Is a life-sized Cat in the Hat really lurking in people’s driveways and scaring teens?

The giant cat walked up to the door, staring into the doorbell camera before showing the homeowner a sheet of paper.

It had her daughter’s name on it.

‘Our camera captured this last night. What does it want with my daughter???’ the mum, who uploaded the footage to TikTok, asked.

Except, this didn’t happen. The footage, posted earlier this week, is one of a wave of social media videos of a shadowy person wearing a life-sized Cat in the Hat costume.

But experts and police have told Metro that, no, the Cat in the Hat is not in your driveway. These posts are all AI-generated.

The Cat in the Hat is the floppy-hatted hero dreamt up by the zany children’s book writer, Dr Seuss, often leading children on adventures.

In these videos, however, he’s doing anything but. In posts, some seen by millions, the character is shown stalking people, lurking in driveways and breaking into homes, among other illegal acts.

Images of the feline were first posted on Facebook earlier this month, with users claiming it was prowling Limerick, a city in western Ireland.

More ‘sightings’ were then reported in Glanmire, Cork; Cahir, Tipperary; Curracloe, Wexford, and Broadford Park in Dublin.

Soon enough, hundreds of TikTok users were uploading clips or photos of the Cat in the Hat across the UK, even making accounts in his name.

‘Just arrived in Conwy. Make sure your doors are unlocked and keep an eye out,’ the ‘real cat in the hat’, as the user put it, said in one post last week.

Some have shared lists of names he’s ‘coming for tonight’ or warn that the cat is ‘coming’ to where they live in only days.

Some users have spread fake news reports about the figure.

A few ‘cat in the hat official’ accounts have shared AI clips of themselves in police standoffs and being walked off in handcuffs.

Who’s inside the costume, though? According to users, it’s Mike Myers, who played the character in the 2003 The Cat in the Hat film.

Fuelling those claims is a now-viral X post by the pop culture news account DiscussingFilm, saying the costume is being auctioned off.

However, the costume hasn’t been sold yet – the auction is tomorrow.

Teens are convinced the Cat in the Hat is stalking them

As tongue-in-cheek as these posts are (more than you’d expect, are of him dancing to Beyoncé) the posts have convinced some teens that the Cat in the Hat really is coming for them.

‘I was having a sleepover, but everyone started watching Cat in the Hat videos. It was 3am. I wanted to go home,’ Skye, 16, told the BBC.

‘When I started walking down my friends’ driveway, I got totally freaked out that the Cat in the Hat was going to jump out. I had to call my mum to pick me up.’

Metro asked NordVPN, a cyber security company, to run a sample of the posts through its AI image detection tool, NordBot. It found they were all generated by AI.

South Yorkshire Police even had to comment on the bizarre trend after users shared a fabricated statement attributed to them, saying the creepy cat had been seen in Meadowhall.

People even approached officers on Saturday to discuss the videos.

‘To confirm, we have not had any reports of a cat in a hat in Meadowhall, or anywhere else in South Yorkshire for that matter,’ the force told Metro.

‘We can also confirm no recent sightings of his associates Thing One and Thing Two,’ referring to the Cat in the Hat’s goofy sidekicks.

‘The cat is not out of the hat on this one… we don’t have a new account or a new logo. Please don’t believe everything you read on social media.’

Naomi Owusu, the co-founder of the digital publishing platform Tickaroo, isn’t surprised by any of this.

‘AI-generated content is becoming harder to distinguish from reality,’ she tells Metro.

‘The obvious tells – strange hands, unnatural movement, distorted faces -are becoming less reliable as the technology improves.

‘AI can also deliberately reproduce the imperfections that make something feel authentic, while a short clip shared without its original context gives people very little to work with.’

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