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New museum opens in Salem honoring not witches, but their close companions: cats

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Katie Delaney

April 8, 2023

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            The City of Salem is a hot spot for museums: from the popular Peabody Essex Museum to the iconic Salem Witch Museum. But beyond the well-known destinations lies a treasure trove of more niche museums inspired by the city’s witchy history and iconic Halloween celebrations: The New England Pirate Museum, the International Monster Museum, and the Witch Dungeon Museum among them.

            A walk down Lafayette Street takes visitors to one of Salem’s newest indie museums, which honors not witches, but their pets. Visitors pass by a window covered in a rainbow of small paper cutouts of cat faces, indicating the entrance to the Salem Cat Museum.

            Though the museum is small—just one open room—it is still chock full of a wide variety of cat memorabilia that museum guests can enjoy.

            The museum features paintings, figurines, sculptures, and cards displaying cats of all shapes, sizes and colors. A Cat Library fills the back wall of the museum with rows and rows of cat-related books that people can read during their visit. The centerpiece of the museum is “Kung Fu Kitty” a 10-foot-long painting of a cat kicking mid-air by local artist Kameko Branchaud.

            The Salem Cat Museum is a pop-up museum founded by Wendy Casazza Scruton, displaying pieces from Wendy’s own collection of cat art and pieces from local artists. The museum opened on March 2 and will be open until the end of May.

As one can imagine, Wendy is a big cat person, and eventually her passion became her profession. “I always loved cats. Like I was always obsessed with them,” Wendy said.

            Before her full-time job became cats, Wendy was an engineer for 15 years, but her side hustle was putting outfits on her cats and posting pictures of them online. Her posts gained a lot of traction, more than Wendy ever expected.

            “It was making me so happy that I was like, I can maybe push this into a real job,” she said. She did just that. After attending CatCon in California, she realized it was possible and quit her job.

            She started making accessories and toys for cats and started her business Notso Kitty. For eight years she has done pop ups all around the country, selling her goods and meeting fellow cat creatives. That’s when her cat collection really began to grow.

“I just started collecting more and more and then I just started saying like, someday I'll just make all this a cat museum,” she said. “I was joking about it, and someone one day was like, why don't you apply to a program with that idea?”

            Wendy made her dream a reality with the help of the North Shore Community Development Coalition, which has a program where they lend spaces out to creative businesses for a three-month period.

The Salem Cat Museum gives back to the community that helped it get started. Admission is voluntary, and all the donation funds go to local nonprofits, like the North Shore Animal Shelter.

“Some things aren't here for the community. They're here for tourists. And I don't want that, I want to always be connected to the community in some way,” Wendy said.

            Wendy said that so far, people have been enjoying the experience. Friends Rebecca Zaharia and Margot Tortolani happened upon the museum on Caturday Saturday—as it’s called at the museum—and decided to check it out.

            Rebecca, a self-proclaimed cat lover, who has a cat tattoo on her arm, wanted to go in to take pictures with her film camera. She got a shot of the “Large Crazy Cat Lady Jar,” a white porcelain urn with a cat printed on the front. “I was thoroughly pleased and enjoyed my experience,” she said.

            Rebecca also checked out the Kitty Gift Shop, where she bought a bowtie for her cat. “I think [the museum] is a really cute little hole in the wall place to explore. It's very cozy,” Rebecca said.

            Margot was attracted to the table in the back, where she drew a face on a paper cat, to be displayed on the front window.

            “It was just really fun and interactive,” she said. “It has a lot of history and like different elements of cats in art from different decades and stuff, which I've never really considered before.”

            Wendy said that though Salem has many museums, the Cat Museum stands out. She said that for those who aren’t so interested in many of the darker and witchier attractions in Salem, “there should be other things for you” like the Cat Museum, which is lighter and more kid friendly.

            With the traction the museum has gotten so far, Wendy is hoping to expand and find a permanent space for the Cat Museum, beyond its three-month run.

            “This was the proof of concept to run, and it seems that the interest is there. People were like, oh, you must make this happen,” Wendy said. “The more I hear that kind of feedback, the more I get motivated to make this a permanent thing.”

            At first, Margot said “I was curious how much you could really do with cats being the sole focus of it, but there was more than I was expecting.” After exploring the museum, Margot said “an expansion would be really cool, to see how creative people can be with the same base to work from.”