No Credible Threat: Hardin County Schools and Police Address the “Cat in the Hat” Trend
Superintendent Terrie Morgan appeared alongside the Elizabethtown and Radcliff police chiefs and the Hardin County sheriff in a joint September 3 message. Investigators found no credible threat, but Kentucky law treats these posts as felonies.
Hardin County Schools Superintendent Terrie Morgan opened her September 3 message to families the way most superintendents open the first weeks of a school year, by saying the year is off to a great start and students are engaged.
Then she got to the reason for the video.
“Unfortunately, we’ve had a few bumps in the road,” Morgan said. “There’s a social media trend called Cat in the Hat. It’s taken a wonderful Dr. Seuss character and turned it into a very distracting issue for our school district.”
What followed was unusual for a district communication. Morgan was joined in the same five and a half minute video by Elizabethtown Police Chief Jeremy Thompson, Hardin County Sheriff John Ward and Radcliff Police Chief Jeff Cross. Four agencies, one message.1
The headline finding: no threat
The most important sentence in the video is also the calmest one.
“While there have been no threats, it certainly is concerning and a distraction to our environment,” Morgan said.
That is worth reading carefully, because the video also describes posts that appear threatening. Both things are true. Investigators have found social media posts using AI-generated images of the character placed near schools, and they have not found a credible, actionable threat against any Hardin County school.
Morgan put the scale in perspective as well. “We know there are only a small handful of students who are making these posts,” she said. “However, it’s causing a huge distraction for our district.”
Chief Thompson added a detail specific to the local investigation.
“What we have learned so far is that we do believe it was originated out of state,” Thompson said, adding that Elizabethtown police are “working with our local and federal partners trying to establish the origin.”
He also wanted to be clear that distance does not mean disinterest. “We don’t want you to think that just because it seems this originated elsewhere, that we aren’t actively investigating this threat,” he said. “... When we find out where that is, if it’s within our jurisdiction, we will charge that individual with the fullest extent of the law.”
Where this actually came from
The trend did not start in an American school, and it did not start as a threat.
It started on August 18 in County Wexford, Ireland, when images circulated on Snapchat appearing to show a life-sized Cat in the Hat lurking outside houses at night. A worried parent posted to a local community forum asking whether anyone else had seen it.2 Within two days, the Gardaí, Ireland’s national police, had looked into it and confirmed the whole thing was fake. The images were AI-generated. As officers in Wexford put it, the Cat in the Hat “was not in your driveway while you were out.”3
It spread to the United Kingdom anyway. One video of the character approaching a doorbell camera drew 800,000 views.2 South Yorkshire Police eventually had to warn people that fake statements attributed to the police about the Cat were also circulating.3
When it crossed to the United States in late August, it changed.4 The overseas version was a ghost story. The American version started attaching real school names, real towns and real students’ first names to the pictures, with captions like “you’re next” and “I’m coming.”5
That mutation is the entire problem. The same picture is a Halloween joke in one country and a felony in Kentucky, and the only thing that changed is whether somebody typed a real school’s initials underneath it.
Kentucky has been hit hard
Kentucky districts first heard about the trend through a statewide message from the Kentucky Center for School Safety, and the response has been widespread.5
Assumption High School in Louisville closed August 31 after a post using threatening language and reopened the next day. Louisville Metro Police said they found no information indicating a credible threat.6 In Allen County, a task force identified a juvenile behind a TikTok account and that juvenile turned themselves in.7 Bourbon County increased law enforcement presence after a post paired the character with a middle school’s initials and the words “I’m coming.”8 Bullitt, Harrison, Fleming, Oldham and Campbell counties all responded.9
In Paducah, a Florida teenager was arrested over online threats aimed at McCracken County High School students, which is a reminder that “out of state” does not mean out of reach.10
What Kentucky law says
This is the part worth the attention of every parent and every teenager in the county.
Under Kentucky Revised Statute 508.078, terroristic threatening in the second degree covers two things. One is a threat, made by any means, to commit an act likely to result in death or serious physical injury with respect to a school function. The other is a false statement, including by electronic communication, that such an act is happening or will happen, made to cause an evacuation, cancel classes, or create fear of death or serious physical injury among students, parents or school personnel.11
Two details matter. First, the statute says outright that the threat does not have to name a specific person or a specific school to be a violation. Second, it is a Class D felony carrying one to five years.11
Radcliff Chief Cross said it about as plainly as it can be said.
“We’re not going to tolerate any of this nonsense and silliness about this, what you may think to be a joke or pranks ... You’re going to be charged whether you think you’re being funny or not,” Cross said.
Morgan made the same point from the school side. “Many students, unfortunately, have been arrested by making these threats,” she said. “And they all say, it was just a joke, I was just kidding. However, we do not take this as a joke.”
Across the country, that has already played out. A 14-year-old in Grand Junction, Colorado was arrested August 31.12 Four juveniles, ages 13 to 15, were arrested in Berwick, Louisiana.13 Students have been charged in Tennessee and Kansas.14, 15
What officials are asking families to do
The ask from all four Hardin County officials was the same, and it was simple: report it, do not repost it.
Sheriff Ward pointed families toward the school resource officers already in the buildings. “Not only do they protect the school, but they are mentors and friends to the students,” Ward said. “Parents, encourage your students to reach out to their school resource officers” if they know of anything that might cause harm.
Chief Thompson repeated it for students directly. “If you are in a school and you see videos like that, please make sure you bring it to the attention of faculty or staff. Find an SRO. Find some type of adult that you can report it to, so that we can then take over the investigative role.”
