The original “Cat Lady”?
An excerpt from my forthcoming title, Death of the Cat Lady
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I discovered that this unfortunate lady stepped off the northbound Housatonic Railroad train onto the platform at Gaylordsville Station in 1918 using her birth name, Mrs. Florence Chandler. Presenting herself initially as a cultivated middle-aged widow with a tragic, mysterious past, she arrived for a farm job and failed at that but stayed.
For a few years, she was blessed with sufficient resources to acquire a small plot of land and erect a cozy bungalow along a remote but historic road. She attracted a clowder of cats, which she lovingly called “the children of the mountain.” Indeed, the old lady often seemed to prefer their company to that of humans. The adult neighbors referred to her as “Old Mrs. Chandler.” Local kids called her “The Cat Lady.”
Over some years, her finances and resources diminished and crumpled, and her unpaid grocery bills and taxes accumulated. Still, for many years, she was “carried,” as they used to say, by members of the communities in Gaylordsville and South Kent and clandestinely by other anonymous benefactors.
Somehow, by the grace of these friends and neighbors, the Cat Lady on Chandler Road survived in her deteriorating tiny home as a pauper for two decades until October 23rd, 1941.
In a cruel coincidence, on this day in Eastern Europe, Romanian militia and Nazi death squads began the roundup and onslaught of nearly thirty thousand Ukrainian Jews, the genocidal Odesa massacres that marked the beginning of the Holocaust.
By then, at age seventy-nine, Florence Elizabeth Chandler Maybrick had lived pseudonymously a third of her life in Gaylordsville, a fearful old lady in destitute isolation.
That is, until the day before the news service reporter snapped an iconic image of her deathbed.
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Want to read more about Florence Maybrick? See my interview in CT Magazine here:
