PHANTOM ANIMALS
by Daniel Cohen
From the demon cat said to stalk the U.S. Capitol building's ``confusing tangle of...winding passageways'' to the swarming ``rats of the Rhine,'' who take terrible vengeance on a man who ordered a peasant massacre, Cohen presents an array of animals who die but refuse to rest, or appear from nowhere only to vanish mysteriously. As always, his reports are drawn from folklore (``King of the Cats''), accounts of psychic investigators, newspaper articles (the Nottingham lion, the recent Chicago kangaroo), or regional ghost story compilations; he relates them calmly, and in an evenhanded manner. Cohen doesn't include source notes; nor does he claim that everything here can be substantiated—but if readers ``happen to believe the story while...reading it, so much the better.'' (Nonfiction. 10-13)