Halloween is supposed to scare you. It’s all malevolent witches, goblins, ghosts and shadowy beings haunting the void between the world of the living and the world of the dead. So how did adorable black cats get lumped in with all those ghastly ghouls? I mean, cats are notorious for sneaking into places where they are not supposed to be, but the underworld?
“It does seem like cats got a bad rap,” says Meghan Henning, PhD, a professor of Christian origins at the University of Dayton in Ohio. In fact, the story of how the black cat became one of Halloween’s most famous symbols is a dark and twisty tale that dates back to the holiday’s earliest origins and the cat’s penchant for getting in the middle of everything.
Read on to discover how the superstition started and what legend says about the black cat‘s connection to the spookiest day of the year.
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What do black cats symbolize?
“It depends on what culture you’re in,” says Henning. Many Asian cultures view cats (of any color) as a symbol of good fortune, while Welsh and Scottish folklore holds that the arrival of a black cat at your door brings good health and prosperity.
“In England, black cats were considered lucky because they were thought to be better hunters who could move around quickly in the dark,” says Henning. “But then black cats became associated with witchcraft and the devil, and it turned on them. If a black cat crossed your path, it meant bad luck was coming your way.”
How did these superstitions about black cats start?
It’s a long and complicated story. “For centuries, cats were a symbol of the sacred,” says Henning. “But then, through a bad confluence of events for the cats, things took a dark turn.” Here are some key moments on the black cat’s reputation roller coaster:
The sacred feline
In ancient Egypt, black cats were more than just beloved—they were worshipped. Bastet, the daughter of the sun god, Ra, was frequently depicted as a cat and was said to protect homes from evil spirits. In wealthy households, cats were treated as royalty, dressed in jewels and immortalized in paintings and statues. When the cats died, they were mummified in the hope that they would one day be reunited with their owner in the afterlife. And anyone who killed a cat was sentenced to death.
“Cats were seen as these divine, supernatural creatures,” says Henning.
A magic helper
We may have the ancient Greeks to thank for the black cat’s link to witchcraft. “In Greek mythology, we have Hecate, who’s the goddess of magic, and she has a cat,” says Henning. “The cat became Hecate’s familiar, helping her with her spells and her work as a witch.”
While Hecate is a relatively minor goddess, she played a big role in establishing cats’ reputation as mystical creatures.
The Celtic Cat-Sith
Black cats played a central role in the Celtic-pagan harvest festival called Samhain (pronounced SOW-in or SAH-win). Like an early version of Halloween, it was an evening of fearfulness and feasts, as the Celts believed it was the one night of the year when spirits could pass from the world of the dead back into the world of the living.
Some believed that spirits coming from the dark side would inhabit the bodies of black cats and steal souls. And legend had it that a Celtic creature called the Cat-Sith, said to resemble a large black cat with a white spot on its chest, was actually a witch transformed into a cat. Leaving a saucer of milk out for the Cat-Sith on Samhain would bring blessings over the year ahead. But anyone who didn’t offer milk to the Cat-Sith would be cursed.
“Over time, the tie between witches and black cats and Halloween starts to stick,” says Henning.
The Pope’s fateful degree
The real trouble didn’t start until the year 1233. “Shortly after Pope Gregory IX becomes pope, he puts out his first papal bull, ‘Vox in Rama,'” says Henning. “It was in response to a rumor that there were a whole bunch of Satan worshippers in Germany.”
At the time, the church was on a crusade to weed out heresy, and one of its most aggressive inquisitors, Konrad von Marburg, had reported back that Luciferians in Germany were worshipping the devil in various forms, including that of a demonic black cat. “The devil that’s supposedly being worshipped is a kind of shadowy half-man, half-cat figure, and there are stories of the witches kissing a black cat’s butt,” says Henning. “You can see how that stuck with people, right? And it leads to the widespread persecution of black cats, and other cats too.”
Although domestic cats aren’t even mentioned in the Bible (much less connected to Satan) and Marburg was later found to be torturing people to get the confessions he wanted, his outlandish allegations did their damage. “Some people say that cats were almost eliminated in Europe, and that’s part of what led to the spread of the bubonic plague—because there weren’t cats around to kill the mice,” says Henning. “It wasn’t a great time to be a cat.”
What is the black cat’s connection to witches, exactly?
As with that Greek myth about the goddess Hecate, witches were often said to employ black cats as “familiars”—companion animals who helped them with their witchcraft. The idea really took hold in European folklore during the Middle Ages. Some stories told of witches using black cats as messengers. Others had the witches disguising themselves as black cats to pass through society unrecognized. (They could reportedly accomplish the change only nine times, which may be the origin of the “nine lives” cat myth.)
“The tie between witches and black cats may be partly because of the respect that many pagan cults and witches had for plants and animals,” says Henning, “but there’s also, I think, a less obvious gendered connection there. Women who were accused of witchcraft were often caricatured as questioning authority because they had independent thoughts. And the cat is a symbol of independence and sometimes is characterized as being aloof. So the association is also a part of a gendered history of mischaracterizing women who display the same characteristics that we value in men.”
So how did black cats make the jump to becoming Halloween symbols?
“It’s not entirely clear,” says Henning, “though it seems they likely came along with the witches.” The origins of Halloween itself are a little murky. But there’s a well-documented overlap between pagan and Christian celebrations.
Originally called All Hallows’ Eve, it initially marked the day before All Saints’ Day, which the Catholic Church created as a way to honor the dead. But its timing—All Saints’ Day falls on Nov. 1, so All Hallows’ Eve is Oct. 31—meant it coincided with the pagan harvest festival Samhain. And it seems some of those traditions got blended in.
“People thought that on the night before All Saints’ Day, the barrier between the afterlife and this world was very thin,” says Henning, “so that saints would be especially likely to intercede in your life. But if saints could intercede, then so could demons and the devil, and then they added in witches, and the cats just came along too.”
Why did people believe that a black cat crossing your path brought bad luck?
As with the origins of other popular superstitions, it’s a little hard to say for sure. “But it’s probably the witches again,” says Henning.
Because people believed that witches could take the form of black cats, they feared being anywhere near one. “Black cats were associated with witchcraft and the devil, so no one wanted to be in their path because then you could be associated with those things too,” she says. And in the days when witches were being burned at the stake, no one wanted to take that chance.
Is there any truth to the superstitions?
Of course not! Anyone who’s ever owned a black cat knows that their magic is all for the good. Black cats are among the feline world’s most striking creatures—and some of the most cuddly.
Even better, some research suggests that black cats may have developed their dark fur not by chance but because it helps them live longer. (It offers camouflage, helps with heat regulation and maybe even increases their resistance to infection.) How’s that for luck?
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Sources:
- Meghan Henning, PhD, professor of Christian origins at the University of Dayton; interviewed, October 2025
- American Research Center in Egypt: “The Goddess Bastet and the Cult of Feline Deities in the Nile Delta”
- Folklore Scotland: “Cat Sith”
- HudsonAlpha Institute for Biotechnology: “New study finds animals with black skin, fur are not black by chance”
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