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<\/p>\nWritten by Mary Beth Breckenridge in Jan. 2015<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
AKRON, Ohio \u2014 The people who run Perkins Stone Mansion are used to things that go bump in the night.<\/p>\n
But things that dart into people\u2019s paths and brush against their legs are another matter.<\/p>\n
For about a year and a half, staff members and volunteers at the Summit County Historical Society have reported encountering what they believe is the ghost of a dark-colored cat in the reputedly haunted mansion just west of downtown.<\/p>\n
Sometimes they see a cat\u2019s form. Sometimes they hear a meow or a distinctive sneeze. One felt something brush against his leg during, of all things, a paranormal tour.<\/p>\n
They think they know who the mysterious resident is: the spirit of Simon Purrkins, a black cat who once prowled the mansion\u2019s grounds as the historical society\u2019s unofficial chief executive.<\/p>\n
The sightings started around June 2013, some eight months after Simon died. \u201cI just thought that was coincidental,\u201d said Leianne Neff Heppner, the society\u2019s executive director and one of the many humans Simon once held in thrall.<\/p>\n
That Simon would return makes perfect sense to her. He lived a big part of his life in the historical society\u2019s offices and on its grounds, from the time employees rescued him as a skittish kitten in 1998 until he moved East with his human family in 2009.<\/p>\n
\u201cHe was such a fixture on the property,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
Besides, the mansion is reputed to harbor visitors from the spiritual realm. Simon was a social cat who might have wanted company in the afterlife.<\/p>\n
Heppner has not crossed paths with Simon\u2019s spirit, but she\u2019s heard about enough experiences to give her pause.<\/p>\n
Volunteer coordinator Melinda Sedelmeyer\u2019s first encounter came this fall, as she was turning off the lights after a tour of the mansion \u2014 a home built for Col. Simon Perkins and a place his feline namesake once roamed. Sedelmeyer looked down and saw a cat, but in that first instant it didn\u2019t hit her as anything unusual because she\u2019s a cat owner. \u201cAnd then I realized I\u2019m at work,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
She turned to look again, and the cat was gone.<\/p>\n
A couple of weeks later she was going through the same lights-out routine when she heard meowing. She figured it was a volunteer teasing her, so she yelled to him to be quiet.<\/p>\n
He swore he hadn\u2019t made a sound.<\/p>\n
Sedelmeyer said she later almost fell trying to avoid the apparition when it shot past her in a doorway. And she said a motion-sensing alarm sometimes detects unexplained movement in a back bedroom that can\u2019t be entered without going through another room. Well, at least that\u2019s the way mortals have to get in.<\/p>\n
<3 Anna<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Or, Ghostly Kitty On The Prowl Black Cat’s Ghost Said to Prowl Haunted Mansion Written by Mary Beth Breckenridge in Jan. 2015 AKRON, Ohio \u2014 The people who run Perkins Stone Mansion are used to things that go bump in the night. But things that dart into people\u2019s paths and brush against their legs are […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"Black Cat Haunts Mansion","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[73],"tags":[74,529,577],"class_list":["post-2224","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-haunted-house","tag-ghost","tag-ghost-cat","tag-haunted-house"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","views":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2Wkl2-zS","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/annaabner.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2224","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/annaabner.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/annaabner.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/annaabner.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/annaabner.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2224"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/annaabner.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2224\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2272,"href":"https:\/\/annaabner.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2224\/revisions\/2272"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/annaabner.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2224"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/annaabner.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2224"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/annaabner.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2224"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}