The Cat That Won the Poet's Heart

One of the strangest burial stories is attributed to the funeral of the English poet Thomas Hardy in 1928.

Hardy lived to the age of 87. His body was cremated, and his ashes were interred in Poets' Corner in Westminster Abbey, next to Charles Dickens.

His heart, however, was cut out so that it might be buried in the grave of Hardy's beloved wife Emma in Dorset, but while the excised heart lay on a table, a cat dragged it off and ate it. In the end the cat was buried beside Emma, on the understanding that the heart was inside it.

The story appeared in the newspapers a few years after Hardy's death, and rather as an anecdote, so its veracity is, naturally, very much in question. Over a hundred years the legend has acquired a multitude of versions and embellishments: for instance, that the housemaid promptly strangled the cat, since they could hardly be expected to wait for its natural end some years hence.

Hardy's biographers, however, do refute the myth and maintain that there was no cat that ate the heart, and that the funeral proceeded in the usual manner.