he was already about six months old. He wasn't the last one we took in back then - that was Spooky's littermate Homer, who joined us in July 2010. and was the last cat we took in until Bojangles in 2019, who was rapidly followed by his mother Mama Cat and his sister Spumoni. Homer died in 2021, the same year as Babusz and Ray. All of the other cats from that era have died, most recently Spooky's littermate Amber in May 2024, and Peaches in October 2023. Now all that remain are the newcomers Bojangles, Mama Cat, and Spumoni.

Spooky, December 30, 2024

I snatched Spooky from where he was sleeping on our back porch on New Year's Day in 2010. He and his siblings were sleeping in a plastic shoe storage bag my mom was throwing out. They had stuffed themselves into the bag and were packed together tightly. I couldn't understand how they weren't suffocating jammed in there. But I knew that fate and humans are unkind to feral cats, especially feral black cats, and since I knew we could only take in one more cat, he was the one I targeted. 

He did not appreciate it.

We had set up the bathroom as an isolation room for new cats, until they could be medically cleared by the vet. After clawing the hell out of me - I should have worn gloves - he proceeded to tear the bathroom apart, something that Spumoni would do again nine years later. But he soon came around and realized the benefits of having a safe, warm house.

Spooky, March 19, 2010

For most of his life he was a quiet cat who lived in the shadows. That was the way of things - usually one cat at a time would get to be my mom's special cat, and the others would stay back. Toward the end of her life Babusz was the special cat. When Babusz died in 2021, Amber moved to take her place. Peaches gravitated to me.

After my mom died in 2023, Peaches became my special cat, always sitting by my side. I could tell her life was coming to an end, and I always justified not doing things because I had something more important to do - namely, pet Peaches. 

After Peaches died, Amber moved to take her place. Amber had lost a lot of weight after my mom died - my mom had a habit of overfeeding the cats, and without her leaving bowls spilling over with treats all over the house, all of the cats began to lose weight. Amber was extremely overweight when my mom died, but I made a point of feeding her exclusively. She also inherited the lickable treats that Peaches had enjoyed - specifically Temptations Purrrree with Chicken. Amber was the special cat for just over six months until her sudden and untimely death due to saddle thrombus.

Spooky moved into the special cat spot by my side. Not just by my side - throughout 2024 and until we were ordered to return to the office full-time in February 2025, he would make a point of walking in front of my face while we were doing our weekly online meetings, much to the amusement of my coworkers. (I explained to them that he was used to hearing me talking on the phone or tapping away at my keyboard while I was working, so when I fell silent during a meeting he assumed I was dead and wanted to check on me. He became very popular with them, and when we returned to the office full-time they all asked about him.) I took to breathing into his fur whenever he did that and he came to really enjoy it. About three months ago he started to follow that by curling up on the left side of my chest, over my heart, and falling asleep there for an hour or more.

He loved bedtime. When he decided I had been online too long, he would climb up on my chest and block my eyes so I couldn't see the monitor - his way of saying "That's enough Internet for today, time for bed." He would paw at  my hand on the keyboard to remind me that I should be doing something more important, like petting him.When I would go to bed at night he often came to sleep on my pillow, pressing his body against my forehead as though he were trying to calm my thoughts.  He was the only cat left in the house who wore a collar, a collar with a bell. When I heard the bell at night I knew he was around, coming to demand a thousand kisses to the forehead and to steal my pillow from me in bed, so I would wake up with him on my pillow and my head flat on the bed - to the point that I bought two identical pillows, one for each of us, though he would often stretch out across both of them.

He would see me off to sleep at night and be there to greet me in the morning. He was my companion during work from home, during naps, even when I was just sitting around.

Spooky inherited the lickable treats, which he was always happy to share with fellow black cat Bojangles, as well as the exclusive Fancy Feast feedings, which he shared with everyone after he had eaten his fill. He also enjoyed Temptations crunchy treats at bedtime and upon waking up. In the last few weeks I was keeping a bowl of treats at the spot where he would sit next to me, so he wouldn't have to go looking for them. This was also where I kept the bowl for his semi-exclusive Fancy Feast feedings.

Bojangles, Mama Cat, and Spumoni always had exclusive feeding of their own: a "midnight feast" (usually served between 1:30 AM and 3:00 AM) of a can of Friskies split three ways. Spumoni is very food aggressive, and would always push her mother and brother aside to get to the first bowl - and then the second, and then the third, abandoning each to the other cats in turn. Spooky never had any interest in the midnight feast until recently. Some nights he would show up as I set out the three bowls. Some nights he would show up in time for me to split the can four ways. Sometimes he would be fed last, but in his last few days he was fed first. Spumoni respected his seniority and would not try to steal his bowl, and neither would the other cats. Sometimes he left some food in his bowl for the others, other days he would eat everything in his bowl and nibble at anything left over by the others. 

