Christ Church Cathedral’s Odd Cat and Rat
Mummified Cat & Rat
Christ Church Cathedral
Dublin, Ireland
submitted by UrbanDragon (Scott)
*click here (or the UrbanDragon tag below) to see Scott’s other great finds!
RoadsideWonder’s first “Irish Wonder” … Scott recently shared the famous mummified cat and rat on display at the historic Christ Church Cathedral in Dublin, Ireland.
The placard reads:
Possibly our most famous residents, our cat and rat were trapped in an organ pipe in the 1860s and became mummified.
They were made famous by James Joyce, when he writes in Finnegan’s Wake
” … as stuck as that cat and mouse in that tube of the Christchurch organ … “
Visit Atlas Obscura to learn what other oddities call the Christchurch Cathedral home.
Predictably, I am now very sad for that poor cat. I imagine it was a very slow and unhappy ending for him (her?), stuck in there. … As a side note, I also read the Atlas Obscura piece, and now I’m a little disconcerted that someone stole that 800-year-old mummified heart a few years back. What, precisely, is the market for 800-year-old mummified hearts, unless maybe its vampire needs it back!
I imagined how awful (and possibly slow) those deaths were.
I can’t imagine someone just waltzing in there and stealing a heart either …
What a huge rat, brings back memories of New York City!