The old Vincennes morning Commercial, which made it a practice to reprint old ghost tales from the area, used to sometimes drawn on other newspapers to get them.

On Friday, Aug. 23, 1889, it recounted an eerie story involving Cato, the Witch, apparently taken from a Carmi, Ill., publication. It carried a Carmi, Aug. 20, dateline. A sub-headline called the tale "The story of an old crone who conjured spirits among Indian mounts and haunted her children after death."

The Carmi account said that the writer of the story was looking through the county records for a "queer bequest" when "an old gentleman bystander" related the Cato story.

The old man told the Carmi newsman that two miles south of Carmi near the Indian shoals, weird sounds used to be heard coming from the rocks that rise from the opposite river bank. There at the time, the man said, could be seen the remains of an old house. When he was a boy it was "occupied by a browned and wrinkled crone of perhaps 83 years. Her maiden name was Cato. She was known as 'Cato the Witch.'"

The old story teller said from the earliest time he knew Cato, she was a firm believer in ghosts. He said she frequently claimed that she could see the forms of dead Indians, who came back to visit the mounds.

The ghosts also called on Cato's kinfolks and hovered around her cabin in the twilight. According to the old story teller, the ghost brought messages from spiritland approving of the influence for good that she exercised over "her credulous neighbors."

The old man continued his story this way:

"She had raised a large family of boys who took to the wild ways of the woods that surrounded them. Recognizing no law beyond their will, they became a set of idle, wandering vagabonds, and the old crone was left to die alone, so far as her immediate family was concerned.

"When the time of her dissolution was drawing near, and being informed by the neighbors that her magic powers had deserted her, and that death, the inevitable and inexorable, was approaching, she intimated a desire to make a will. Her wishes were complied with, and though the document was informal and could not be admitted to probate, the latter clause impressed itself upon those present, and her wish was literally complied with.

"It was as follows: 'And, lastly, I desire that the lid of my coffin shall not be screwed down, and that my grave shall be only three feet deep from the surface, as I intend to appear before all my children and warn them of their evil ways.

"She was buried in a lonely spot which she has designated, near an unfrequented road, not far from the place where she had lived and died. It soon became deserted on account of the rumors of strange sounds and unearthly apparitions that greeted the ears and eyes of the belated travelers who happened to pass the place.

Her children, frightened by their mother's prediction, fled, and but a few of her descendants are to be found in this country."

The Carmi newspaper writer said that "with the exception of the old gentleman who related the above and two or three others, there are none who can point out the lonely grave of 'Old Cato, the Witch,' but there can still be plucked from the grassy mound where her cabin stood a few bunches of catnip, wormwood, horehound and tansy and other herbs which she used in the performance of her miracles."

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