Demon Cat of the Capitol

The U.S. Capitol has accumulated more than two centuries of stories, and the strangest is the Demon Cat. In its usual form, Capitol night watchmen and police meet an ordinary-looking black cat in the basement corridors, which swells as they watch until it is as large as a tiger – or an elephant – and then lunges and vanishes. Tellers say it appears before national calamities: Lincoln’s assassination, the stock market crash of 1929 and the assassination of John F. Kennedy in 1963.

The story’s traceable origin is a piece of journalism. In 1898 the Washington writer Rene Bache published an article in the Boston Evening Transcript calling the Capitol “probably the most thoroughly haunted” building in the world and describing a “feline spook” that grew to enormous size and had been terrifying people since 1862 – the year the Union Army used the building as barracks and a hospital, with more than a thousand cots in Statuary Hall. Demon-cat stories were a popular newspaper genre in the 1880s, and the Capitol, overrun by rats drawn to the bakery ovens that fed the troops, had plenty of real cats brought in to hunt them. In 1935 a Capitol policeman told the Washington Post he had fired at a large black cat.

The legend has one piece of physical evidence: a set of small paw prints set into the floor of the Small Senate Rotunda, near the entrance to the Old Supreme Court Chamber, alongside the letters “D.C.” scratched into the surface. The Architect of the Capitol agrees the prints are real but attributes them to the rat-catching cats that once lived in the building. A U.S. Capitol Historical Society guide has linked them to repairs after an 1898 gas explosion damaged that part of the Capitol, when a cat could easily have walked across fresh concrete.

The Capitol has other ghosts in its lore – a Civil War soldier in Statuary Hall, John Quincy Adams, who collapsed at his desk in 1848 and died in the building, a construction clerk killed by a collapsing arch, and Congressman William Taulbee, shot on a staircase in 1890. The Capitol Historical Society presents them as stories that open a door onto the real people who lived and died there, whether or not anyone believes in ghosts.

Watchmen and police are said to see a black cat that grows to enormous size, hisses or lunges and then disappears. The cat is said to appear before national tragedies or changes of administration. Paw prints in the floor are cited as evidence.

The basement corridors and crypt level of the Capitol and the Small Senate Rotunda near the Old Supreme Court Chamber, where the paw prints are. Sightings are always at night.

The Demon Cat (whose initials, fans like to note, are “D.C.”) is a Washington Halloween favourite, featured by National Geographic, the Architect of the Capitol’s own blog and countless ghost tours of Capitol Hill.