Why We’re Obsessed With the Chicago Rat Hole

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Why We’re Obsessed With the Chicago Rat Hole—and the Romans Probably Would Have Been Too
The human impulse to find meaning in the unusual is timeless.
By Adrienne Mayor for slate.com

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.

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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.