{"id":651961,"date":"2026-08-23T09:01:14","date_gmt":"2026-08-23T09:01:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/651961\/"},"modified":"2026-08-23T09:01:14","modified_gmt":"2026-08-23T09:01:14","slug":"whats-not-enjoyable-about-the-minor-panic-over-a-cat-in-the-hat-prowling-the-sunny-south-east","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/651961\/","title":{"rendered":"What’s not enjoyable about the minor panic over a Cat in the Hat prowling the sunny south-east?"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/p>\n

\n Stephen McDermott<\/p>\n

NOT EVERY PIECE of online misinformation begins as a lie; sometimes fake news starts as a joke that people take too seriously.<\/p>\n

Earlier this week, Irish social media users shared claims about a strange individual who was stalking housing estates in the south-east of the country after dark.<\/p>\n

His movements were captured in grainy nighttime pictures and supposed doorbell-camera stills, which showed him standing in driveways, walking on suburban streets and, in one case, hunkered on top of a person\u2019s car.<\/p>\n

The man was particularly distinctive because he was creepily dressed in a full Cat in the Hat costume.<\/p>\n

The alleged sightings were first reported on TikTok on Tuesday, when claims about the man appearing in Wexford and Waterford were accompanied by warnings to \u201clock your doors\u201d and the first images of him.<\/p>\n

New pictures appeared as others claimed to have spotted him in neighbouring counties.<\/p>\n

People began to question whether the reports were legitimate, with an increasing number of TikTok videos, Reddit threads and Facebook posts dedicated to the topic as the week progressed.<\/p>\n

This was part of the fun: watching people hover between disbelief and the irrational possibility that maybe there really was a six-foot Cat in the Hat peering through living room windows.<\/p>\n

A lot of the posts existed in a liminal space between joke and hoax, adding their own images while dismissing suggestions that they were generated by artificial intelligence.<\/p>\n

But as the images spread, it became clear that there was still enough credulity for people to genuinely believe the Cat in the Hat was prowling around the south-east of the country.<\/p>\n

The gag got so out of hand that garda\u00ed in Wexford felt the need to issue a statement on Facebook informing users that the whole thing was a hoax.<\/p>\n

The trend was mostly harmless fun, and I\u2019m not going to suck the life out of it by overthinking it.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m aware this comes across as strange from someone whose job involves factchecking things, but who doesn\u2019t appreciate a good prank when the stakes are low?<\/p>\n

In the words of Sigmund Freud: sometimes young people making stuff up on the internet for the lulz is just young people making stuff up on the internet for the lulz.<\/p>\n

The hoax did not target a vulnerable group, incite anyone against their neighbours or shepherd people into a cynical political worldview.<\/p>\n

Given the amount of crap and bile that exists on social media these days, there was something heartening about it all.<\/p>\n

It recalled a time, eons ago in internet years, when people could laugh at others being fooled online without it curdling into something worse.<\/p>\n

\"Cat
\n The Garda warning about the Cat in the Hat on Facbook Facebook<\/p>\n

Facebook<\/a>\n<\/p>\n

Were a cohort of internet users legitimately worried about a man dressed as a giant Cat in the Hat wandering around the south-east at night? Probably. Is that funny? Absolutely.<\/p>\n

Online pranks were a rite of passage for many people who grew up with the internet, but over-sincerity and warnings about misinformation have all but stolen that opportunity from Gen Z and Gen Alpha.<\/p>\n

The internet has also changed the mechanics of urban legends, another schoolyard ritual that has been somewhat ruined by the ubiquity of smartphones.<\/p>\n

In the pre-internet era, apocryphal stories like this involved someone insisting that their cousin\u2019s friend had seen something strange on their way home, or that an obscure celebrity had died in a car crash.<\/p>\n

Now you can just look up the facts in a matter of seconds; that\u2019s great for the truth and media literacy, but it\u2019s hard not to feel that a certain amount of imagination and divilment is lost without those kinds of harmless tall tales.<\/p>\n

The Cat in the Hat meme revived this kind of communal fabulation in Ireland, spreading like old urban legends handed down from one group to another.<\/p>\n

In June, TikTok accounts in the US began repurposing clips of Mike Myers from the 2003 live-action version of the Cat in the Hat to make him appear creepy.<\/p>\n

That was soon followed by images and videos, many generated by AI, showing the character stalking people in horror film-esque scenarios.<\/p>\n

The Irish version merely localised a meme that had already been circulating elsewhere.<\/p>\n

For a few days, it restored the old uncertainty that something ridiculous might be true because enough people were repeating it.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s not the first time that the internet has produced this type of viral joke.<\/p>\n

In 2016, social media was briefly obsessed with warnings about clowns appearing in public places in the US, a trend that was furthered by genuine instances of people dressing up creepily as a prank.<\/p>\n

Things are different now, of course.<\/p>\n

When garda\u00ed are reassuring people about reports of a man dressed as the Cat in the Hat, you know it\u2019s a very strange information environment that we\u2019ve managed to build for ourselves.<\/p>\n

But if young people can still find a way within that environment to trick their fellow internet users without any lasting consequences, I say let them at it.<\/p>\n

Now that online spaces are full of ragebait, scams and harmful misinformation, the Cat in the Hat hoax came as a salve in my social media feed.<\/p>\n

The kids are alright.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Stephen McDermott NOT EVERY PIECE of online misinformation begins as a lie; sometimes fake news starts as a…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":651962,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[75],"tags":[192249,18,117,275474,19,192250,17,9457,186860,3408,1114,275475,1150],"class_list":["post-651961","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment","tag-diary-of-a-man-on-the-internet","tag-eire","tag-entertainment","tag-hoax","tag-ie","tag-internet-diaries","tag-ireland","tag-misinformation","tag-pranks","tag-reddit","tag-social-media","tag-the-cat-in-the-hat","tag-tiktok"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@ie\/117144014476318301","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/651961","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=651961"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/651961\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/651962"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=651961"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=651961"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=651961"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}