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The 1970s Witchcraft Trial and Other Oddities in Witch History

Khalid Elhassan March 15, 2022 25 min

12. Collective Meowing and Witchcraft

Matthew Hopkins, Witchfinder general. Etching. Wellcome Images, The Wellcome Collection Gallery. Wikimedia Commons. Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license.

The pressure cooker of medieval convents led to a bizarre collective craze of mass meowing. One day, a nun started to meow like a cat. Back then cats were not viewed by Europeans as cute and cuddly pets, but as creatures associated with Satan, witches, and witchcraft. Soon, other nuns joined in and started to meow. Before long, the whole convent was meowing. It eventually became chorus-like, as all the nuns joined in collective caterwauling for several hours each day.

Understandably, the cacophony alarmed and upset the neighbors, particularly in light of cats’ association with the Devil and demonic possession and witchcraft. Please to stop were not heeded, so soldiers were eventually called in ordered to whip the meowing sisters into silence. That finally brought the mass hysteria outbreak to an end.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.