He thanked the people who already have. “We hope that you aren’t reluctant to report information in the future,” he said.
For parents talking to kids at home, the useful frame is the one the Irish police landed on two weeks ago: this began as a picture a computer made up. A frightening post is not automatically a real threat. It is also not automatically harmless, which is why it goes to an adult rather than into a group chat.
The bigger point
Morgan closed by widening the message past this one trend.
“While we are currently talking about the Cat in the Hat trend, please know that any social media trend that takes away from our learning opportunities and the feeling of our students’ safety is not acceptable,” she said.
“Be smart, think before you post, and make great decisions that will last you a lifetime.”
Get in the game: pick’em and fan polls are live
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Watch the message
Each official’s remarks, in the order they appear. Every player below opens at that person’s segment.
Superintendent Terrie Morgan
Elizabethtown Police Chief Jeremy Thompson
Hardin County Sheriff John Ward
Radcliff Police Chief Jeff Cross
Chief Thompson: how students should report it
The full message
Five minutes, thirty-eight seconds. The district posted the original publicly; this copy is hosted on the Hardin Local channel so it stays available alongside this article.1
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How we built this report
We want to be straight with you about how this article was made.
Hardin Local built this story using our own custom AI stack. We downloaded Hardin County Schools’ public September 3 message to families, transcribed all five and a half minutes of it on our own hardware, ran the transcript through a local corrections database for Hardin County names and places, and used AI to index and analyze the full record so that nothing said in that video got overlooked. The national and state context in this article was researched and sourced separately from published news reporting, Kentucky Revised Statute 508.078, and the Irish and British police statements that first debunked the images.
Then a person checked the work. Every quote in this article was checked against the source audio, and the passages the machine transcript rendered poorly were re-transcribed from isolated clips at higher accuracy settings and compared before anything was quoted. That step mattered here: the first-pass transcript reversed the meaning of one of Chief Thompson’s sentences, and the corrected line is the one you read above. A second, independent review pass then re-checked every quote and every name against the recording and the official statute text. Every speaker was confirmed against the district’s own on-screen name graphics before their name was attached to anything they said. Nothing was published on the strength of a machine transcript alone, and a human editor reviewed this article before it went live.
That process is not perfect, and we would rather tell you that than pretend otherwise. Chief Thompson’s statement that the posts appear to have originated out of state is his, given while an investigation is still open, and we have reported it as his statement rather than as an established finding.
We also made a deliberate choice not to show you the images. Every official in that video asked people to report these posts instead of spreading them, and republishing the pictures would work against the exact thing they asked for.
If you spot an inaccuracy, please tell us. Email [email protected]. We will check it against the recording and correct the record publicly. We would much rather be corrected than be wrong.
Here is why we are doing this the hard way. Local government and local institutions produce an enormous amount of public record: hours of meetings, hundreds of pages of staff reports, official messages that scroll past in a feed and vanish. Almost all of it is technically public and practically invisible. We are building tools that let a small local outlet read all of it, every week, and hand it back to you in plain language with the receipts attached. That kind of access has never really existed at the local level, and we think Hardin County deserves it.
That is what your free account pays for. Not a subscription, not a paywall, just your email and your attention, which is what lets us keep doing this. If this coverage was useful to you, the most helpful things you can do are share it with someone in Hardin County who should see it, tell us when we get something wrong, and tell us what you want us digging into next.
And truly, thank you for your help and your patience while we build this system. The whole point is to help citizens stay engaged and informed without having to watch hours of video to do it. A summary report is only the beginning. We will be creating much more.
Sources
- Hardin County Schools, “An Important Message from Hardin County Schools - September 3, 2026” (YouTube, posted by HCS Director of Community Relations John Wright).
- Know Your Meme, “Cat in the Hat Serial Killer Trend”: origin timeline, the Wexford forum post, and view counts.
- PetaPixel, “Photos of ‘Cat in the Hat Serial Killer’ Are AI-Generated, Police Say”, Aug. 24, 2026: Wexford gardaí and South Yorkshire Police statements.
- Newsweek, “How ‘Cat in the Hat’ Social Media Trend Has Led to School Lockdowns”: spread from Snapchat to X and TikTok.
- WDRB/WAVE, “Kentucky school districts on high alert after creepy ‘Cat in the Hat’ posts go viral”, Aug. 31, 2026.
- WAVE 3, “LMPD says no credible threat following ‘Cat in the Hat’ TikTok trend”, Aug. 31, 2026.
- WBKO, “UPDATE: Juvenile identified in ‘Cat in the Hat’ case”, Aug. 29, 2026.
- FOX 56, “‘I’m coming’: Cat in the Hat post sparks fear in Kentucky school”.
- LEX 18, “Schools, police respond to social media threats circulating across Kentucky”.
- Baltimore Sun / Sinclair, “‘Cat in the Hat’ threat trend sparks school lockdowns, police investigations”, Aug. 31, 2026.
- Kentucky Revised Statutes, KRS 508.078, Terroristic threatening in the second degree, effective July 15, 2024. Sentencing range for a Class D felony is set by KRS 532.060.
- KJCT, “What is the ‘Cat in the Hat’ trend? Grand Junction police explain after student’s arrest”, Sept. 3, 2026.
- KLFY, “Berwick police arrest four juveniles over Cat in the Hat TikTok trend”.
- WKRN, “Warren County, TN student arrested in ‘Cat in the Hat’ threat trend”.
- KWCH, “Hutchinson teenager charged in connection with ‘Cat in the Hat’ trend”, Sept. 1, 2026.
