Why Americans Love the Chicago Rat Hole

Throughout January, people across Chicago ventured out to the neighborhood of Roscoe Village to stare at a sidewalk—and pay their respects to the impression of a rat indented in the concrete. Tourists and locals have been visiting the site and leaving offerings (coins, flowers, candles, cheese). Someone put up a historical plaque. One couple was engaged there; another married at the spot.

The initial crowds were the result of a single tweet that went viral (with an image of the rat-shaped hole filled with water). But as more and more photos of the rodent’s presumably accidental life-cast circulated, the sidewalk indentation became a unifying attraction and something of a playful pilgrimage site.

And it is quite funny-looking. Splayed out like Wile E. Coyote smashed into a wall, the “rat splat” is incredibly well defined and prompts many puzzling questions for a viewer: How did this get here? Did a rat attempt to make a snow angel in wet cement?

There was a time (ancient Rome, medieval Europe) when an out-of-the-ordinary, vaguely ominous thing—like the impression of a rat on a city road—would have been seen as an omen. Upon its discovery, soothsayers would’ve been summoned to interpret the meaning and declare whether the sign was sinister or propitious. As at the Chicago rat hole, an altar or shrine would have then been set up for pilgrims to offer dedications and make special requests. Romans took omens very seriously: They left archives of myriad portents, listed by date and with detailed interpretations, almost always ominous.

Are we so different from the ancient Romans, confronted by the eerie or inexplicable or bizarre? There’s something faintly disquieting about a rodent that mysteriously fell from the sky (there is no tree above the site of the splat), plopped into the wet cement, and disappeared, leaving only a ghostly outline of its body. Come to think of it, it evokes a crime scene—the chalk outline of a body on a sidewalk, never a good sign.

The questions pile up: Was it a rat or a squirrel? Does it matter? Rats are vermin, consistently placing near the top of lists of the least loved animals. Squirrels are also pests, but more endearing. So, would a falling rat be more ominous than a falling squirrel? Why did the rodent fall? Was it chased? Pushed? Just clumsy? Or unlucky? Was the impact fatal? If so, what happened to the corpse? If the rodent survived, how did it escape the quicksand of the wet cement? Could it be a sign? An omen? The human impulse to find meaning or some sort of message in an unusual occurrence is a strong, timeless, and often evolutionarily valuable tendency.

The Chicago rat hole calls to mind other modern marvels—instances of crowds seeing patterns or meaning, often suddenly, in everyday surroundings—including another recent pilgrimage site in cement in Chicago: a large stain made by salt runoff on a wall under the Kennedy Expressway. The stain was taken to be a miraculous image of the Virgin Mary in 2005 by devout Catholics who brought candles and flowers to the site. But it also inspired jokes about “Salt Stain Mary” and “the Viaduct Virgin,” and a play about “Our Lady of the Underpass,” described by the Chicago Reader in 2009 as both “hilarious” and “sometimes moving.”

Seeing sacred images of holy figures imprinted on commonplace items goes all the way back to medieval relics. The Veil of Veronica is a handkerchief, still stored at St. Peter’s Basilica, that was said to be stained with blood and sweat in the shape of the face of Jesus (collected, supposedly, after St. Veronica wiped his brow on the way to the crucifixion). It’s a similar story with the famous Shroud of Turin. Modern American examples include “Screen Door Jesus,” an impression that appeared on a backyard door of a house in a small Texas town in 1969. The image aroused religious fervor and attracted hordes of pilgrims and gawkers—the Beaumont Enterprise reported that 1,000 people visited it—but looking at the photos of the crowds and hoopla, one can see that not everyone took the image seriously. It was a spectacle, so it was worth witnessing, no matter what it meant.

Is a rat hole the same as an optical illusion deemed to be a holy image? Of course not. But it is universal, an image that can be immediately understood. That’s the best-case scenario for anything that goes viral on a large scale like this: We all know about rats. And, you don’t need to know anything except what a rat looks like to see a story (and mystery!) in the “rat splat.”

Plus, humans have always had an irresistible urge to seek out humor. Even the superstitious Romans made “pilgrimages” to view marvels and relics for amusement’s sake. Consider the tourist exhibits in ancient Sparta, which by Roman times had become a theme park of wonders and sideshows. Among the awesome displays advertised was the supposed actual egg laid by Leda, a Spartan queen who was, according to myth, impregnated by the god Zeus in the form of a swan, and from which hatched Helen of Troy. The gullible may have stood in awe, but sophisticated travelers scoffed and snickered at the big egg, obviously laid by an ordinary ostrich. Another must-see on every Roman tourist’s list was on the island of Rhodes, where one could gaze at a wine goblet said be cast from Helen of Troy’s perfect breast.

By the time of the Roman Empire, there were so many wonders to visit—for example, a gnarled olive tree “twisted by Heracles himself,” a rock with the hoofprint of Pegasus, or the pool where the goddess Hera renewed her virginity annually—that the professional travel writer Pausanias created a rating system for the sights. His judgments ranged from “you’ll gasp” and “very worthwhile” to “silly,” “utterly idiotic,” and “waste of time.” It’s fun to ponder what Roman sightseers would make of the revered rat hole today.

In the end, what makes the rat hole a marvel—its mystery, its sudden debut—is perhaps not so mysterious. The creature’s impression has apparently been emblazoned in that patch of sidewalk for years; it’s only new in that it went viral. Locals told the Chicago Sun Times that there used to be an oak tree nearby, which a rodent could have fallen from. Alternately, maybe some enterprising passersby saw a dead rodent nearby (roadkill?) and made the impression in wet cement themselves.

Whatever the reason, the rat hole’s elevation from sidewalk imprint to American wonder has been a delight and reprieve from the harsh daily onslaught of disturbing news from around the nation and world—and maybe, as Pausanias would say, “silly” and “utterly idiotic.” But certainly not a waste of time.