The Japanese used them in their pagodas to protect important manuscripts from mice. Cats became associated with bad luck during the Middle Ages in Britain. Starving old women who wandered through the streets fed them. Years later, those same solitary old women became linked to the furor over black magic and their cats, thought to represent messengers from the devil, were burned. The fear of walking under ladders has logical roots, since in olden times a ladder represented the way up to the gallows.
People walking under ladders also expose themselves to the danger of objects falling from above.
For this reason, a similar fear of taking shelter in the eaves of buildings emerged. Breaking a mirror is another of the most widespread superstitions. Some believed that mirrors were able to reflect the soul and that if a mirror was broken, the spirit would suffer a similar fate. Stories about vampires note that they produced no reflection in mirrors because of their lack of a soul. The seven-year period of bad luck could have come from the length of the phases of change in human beings' biological cycle.