Why Black Cats Got a Bad Reputation (And Why It's Not Fair)

Black cats and witchcraft have been linked in Western popular imagination for centuries, and the association is worth taking apart, because the actual history is both flimsier and more regionally inconsistent than the stereotype suggests.

Where the association started

Cats generally — and black cats specifically — got tangled up with witchcraft accusations during the medieval and early modern European witch-trial era, when a cat kept as a pet (an unremarkable, common thing) could be reframed by an accuser as a "familiar spirit" serving a supposed witch. Popular retellings often point to a 13th-century papal document, Vox in Rama (1233), as linking black cats specifically to devil worship — though historians debate how much real influence that single document had on the folk superstition that followed, versus the superstition developing more gradually through general witch-trial paranoia. Either way, there was never good evidence behind any of it — it was accusation and folklore, not observed fact.

You'll also sometimes see the claim that killing black cats worsened the spread of plague-carrying rats in medieval Europe. That's a popular, appealingly ironic story, but it's disputed among historians as an oversimplification of much more complicated plague transmission and animal-population dynamics — worth repeating cautiously, not as settled fact.

The regional inconsistency that gives the game away

If black cats were actually, universally unlucky, you'd expect that belief to hold up across cultures. It doesn't. In Britain and Ireland, a black cat crossing your path is traditionally considered good luck. In Japan, black cats are associated with good fortune, particularly for single women. It's really only in the United States and parts of continental Europe that the "unlucky black cat" version took hold and stuck. A superstition that flips to its opposite meaning depending on which side of a border you're standing on is a strong sign you're looking at folklore, not any kind of real pattern.

The real-world cost of the stereotype

This isn't just a harmless bit of folklore trivia — animal shelters consistently report that black cats are adopted at lower rates and euthanized at higher rates than cats of other colors, and many shelters pause or restrict black cat adoptions specifically around Halloween out of concern about impulsive decor-driven adoption or, worse, ritual harm by bad-faith adopters. If you're drawn to black cats (plenty of witches genuinely are, stereotype notwithstanding), the respectful move is adopting one as a full commitment, any time of year — not picking one up as a seasonal prop.