The Black Cat

     In western culture black cats were considered  bad luck. People believed that meeting a black cat early in the morning or having a black cat turn its back on you and scaring or driving away a black cat from your property would bring bad luck to you. I found the origin of superstitions surrounding black cats being considered bad luck. The middle-ages in Europe that the black cat began to be associated with so-called witches. This belief was taken up a notch when  folklore involving a father and son in Lincolnshire in the 1560’s started making the rounds. The pair were said to have been traveling one moonless night when a black cat crossed their path and dove into a crawl space. Naturally, they did what any guys would do, they threw rocks at the furry feline until the helpless injured creature scurried out into a woman’s house, who at the time was suspected of being a witch.  The next day, the father and son came across the same woman and noticed she was limping and bruised and believed that to be more than just a coincidence. From that day on in Lincolnshire, it was thought that witches could turn into black cats at night. The belief of witches transforming themselves into black cats in order to prowl streets unobserved became a central belief in America during the Salem witch hunts. 

In many Asian countries, owing a black cat today is considered good luck. Specially in China, people believe  that a black cat can stabilize a house and avoid evil spirits. So a lot of people now start to have a black cat as a pet. When I was 10, my grandma used to tell me about the legend of the black cats. She said black cats are full of spirituality if you treat it good it will treat you the same way, if not you can wait to be full on evil day. As we know there are a big different between western culture’s zombie and Chinese’s zombie. There was a legend about if the black cat jump over some dead people’s body, they will come back as zombie. Because black cats eat ghost as food so if it close by the dead people, the black cats will bring this person’s ghost back and try to eat it. The black cats will take the initiative to avoid evil spirits, so if there are some very evil stuff where there a always black cat, people will mistakenly think that  the black cat bring  bad luck.