What people say
A bat in the house means death — or, in China, five bats represent the five blessings.Animals · 90 searches a month
Bat superstitions
A bat in the house means death — or, in China, five bats represent the five blessings.
When it actually starts
How old is this one
First recorded
Medieval Europe as ill omen; Chinese sources as good fortune
That makes it
about 726 years old
Rank by age
18 oldest of 40 dated here
Category
Animals
Searched
90 a month
Nocturnal, silent, mammalian and airborne at once — bats fit no obvious category, and things that fit no category attract unease across cultures.
Why it stuck. The Chinese reading runs on a pun rather than fear: the word for bat, fú, sounds like the word for good fortune, so bats appear on wedding textiles and porcelain.
What is going on
A single bat eats up to 1 200 mosquitoes an hour. The animal most feared in European tradition is among the most useful to have nearby.Where it applies. Feared across Europe, celebrated across China — the sharpest reversal of any omen in this set.
Recorded around the same time
Bat superstitions is the 18th oldest of the 40 dated superstitions here. Of those, 6 are younger than a century and 5 predate the common era.
First-recorded dates are the earliest documented appearance in written sources, not the earliest possible origin — an unrecorded practice can be older. How the dating works and where it is uncertain →