Poe vs. eliminativism

You may recall the plot of Poe’s wonderful “The Black Cat.” The narrator begins as a happily married animal lover. But through alcoholism he becomes a wife-beater, and then perversely cuts out his cat’s eye with a knife, finally hanging the poor creature from a tree. That night his house burns down, and on the sole remaining wall there is the ghostly silhouette of a cat with a rope around its neck.

But not to worry… There is a perfectly natural explanation for this:

“When I first beheld this apparition –for I could scarcely regard it as less– my wonder and my terror were extreme. But at length reflection came to my aid. The cat, I remembered, had been hung in a garden adjacent to the house. Upon the alarm of fire, this garden had been immediately filled by the crowd– by some one of whom the animal must have been cut from the tree and thrown, through an open window, into my chamber. This had probably been done with the view of arousing me from sleep. The falling of other walls had compressed the victim of my cruelty into the substance of the freshly-spread plaster; the lime of which, with the flames, and the ammonia from the carcass, had then accomplished the portraiture as I saw it.”