Kind woman lives here
A cat drawn in chalk, reported to mean that a kind-hearted woman lived in the house.
Meaning
Dan Beard, who collected tramp signs for his American Boys’ Book of Signs, Signals and Symbols (1918), wrote that “a rude representation of a cat” marked the home of a kind-hearted woman. The National Cryptologic Museum’s sample sheet of hobo signs draws a seated cat for “Kind lady lives here”, and gives a separate sign for “Kind lady here, tell a sad story”. The idea crossed the Atlantic in a story American papers printed in 1928 and 1929: a French vagrant arrested by gendarmes carried slips of paper with the signs by which French hobos recognised “a charitable lady’s home or a menacing dog kennel”.
Origin and history
Beard said he picked the signs up one by one and checked them as the chance came. He was not writing for tramps: he published the signs for Boy Scouts and householders, to rob them of their secrecy.
Did hobos really draw it?
No one has shown a cat drawn by a hobo on a real house. Josiah Flynt, who travelled as a tramp to study tramps, wrote in 1900 that the signs and marks the public believed in were “a fabrication so far as the majority of roadsters are concerned”, though a few small groups of vagrants had “a crude system of marking ‘good’ houses”, used now and then. The hub page sets out who believed in the signs and who did not.
Read next
- Next in Hobo symbolsFood given hereA circle with a cross inside, reported in 1907 to mean that food was given at the house.
- The same shape in Chinese mythology and symbolsGuardian lions (foo dogs)A pair of stone or bronze lions guarding a gate in China: the male with a paw on a ball, the female with a paw on a cub. In English they are often called foo dogs or fu dogs, but they are lions.
See also
Care if you are sick, Religious talk for a meal, Gentleman lives here, Dog here, Keep quiet, Judge lives here.
Sources
- The American Boys’ Book of Signs, Signals and Symbols, Dan Beard, J. B. Lippincott, Philadelphia, 1918 (Cornell scan on the Internet Archive), Internet Archive, ch. VII, fig. 70
- Sample of Some Hobo Signs, National Cryptologic Museum, exhibit sheet (hobo-signs-definitions.pdf), National Security Agency, page 1
- French hobo signs (syndicated report), The Weekly Gazette (East Hartford, Conn.), 8 February 1929, page 8, Library of Congress, Chronicling America
- Notes of an Itinerant Policeman, Josiah Flynt, L. C. Page, Boston, 1900, Project Gutenberg, ch. II, The Tramp and the Railroads
The same shape elsewhere
Browse symbols formed from circles or curves and waves.
Researched, edited and approved by Rory Hansen before publishing. Last reviewed October 9, 2026. How we research
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