Add Mayor Whiskers & Captain Whitaker back into game?

Oh yep that's another bug! [CD] Captain Whitaker is no longer a ghost | EA Forums - 11969753

Someone in that thread said he needs to be an elder before the game will let him be a ghost again, dogs are only allowed to die of old age

thank you for a vanilla solution! it has helped me finally figure out this bs
i ended up making a family, moving them in, deleting the adult with MCCC and then evicting the single pet household from the lot releasing them into the households as a single pet

EDIT: actually this only seemed to work for Mayor Whiskers, Captain unghosts :|
and idk how to Re-ghost him

I usually just add them straight into a family who I think would want to adopt them! But to get them back to single-pet households, here's my slightly unhinged workaround:

1. In CAS, add each pet to single-sim households with random sim who you don't care about. Move them into "other households"
2. Configure custom Neighborhood Stories for those two households. Enable only "Die In Accidents". (This affects the sims, not the pets.)
3. Disable default Neighborhood Stories for everyone else, so only your two test households are running stories. Wait a night or two for the sims to be... "sacrificed"
4. Once the sims are gone the pets will be single and homeless once more! Then you can reset your Neighborhood Stories however you like :)

You could also just add the pets to elder households where the sims will die off soon without having to mess with Neighborhood Stories, but then you'd have to deal with all the other sims aging too.

Hopefully someone else has a simpler solution than this!