I have questions.
Mostly because I can picture a horse doing a lot of things it probably shouldn’t be doing.
Opening a gate? Sure.
Getting into the grain? Absolutely.
Standing somewhere looking completely innocent while you try to figure out what it just destroyed? That seems entirely believable.
But climbing a ladder?
That one sent me down a rabbit hole.
It started with a tiny newspaper story from 1897 about a missing horse, a hayloft and one very confused farmer.
And, strangely enough, the farther I went, the less ridiculous the story became.
First, We Need to Find the Horse
On December 11, 1897, the New York Journal and Advertiser ran a little story under the wonderfully direct headline:
“Horse Climbed a Ladder?”
According to the paper, Michael Carrigan of Pittman Grove, New Jersey, went out one morning to feed his favorite horse.
No horse.
Carrigan searched for several hours before eventually returning to his barn.
And there was the missing animal.
Not out wandering the countryside.
Not stolen.
Not even particularly concerned about the commotion it had apparently caused.
The horse was up in the hay mow eating Carrigan’s summer supply of hay. Honestly, from the horse’s point of view, this may have been a very successful morning. There was only one problem.
How did it get up there?
The newspaper said the only apparent route to the hay mow was a ladder.
And apparently people realized how this story sounded even in 1897, because the newspaper went out of its way to say the tale was supported by several local citizens who had, as it put it, “never been known to stray from the path of truth.”
Well.
Glad we cleared that up.
Then Came the Circus
Carrigan later discovered something interesting about his horse. It had reportedly been a circus trick horse.
The newspaper offered that as a possible explanation. Maybe ladder climbing was simply another trick the horse had learned during its show-business days.
My first reaction was roughly: Oh, come on.
So I went looking.
Were circus horses actually trained to do anything remotely like this?
Turns out, yes.
Not necessarily this exact thing, which is important. I have not found convincing evidence that horses routinely scampered up ordinary barn ladders as a circus act.
But trick horses were doing some astonishing things long before Carrigan lost track of his.
Circus Horses Really Were Taught to Climb
One of the best examples I found dates all the way back to 1839.
A trained horse appearing with the Liphard circus troupe in Europe performed a list of tricks that included ascending stairs, retrieving a live carp from water, picking small objects off the ground and responding to voice commands.
So by the time our hay-eating fugitive appeared in 1897, teaching a horse to go upward onto man-made structures wasn’t some brand-new idea.
And circus horses of Carrigan’s era could do much more than trot prettily around a ring.
Ringling Bros.’ own 1897 route book describes trained horses that would kneel and bow, waltz, dance quadrille figures and change their gaits in time with music.
One horse named Mizpah had even been taught to retrieve objects like a dog.
These weren’t horses wandering around a ring while somebody waved a sparkly hat.
They were genuinely trained animals responding to cues and performing learned behaviors.
Suddenly Carrigan’s former circus horse becomes a little more interesting.
But Could a Horse Actually Get Into a Hayloft?
Apparently horses getting themselves into places where horses have absolutely no business being is not confined to Victorian newspapers.
The New Hampshire SPCA has discussed large-animal rescues involving horses that have tried to climb stairs to haylofts and become trapped.
So the basic idea of a horse looking upward and thinking, Yes, I believe I’ll go there, is apparently not impossible.
Actual stairs are one thing, though.
A true ladder with narrow individual rungs is another.
Modern horse-safety guidance treats loft ladders as something horses should be kept away from, and I couldn’t find reliable documentation showing that climbing a standard human ladder was a normal horse trick.
Which leaves us with a problem.
Or, depending on your point of view, a much better story.
So Did This Horse Really Climb the Ladder?
We don’t know.
Nobody in the 1897 article claimed to have watched it happen.
All we really have is this:
A horse disappeared.
Several hours later, it was discovered in the hayloft eating hay.
The newspaper said the ladder was the only apparent way up.
The horse turned out to have formerly been a circus trick horse.
And we know from other historical evidence that circus horses really were taught unusually complicated behaviors, including climbing stairs.
That’s as far as I can responsibly take it.
But I will say this.
I started this rabbit hole expecting to discover that the circus-horse explanation was pure newspaper silliness.
Instead, I ended up finding trained horses climbing stairs, bowing, waltzing, retrieving objects and following subtle commands.
So did Michael Carrigan’s horse actually climb that ladder in 1897?
I still don’t know.
But I’m no longer willing to bet against the horse.
Especially when there was an entire hayloft buffet waiting at the top.