When we think of dangerous animals in Lancaster County’s past, our minds usually go to wolves, cougars, and venomous snakes lurking in the river hills. House cats rarely make the list. Small, familiar, and believed to be thoroughly domesticated, they seem among the least threatening creatures in the rural landscape. Yet in the spring of 1834, a shocking report from Martic Township suggested that even the most ordinary pets could become something far more sinister when left too long to the wild.
At the time, Martic Township was one of the older and more rugged parts of Lancaster County, a place of farms, creeks, hills, and working quarries. It was the sort of landscape where cultivated ground met broken terrain, and where abandoned industrial places could quickly be reclaimed by brush, shadow, and animals. One such place, an old stone quarry, had become the home of several ordinary house cats and their young. For three or four years, they had lived there beyond the reach of domestic life, and in that time, it was said, they had relapsed into a wild state and acquired the fierce predatory habits natural to their kind.
Then came the incident that made the story race through the county.
The story was serious enough to appear in the Lancaster Examiner on March 27, 1834, under the memorable headline, “Sheep killed by Cats.”
A flock belonging to Martin Herr was grazing in the vicinity when a full-grown sheep was seen being pursued by the feral cats. What followed sounded almost unbelievable. The animals overtook the sheep, dragged it down, and tore so savagely at its throat that before the witness could reach the scene, the poor creature had been fatally wounded. The sheep soon bled to death. Even then, the cats reportedly had to be driven off with considerable effort. The attack was so fierce that when a dog was later sent in pursuit of them and managed to catch one, the struggle became dangerous enough that the dog itself might have been killed had its owner not intervened.
As alarming as the attack on the sheep was, it was not the only troubling report connected to the quarry cats. Two days later, on March 29, The Columbia Spy claimed that the animals had, some time earlier, pursued a small boy and followed him a considerable distance. The account concluded with the chilling suggestion that they had done so with deadly intent.
Today, the old quarry is grown over, and the sheep-killing cats of Martic Township have long vanished. But the story remains one of the stranger animal tales ever reported from the region, a reminder that even the most domesticated creatures can take on a darker shape when they slip beyond human control.
Interestingly, this isn’t the only usual tale involving sheep here in Lancaster County. Another would lay the foundation for the Reading & Columbia Railroad to designate a stop as haunted when they established an East Hempfield Township station as “Spook House.”
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