THE CAT LADY OF BUSHWICK (1915)
Brownstone Detectives investigates the history of our clients’ homes.
The story you are about to read was composed from research conducted in the course of one of those investigations.
Do you know the history of YOUR house?
********************************************************************************************************************************
There is an old wives’ tale which tells us that cats steal the breath of humans.
They lie in wait until the human is deeply asleep before climbing upon the victim’s chest, leaning down closely to the mouth, and then slowly sucking the air out from the lungs of their victim.
When the next morning, a dead body is discovered, no visible suspects are to be found.
On a morning in January of 1915, at 1355 Dekalb Avenue, a night watchman by the name of William Heuermann, was returning home after a night’s work. Upon opening his bedroom door, and discovering his dead wife – he found plenty of suspects – 47 to be exact.
THE CAT LADY OF DEKALB
Angelina Heuermann was crazy about cats. Some would say that she was just plain crazy.
She was always “collecting them off the streets,” her fondness for the felines “frequently causing them to be dispossessed from houses where the presence of weird animals was undesirable.”
The neighbors knew about her quirk, but they chalked it up back then to an oddity rather than a sickness.
The number of cats that lived in and about the house, though, had grown suspiciously large of late, causing the neighbors to gossip amongst themselves regarding what exactly was going on in the house. While Angelina rarely left her home, her husband worked regularly and could be seen departing each night around 11 and returning every morning promptly at 8.
When he returned home on the morning of 18 January, though, he must have discovered a sight he was hoping not to find – but perhaps might have expected.
His wife was “lying pale and motionless on the bed,” while all around her “were cats of various sizes, and at her head crouched two big tomcats, who looked at Heuermann with blazing eyes and spat at him so viciously when he tried to examine his wife that the night watchman was frightened.”
THE POLICE ARE SUMMONED
Rushing out of the room, William summoned the police who came to investigate.
Upon entering the room Patrolman Hollman noticed that “there were at least forty-seven cats surrounding the bed of the woman. The two big tomcats were still on guard and they spat at the patrolman and acted so viciously that he was compelled to draw the night-stick and beat them off before he could find out what had happened to Mrs. Heuermann.”
What he discovered was that not only was she dead, but that “she had been dead for some time.”
Her manner of death, though, was what was “puzzling the police.”
When Ambulance Surgeon Donohue of the German Hospital examined her, he determined that she had died of “apoplexy,” an old word for a stroke.
THE GOSSIPING MOUNTS
What the police thought was the cause of death and what the ambulance surgeon considered the reason, were very different from what those in the neighborhood believed had happened.
They “were firmly convinced that the large cats were the cause of the woman’s strange death.”
The neighbors, in essence, believed that the cats either “sucked her breath or that she awoke from sleep and was so frightened when she saw the gleaming eyes of the cats that she had an apoplectic fit and died.”
The theory that the cats may have sucked her breath was “far from chimerical,” defended the Brooklyn Daily Eagle. “There are well authenticated cases of this kind,” the paper’s reporter went on to note, commenting on the many such situations regarding cats and the deaths of small children.
Either way, Mr. Heuermann would have a difficult time with the loss of his wife. The police noted that he was prostrated over her death.
He also must have had a difficult time ridding the house of the felines, including the overbearing odor they brought to the house, as when Patrolman Hollman first entered the room where Mrs. Heuermann lay dead, “the odor almost drove him back.”
“It smelled like one of the animal houses in the Prospect Park Zoo,” Hollman said, making the point that most people must have been thinking: “It was incomprehensible to me how human beings could have lived in such a fetid atmosphere.”
After he had fought off the two big cats, he said that other cats hid under the furniture and jumped out of windows all around him. The cats must have known that their days were numbered and were already beginning to find suitable alternative housing – or another catlady to take them in.
———————————————————————————————————————–
Brownstone Detectives is an historic property research agency. Our mission is to document and save the histories of our clients’ homes. From our research, we produce our celebrated House History Books and House History Reports. Contact us today to begin discovering the history of your home.