Joining the midnight feast wasn't the only change in Spooky's behavior lately. Several times in the days before he died, he would jump in the empty bathtub in the morning while I was in the bathroom. Now that I think of it, Spooky might have done it a few times when I wasn't in the bathroom. I don't know what this meant. Peaches spent the last few weeks of her life living in the bathtub, to the point that I was feeding her there. After Peaches died, Amber kept checking the bathtub to see if she might be hiding there. 

We had a schedule of sorts. I would wake up between 9:00 and 10:00 AM and have breakfast. Around 11:00 AM I would move into another room and get a tube of treat and a can of Fancy Feast. Spooky would jump up and sit at my right side waiting for his treat, and Bojangles would sometimes jump up on my left. Spooky always got first crack at the treat, but then would share with Bojangles. Afterwards I would cut wedges of the Fancy Feast pate, half the can, and put them in a bowl where Spooky would eat his fill and leave the rest for everyone else.  We would repeat the ritual a few hours later just before I left for work in the afternoon, or when I got home from work early in the morning.

The last week of January I was home every day. Monday and Tuesday we were working from home because of heavy snow. Wednesday I called off because I hadn't finished digging my car out, wasn't feeling that great, and didn't feel like making the effort to go into work, and didn't have the energy to deal with callers from home. Thursday and Friday I had scheduled off, two of the only selected days I was able to get in the first months of 2026. So I got to spend lots of time with Spooky those days.

Wednesday, February 4 was a good day. Spooky enjoyed his treat and his food and spent time sitting with me. The sun came out and he jumped into the front bow window to bask in the sunshine for a few hours. While I was taking my shower I heard him crying, and then came out to find him sitting outside the bathroom waiting for me. He ran out to his spot and positioned himself for extra treats, which I gave him gladly.

All this last week I had dreaded coming home. Despite my best efforts, Spooky was getting older. When he was young his fur had been jet black with a few wisps of white on his chest; now his coat was salt-and-pepper, and he sported a full white muzzle. His spine was becoming more prominent. I could tell his time was drawing near. I worried that I would come home to find him dead. I thought about where to look for him: in the chair where he liked to sleep, in the bathtub, in one or two other spots. 

I came through the door and found him waiting for me to serve the midnight feast.

I put out his food first. Spumoni made no efforts to steal it. 

I got ready for bed. I lounged in the chair where I would feed him treats, where he would sit by my side, where he would sleep on my heart. He came up and sat by me for a bit. We dozed there for an hour or so. Then he got up, scrambled over me, and went off to do cat stuff. 

About 4:15 AM I got up to go to the bathroom one last time. I found Spooky sleeping in an unusual spot on the floor and had a bad feeling. The night he died years ago, Thor had curled up in front of the back door, something he had never done before. I had picked Thor up, said "No, not here," and took him to sleep with my mom. He died in her arms shortly after. 

On my way back from the bathroom I stooped down to pick Spooky up. If this was the time, I wanted him to be in the chair where he liked to sleep, not some dark corner of the floor.

He struggled against me. He dug his claws into the carpet, into the curtain. He looked at me with a shocked, surprised expression. I picked him up, held him against my chest, carried him over to the chair that I had been sitting in, the chair where he had been sleeping the past few months, and laid him down gently on the cushion.

He landed stiff and still, his forelegs pointed in one direction, his hind legs in another, his head in another.

I might have killed him picking him up. His heart might have given out struggling against me.

I picked him up again. He was dead weight. I sat in the chair and held him against my chest. I could feel his breath, faint, and his heartbeat, fading. I made my goodbyes. Told him soon he would be with his mommy and Amber and Peaches and everyone else. Told him that I loved him, that he would always be my little tiny buddy. That I loved all the time we had spent together, all the times he had slept curled up on my heart. I kissed him on his forehead, again and again. After a while his breathing stopped. His heart stopped. It was around 4:30.

I pulled a blanket over us and slept there in the chair for the next four hours, holding him.

When I woke he was still dead. 

I laid Spooky out on a soft towel. Spumoni spent a lot of time staring at him. I don't know what she was thinking.

With much difficulty I removed his collar, the collar with a bell. I put the collar in a baggie, along with some plucked hairs. 

My mom called him Pookie sometimes. To me he was Spooky. Spooky McGooky. Spook McGook. Spookus Mac Gookus. My little tiny buddy. The smallest of the remaining cats.

I took him to our vet to be cremated on the way in to work Thursday. I will pick up his ashes in a few days.

Spooky's Kubrick Stare, October 3, 2023

Homer

Today after I got home from work I watered my tomatoes, moved some heavy terra cotta pots, and slept. Then I woke up, ran the weed whacker, and hauled out the garbage.

