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Claim A says French kings personally lit the first black cat bonfire each year. Claim B says Puritans burned black cats on Shrove Tuesday to ward off curses. Claim B is true, and Claim A is completely made up.
The real story is far stranger than royal theater. In medieval France and Spain, black cats were seen as demonic familiars, shapeshifting witches, or outright incarnations of the devil himself. Communities didn't wait for a king's blessing — they organized their own ritual burnings as a form of collective, superstitious insurance.
This practice crossed the Atlantic with American Puritan settlers, who folded it into their own seasonal customs. Burning black cats on Shrove Tuesday or during autumn transition rituals was thought to prevent curses, bad luck, and even house fires in the year ahead.
What's chilling is how normalized this was. It wasn't a fringe practice or a rumor — it was a state-sanctioned tradition, openly performed at community gatherings rather than hidden away in secrecy.
This is also where our modern association between black cats and Halloween spookiness traces back to — not cute costumes, but centuries of genuine fear and violence directed at an innocent animal simply because of its coat color.
The monarchy angle just never happened. There's no historical record of French kings presiding over cat-burning ceremonies — the tradition was a grassroots, community-level superstition, not a royal spectacle.
Pretty grim stuff for a Tuesday — did you guess right, or did the royal twist have you fooled?
