Feline supernatural security agency

At a recent dinner we started talking about mumu (ghosts) and everyone had a story to make all the hairs on your head stand on end.

I may as well be bald because I don’t have any mumu stories other than the one that led to my exorcism when I was eight months old, and I don’t remember anything about that so technically it is pure hearsay. The only people who haunt me are the living.

Someone mentioned a certain vacation resort as being especially haunted—strange noises in the night, small objects disappearing, apparitions. These stories I found disturbing because I have stayed in that place a few times and noticed absolutely nothing. Although I had been warned about “sightings”, I slept like a baby and did not hear or see any protoplasm loitering about. I don’t deny the possibility of beings from another dimension straying into this one, but none have revealed themselves to me and I prefer it that way. This reality is worrisome enough without getting mixed up in otherworldly stuff.

Dense as I am at mumu-related matters, had I lived a few centuries earlier I might’ve been suspected of supernatural associations. Not for the big bruha hair or the maniacal laugh, but for the three cats in my household.  During the Middle Ages cats were thought to be the preferred companions of witches. Along with women accused of practicing witchcraft they were hauled before the Spanish Inquisition.

Thousands of them were burned at the stake. In the Malleus Maleficarum, a witch-hunting manual written by a 15th century Catholic inquisitor, there is an “actual example” of a man attacked by shape-shifters. The victim was chopping wood when he was allegedly pounced on by three cats who bit and scratched him. He drove them away by hitting them with sticks. An hour later the victim was arrested and thrown into a dungeon. No one would tell him why he’d been arrested, and the judge refused to grant him a hearing. When he was finally brought before the judge, he learned that he had been accused of beating three women with sticks. Apparently the three women had taken the form of cats. The man was set free and advised never to mention the incident again.

In those days cats were believed to be witches’ familiars: spirits in animal form that did the witches’ dirty work. Oddly, in Filipino folklore the familiars tend to be black dogs. Aswang and manananggal were believed to assume canine form.

One can almost understand why cats would be subject to these ridiculous suspicions—look into those big eyes, they seem to know something we don’t. If you live with cats you may have noticed their habit of staring at an empty spot on the wall as if they see something there. Sometimes they’ll stand on their hind legs and interact with some invisible visitor. It’s creepy when that happens.

Last December in Lancashire, England, engineers discovered the remains of a cat that had been walled up in a cottage. Four hundred years ago, a dozen people in nearby Pendle Hill had been tried for murder by witchcraft. Apparently the residents of the cottage had sought to protect themselves from witchcraft by sealing a cat inside a brick wall. Such was the people’s fear of cats. This happened two centuries before Edgar Allan Poe published The Black Cat and A Cask of Amontillado, stories that involve burials in brick.

This idiotic fear of cats had dire consequences for the human race.

The era of witch and cat persecution in Europe coincided with some of the most horrific plagues in history. These two events were connected all right, but ignorance and stupidity proved more deadly than some witch’s curse. The “Black Death” or bubonic plague in the 14th century killed about a quarter of the population of Europe. It was carried by flea-infested black rats, whose spread was unchecked because the idiots had exterminated the cats.

Happily, humans’ attitudes towards cats have changed in the last few centuries. Cats now compete with dogs for the Most Popular Pet title. There is even a Neil Gaiman story called “The Price” in which a scraggly black stray cat gets into vicious fights with some mysterious entity. It sits in the porch at night and in the morning it has new wounds. It turns out that the cat was guarding his human hosts from an unseen evil.

I suspect that my cats protect me from unseen nastiness, but they are too snooty to get into fights so they just snub the invisible visitors to death.