More than half of our garbage, by volume, is cat litter. We recently acquired our twelfth cat. I had decided that we were done with cats, but this one had extenuating circumstances.

For the past few months I believe the resident feral population has hovered at five: two from the same litter as Bowie, Thor, and BlueBear, and three from the same litter as Amber and Spooky. We have managed to catch two of those ferals for neutering and re-release, one of the older males and one of the younger females. The other younger female became pregnant at some point and had kittens a few weeks ago at the height of the heat wave. (It appears her kittens have all died - I found and buried two of them last week, and I have seen none anywhere near her today.)

The other older cat has not been around lately. Maybe he's dead, maybe he's just moved on to establish his own territory.

And then there's Homer.

These cats are really just semi-feral. They know that humans on the porch mean that there may be food available, so any time they hear the back door open they will come up the steps and through the propped-open door to see if we have anything for them. Mostly they will keep their distance, dashing back off the porch at the slightest provocation. Except for one of the younger cats.

For weeks, months maybe, one of the three younger cats kept trying to come into the house. Not sneakily, not by stealth: it's just that whenever we opened the back door to go back into the house, he assumed we were inviting him to stroll in, too. Several times he nearly made it, and was caught in mid-stride. He didn't put up a fight when we turned him back, but he would always try again.

Our personal trap-neuter-release program, as you may recall, started with a disaster. While I was able to trap one cat, a young female, almost immediately, she got loose while I was trying to transfer her to another carrier. She bit the hell out of my hands each of the several times I was able to grab her as she raced around the house looking for an exit, and then she spent most of the next three days (Thursday morning through Saturday night) hiding in our house until we successfully re-trapped her. (That first Friday my sister was able to trap an older male that we then had neutered.) We had to hold onto her until the following Friday, when the mobile low-cost spay/neuter clinic came back to town. She spent that week in two oversized pet carriers, being transferred from each when it became too soiled to let her remain.

After that adventure was over and she had healed from her surgery and been released, I took the carriers outside, disassembled them, hosed them down , cleaned them off, and then filled them with a bleach-water mixture to soak for a while. Then I went to work for the night.

That night I was haunted by visions of feral cats drinking the bleach-water mixture from the carriers. My God, what have I done? Have I killed the cats we were trying to save?

The next morning when I got home from work I went straight out and dumped out the remaining bleach-water and hosed out the carriers.

One of the cats was on our porch, sniffing at the food. He yowled a bit, stepped off the porch, jumped off the steps behind a rhododendron, and yowled some more.

Over the next few days I kept an eye out for him. He was suddenly very skinny, as though he weren't eating at all. Had I burned his esophagus and stomach and the rest of his digestive system with bleach-water?

The other cats stopped coming around, though we saw them once in a while. We suspected that they resented what had been done to them, and did not appreciate being made our unwilling guests. And I figured the pregnant one had gone off to find a place to have her babies. The temperature began to soar.

But the skinny cat kept coming around. He would plant himself directly in front of the back storm door, which opens out. Several times I had to pick him up and relocate him so I could open the door all the way. He didn't put up a fight.

Finally it was time for me to go back to work. On that day, my mom decided she had had enough of watching this cat getting skinnier and skinnier, dying by inches. She was going to take him to the vet to see if there was anything that could be done with him.

I told her that she was probably just investing a lot of money in having a cat put to sleep. If he hadn't been accidentally poisoned by me, or intentionally poisoned by someone else, he was probably being eaten alive by parasites and full of diseases. But she decided to take him and that was that.

As I got ready to leave for work, they were finally taking her into a room. As I left for work, she called me with the verdict.

He wasn't dying, not irreversibly. He hadn't been poisoned, intentionally or accidentally. He didn't have rabies, or Feline AIDS, or Feline Leukemia. What he had was a severe respiratory infection that was compromising his ability to eat or drink. The vet gave him I.V. hydration, a massive dose of antibiotics, and prescribed some appetite stimulants. We decided that we would hold onto him for at least two weeks, if possible, and try to get him back to fighting weight.

It became clear very quickly that this was the cat who had always been trying to get into the house. He didn't fight us, not like his feral sister had when we captured her for spaying a few weeks ago, in fact not at all. And I don't think this was just because of his weakened state. He actually seemed to be - well, not just friendly, but actually grateful. Happy to be starting a life as a domestic cat. (This sort of odd behavior in a nearly year-old feral had me wondering about rabies, but the vet says he's clean.)

That was nearly two weeks ago. He is doing well. He has put on weight, thanks to a liquid diet of kitten milk which is now transitioning into a diet of solid food in liquids. Where once his spine was the widest part of his body other than his head, he now has a little belly and a somewhat less-bony spine. He is still showing signs of intense gratitude, nuzzling us when we pick him up and wrapping around our legs when we enter the bathroom-turned-isolation chamber where he is being kept. He still tries to stroll out a door - but now it is the bathroom door, so he can meet with his fellow cats. Several times a day I will carry him around the house so he can see (but not closely interact with) the other cats of the house, especially Nicky the Senior Cat and his sister Amber and brother Spooky.

