My Fanged Feline Loves This Spooky Cat Gear—Yours Will Too | WIRED

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There’s a world of fluffy, cutesy-poo cat gear out there. The best cat furniture is designed to blend in with your home and look pleasing to the average person, so it tends to be neutral in style. But what if you are not a fan of cream and beige?

From Scooby Doo to Buffy the Vampire Slayer, my youngest daughter has always been into spooky stuff. She campaigned for a third cat for a solid year before we cracked and welcomed Rocket into the family. As her cat, he lives in her bedroom, so we had to get a bunch of new gear for him. Browsing through the options online, she was disappointed by how dull and samey everything was. But then we discovered Happy & Polly’s Gothic range, which will delight fans of Halloween.

Photograph: Simon Hill

The Happy & Polly Gothic Style Cat Tree is around three and a half feet tall with a plush cat bed up top, a couple of coffin-shaped platforms, and several cat scratching posts. The wide base is around 2.25 feet across at its widest, is finished with black wood veneer, and keeps the whole edifice stable. The coffin interiors provide a contrasting color to the black. We went for the classic red, but you can also go for purple, rose, or green. The final touch is a couple of dangly toys in the shape of hanging bats on elastic strings.

Rocket didn’t even wait for me to fully assemble the cat tree before he jumped on it and scratched the sisal rope posts. It was easy to assemble and fit nicely in my daughter’s small bedroom. Handily, the plush bed on top fits over a wooden platform, and you can remove it to machine wash. Rocket likes to sleep up top but sometimes lies in the coffin, too.

As a Russian Blue, the Gothic Cat Tree suits him perfectly. Before my daughter settled on Rocket as his name, Vlad was in the running, and he does have a snazzy Dracula cape. While Rocket loves the cat tree, our other two cats have steered clear, seeming to sense that this is his territory.

Happy & Polly offers some other spooky cat gear. We also tried the Gothic Style Cat Litter Mat ($20), a non-toxic PVC mat designed to trap stray pieces of litter. The mat is covered in ghosts (there's also a skull version) and is fairly effective, with a nonslip coating on the underside. You can shake it out or vacuum it to remove the litter it catches.

Photograph: Simon Hill

Our final spooky gadget from Happy & Polly was the Ghost Drinking Fountain. This ceramic drinking fountain holds 50 ounces of water and has a pump and filter. The top plate features a ghost, a wee gravestone, and a coffin. Once assembled, the water bubbles up out of the ghost in the center and pools on top of the ceramic plate. It’s not the best cat drinking fountain (my pick would be the Petkit Eversweet Solo 2), but it looks great and ensures Rocket has something to drink if he gets thirsty at night.

The Ghost Drinking Fountain is quite heavy, so there’s no danger of it being pushed around or toppled. I have seen all my cats drinking from it, but only Rocket climbs on top of it and splashes water everywhere. It has a short USB-A cable that you must plug into an adapter, and it does make a noise in operation. I measured around 35 decibels, but the pump gets louder when the water is running low. The ceramic is easy to clean, but you need to scrub it every week to stop it from becoming slimy, and you should change the filter once a month.

A variety of cat furniture is essential if you have feline friends, not to mention toys, litter boxes, and water fountains, but so much of what’s available is purely functional and bland in style. It’s great to see Happy & Polly catering to alternative tastes. Cats have always loomed large in Gothic fiction, and a spooky sense of style seems to suit them purr-fectly.