Did You Spot These Two Inconsistencies about the Demon Cat Story?

On July 4th I posted “The White House’s Basement Demon Cat That Foretells Disaster.” Afterward, I realized something I’d shared from my research couldn’t be true about the Demon Cat story. Then someone on Instagram posted a comment that pointed out another potential mistake.

Did you catch them too?

If not, I’m going to share them here. But I also thought, “This makes for a great Schooled By Ghosts kind of lesson in critical thinking. Let’s write a post about it.”

So, without further ado, let’s examine the inconsistencies of D.C.’s story.

1. Timing

The HuffPost Info

I shared the following information about Demon Cat from a HuffPost article:

“There is even reportedly a Demon Cat in the White House basement that is rarely seen. When it does appear, it is foretelling a national disaster. While the Demon Cat may at first look like a harmless kitten, it grows in size and evil the closer one gets. A White House guard saw it a week before the stock market crash of 1929 and it was also reportedly seen before Kennedy’s assassination in 1963.“

I added the emphasis on the Kennedy part. Keep that in mind during these next shares, which come from Wikipedia, and in which I also added emphasis to a couple of places.

Wikipedia Info 1

According to legend, the cat is seen before presidential elections and tragedies in Washington, D.C.,^[4] allegedly being spotted by White House security guards on the night before the assassinations of John F. Kennedy and Abraham Lincoln.^[5]

Wikipedia Info 2

The last official sighting of the alleged ghost was during the final days or aftermath of World War II in the 1940s.^[4] The U.S. Capitol Historical Society has stated that around this time, the Capitol Police force was notorious for hiring unqualified relatives and friends of Congressmen as favours, and that these men would frequently be drunk whilst on patrol.^[9]

Do you see it?

In the post I wrote, I included a section that detailed D.C. (Demon Cat) sightings. To recap, here are a few of the times D.C. has said to be spotted:

1. The night before Abraham Lincoln’s assassination.
2. The night before John F. Kennedy’s assassination.
3. At the end of World War II, which is also the last time anybody has claimed to have seen Demon Cat.

I compiled this list of sightings based on info gleaned from the HuffPost article and Wikipedia, but there’s an inconsistency, which I didn’t think about at the time I wrote my post. However, there it is in the list.

Did you catch it yet?

The Answer

Wikipedia says the last “official sighting” was around World War II. That’s about 20 years before JFK’s assassination.

Was the pre-assassination sighting “unofficial” then? Is it even documented anywhere? Or was it thrown in because it was an assassination too?

And what about James A. Garfield or William McKinley? Both were also presidential assassinations, yet so far I’ve found no mention of D.C. sightings before their deaths.

Hmm… Why? (There may be an explanation, which I’ll get to.)

2. Location

I titled my post “The White House’s Basement Demon Cat.” But is that location wrong?

Perhaps.

As @misterhalloweenart commented on the post photo I shared on Insta:

Cool post, but the Demon Cat was seen in the Capital building rather than the White House. Security guards there realized they could get a day off if they claimed to encounter it

True. Well, “true” in so far as the story goes about guards getting a day off if they claimed to have seen it. Also true, the first report of a D.C. sighting happened when Civil War soldiers stayed in the Capitol building in 1862.

However, as noted by The Haunted Hillside there are…

“…some inconsistencies with where exactly this cat resides. Some reports say that the black cat is one of the many ghosts that reside with the U.S. President in the White House, while many others argue that the cat can be seen roaming about in the many tunnels of the Capitol complex.”

Perhaps that’s why the Haunted Hillside titled their post “The Demon Cat of Washington D.C.” rather than try to pinpoint it to one area specifically?

Because surely if there is a demon cat, it could roam wherever it wanted, right?

How Light and Sound Affect the Grimalkin 

In re-researching the Demon Cat story I came across History, Art & Archives: United States House of Representatives (or H.A.A. for short) where they debunked the story of the Grimalkin, a.k.a. D.C. (Grimalkin, by the way, is an archaic name for cat/feline qualities, not a form of a Gremlin.)

They, too, felt it was a combo of drunk guards telling stories, but also a matter of shadow play and acoustics.

At one point, guards reported bands of cats roaming the Capitol in 1892. “At about 10 o’clock every night they begin a mad racing through the empty corridors,” a Detroit newspaper reported that year. Given the Capitol’s marble floors, stone walls, and long hallways the sounds made by the cats left a haunting impression. “The acoustic effects produced are astonishing,” the newspaper continued. “Let a single grimalkin lift up his voice in statuary hall, famous for its echoes, and the silence of the night is broken by a yell like that of a damned soul, as loud as a locomotive whistle.” The sound of echoing, shrieking cats throughout the building would likely have been enough to have unnerved anyone within earshot.

So I guess it’s not so much a matter of light and sound affecting the Grimalkin as much as it could contribute to the creation of its legend.

Does D.C. Only Appear Every 30-something Years?

Something else I spotted on H.A.A.’s site got me wondering about the timing of D.C. sightings. It might answer the question I had why no one reported seeing it prior to the assassinations of Garfield and McKinley.

But then, just as quickly, the grimalkin disappeared for decades; newspaper reports mention a sighting of the spectral feline in 1898, noting that it had been absent for 35 years.

Allegedly D.C. was spotted in 1929 before the Stock Market Crash. Not quite 35 years after the 1898 report, but close. 31.

The John F. Kennedy Assassination happened 34 years after the Stock Market crash.

The other two presidential assassinations didn’t happen during what I’m now thinking of as Demon Cat Decades, which, if the sightings can be trusted, come about every three to three and a half decades apart.

• James A. Garfield was shot on July 2, 1881. He died of his injuries on September 19, 1881.
• William McKinley was shot on September 6, 1901. He died of his injuries on September 14, 1881.

And if they are spaced out according to decades, there should have been one sometime in the mid to late 1990s.

It also means another is due sometime this decade, in the 2020s.

But What About the WWII Sighting?

Is Demon Cat a harbinger of doom like Mothman?

I don’t know.

Most of the accounts are attributed to negative events. Most of those were spaced out about 30 or so years.

Except for the World War II sighting.

It was 16 years from Stock Market Crash. The Kennedy Assassination sighting would come 18 years later.

The end of World War II would have been a historic, not ominous, event. Everyone was ready for it to be over.

Even Demon Cat? Was D.C. celebrating the end of the war or the opposite? Had he been feeding off all of the sadness, destruction and uncertainty? Was he upset it was ending?

Who knows. Because who even knows if any of the sightings really happened. All I know is that based on the sightings that have been reported, it’s the only Demon Cat story that doesn’t fit with the Decades’ theory.

But we could be due –or perhaps overdue– for a Demon Cat story. I’m keeping my ears and eyes open for any mentions of modern-day Demon Cat sightings.

Or perhaps you know of one? Use the Check-In to share it!

Sources:

http://www.thehauntedhillside.com/posts/the_demon_cat_of_washington_dc.html

https://history.house.gov/Blog/2019/October/10-29-Haunting-Debunked/

https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2018/10/31/feline-spook-capitol-how-demon-cat-became-washingtons-best-ghost-story/