We were stumped as to what to name him. Finally I decided on a name that reflected his life story: All that he wanted to be was a house cat. All that he wanted was a home.

So now we have our twelfth cat: Homer.


The order of cats:
Nicky, born August 1998 1999 (Based on the date of REM playing at Merriweather Post on September 10, 1999, which is the concert I went to see with my sister the weekend I came down to pick up Nicky.) Abandoned by his mother when she relocated the rest of her litter. Rescued by my sister, then transferred as an infant to us. Senior Cat.
Joey, found in mid-2000 wandering around by my brother's house, looking to get in. Probably several months old at the time..
Babusz, born September 2006.
Scooter, born July 2007.

Bowie, born Spring 2009. Fell into basement twice. The second time, we kept her, May 18, 2009.
Thor, littermate of Bowie, caught barehanded by my mom June 4, 2009.
BlueBear, littermate of Bowie and Thor, trapped (using bird netting as a lure) June 2009.

Ray Chelle, formerly Rachel, littermate of Gretchen (deceased), child of Socks (deceased). Captured (along with his sibling) June 30, 2009.
Peaches, daughter of Tortoise (deceased), caught barehanded by my mom, July 2009.

Amber, born Autumn 2009. Captured October 2009.
Spooky, littermate of Amber. Snatched in his sleep January 1, 2010. (Spooky was fairly old when we caught him, and had a very hard time adapting to life in a house. I decided that he was at the maximum age for taking in a feral.)
Homer, littermate of Amber and Spooky. Came to us, sick and apparently dying, July 2010 - nearly a year old.

Baby Boy, inherited from a neighbor

Romeo, inherited from a neighbor

Bojangles

(Squeaky)

Mama Cat

Spumoni

Spooky

Amber was the most unusual cat of her litter. While most of her littermates were variations on the standard ("mackerel") gray Tabby, Amber was a bright golden color with brown stripes. Very easy to spot. Not a good survival trait for a feral cat. So we took her in. (And because she turned out to actually be a she, we were glad to have removed another breeder from the mix.)

One of her littermates wasn't a gray Tabby. It was a black kitten with an unsettling habit of letting you get very close to it - as long as you were approaching from behind. As soon as it saw you, it would run away, or at least out of reach. It also didn't seem to respond to noises - just visual cues. It was also smaller than the gray Tabbies, which led me to assume that it was a female.

On January 1 of this year I caught the black kitten. Barehanded, while it was sleeping. In retrospect, I probably should have been wearing leather gloves, and a leather apron.

We quickly determined that she was actually a he, and that he wasn't hard-of-hearing at all. But we had him.

He gave us a bit of a scare on his first vet's visit, when he tested weakly positive for the virus that is known (somewhat misleadingly) as "feline leukemia." We had kept him strictly isolated from the other cats, even his sister Amber, and had always washed thoroughly after handling him, so we weren't too concerned with contagion. A more sophisticated and sensitive (and expensive) test came back negative.

We had no idea what to call him in those early days. My mom suggested various precious names, which I shot down. I took to calling him Little Black Cat, or LBC for short. In the end my mom decided on the name Spooky - a name once borne by another black cat, a feral without fear who was last seen about a year ago. When I last saw him, SpookyBear (the "Bear" part came from one of my nephews) was very bedraggled, but there was no question of taking him into the house.

The younger Spooky has absolutely stretched the limits of how old a feral kitten can be when it is first taken into a house. He was fine in isolation, perfectly comfortable in the company of humans, but when released into the larger house his first act was to hide - very effectively. He did interact freely with the other cats in the house, but he avoided any contact with the resident humans. It has only been in the last week or so that I have been able to pet him and hold him without having him run away.

The original SpookyBear received his name because he had a "spooky" habit of sitting still and staring at any approaching humans while his littermates ran away - he would only retreat when you were almost within touching distance. BlueBear was named for his blue eyes (which faded as he got older) with the "Bear" part tacked on in memory of SpookyBear. (BlueBear is now about as big as Nicky - at less than a year old, he could easily be mistaken for a small panther.)

The new Spooky is definitely his own animal, with his own unique traits, and an odd look about him - eyes that tend to have the lids down to the top of the pupil, giving him a suspicious and skeptical look at all times, and a head that is much wider across the upper portion than the lower. Maybe this is just the awkward adolescent stage - at one point Bowie looked less like a cat and more like some sort of bizarre alien creature, long-legged and spectrally thin with skin stretched taught across her frame. We will see how Spooky develops over the coming months.