Chronicles of the Strange and Mysterious

by Chronicles of the Strange

  Puzzling Pumas, Curious Cats

  The tactical situation on Exmoor in the early summer of 1983 seemed to be fully extending Britain's crack military unit, the Royal Marines. Armed with high-powered rifles and the most up-to-date night sights, the men of 42 Commando were holed up in ditches or hunkered down behind walls and hedges. From time to time a cautious sortie would be made across the rocky pastures of the Exmoor upland. The troops were frustrated: for the second time in two months they had been fruitlessly engaged. Several of them thought they had seen the target in their night sights, but each time, the quarry had been out of range.

  The operation around Mr Eric Ley's farm at Drewstone had to go on, for this was the operation to hunt down the dreaded 'beast of Exmoor' - the beast that screamed in the night, displayed supernatural cunning in eluding its enemy, and was blamed for the deaths of nearly 100 sheep and lambs. A Marine officer said: 'The animal moves like soldiers themselves do, from cover to cover, and it rarely crosses open ground. It kills ruthlessly, ripping open its prey, and it can eat 35 lb of meat.'

  Those Marines who had seen something flash across their night sights were convinced that the animal was a large wild mongrel dog - some latter-day Hound of the Baskervilles. Others were sceptical. Mr Ley said: 'What kind of dog is it that screams in the night? My wife has heard it and so have the troops. It is like a nightmare that never ends.'

  The nightmare never has ended yet. The Marines have gone back to base, but something is still savaging the sheep and deer of Exmoor and Dartmoor, though less profligately than before.

  The beast has joined the gallery of large and strange cats, dogs, lions, pumas, cheetahs and leopards reported to be running wild in Britain. Nearly 1,000 people now claim to have seen the famous Surrey puma over the last twenty years, and have gone to the trouble of telling their stories to the police. Lions have been seen in Flintshire (now Clwyd), more pumas in Scotland, bears in Hampshire. This is the most pervasive example, in Britain, of the problem which faces the sceptical enquirer into mysteries. Can so many people, apparently intelligent and sane, be entirely mistaken?

  The Exmoor beast has some immaculate credentials. Trevor Beer, a local man and a trained naturalist, has seen it five times. Once, at close range, he saw it lope along a hedge before clearing it easily. It was dark coloured, cat-like and about 4 1/2 ft (1.3 m) long. The most distinctive feature was the greenish-yellow eyes. Wayne Adams, aged fourteen, holidaying on Halfcombe Common, was also struck by the eyes: 'I looked over a gate and saw the animal about ten yards away. It stared straight at me with bulging greeny eyes just like a lion. It was jet black apart from white markings down its head and chest and had a head like an alsatian dog, but it was bigger than any dog we've ever seen.'

  His companion, Marcus White, aged twelve, said: 'It moved like a cat but its face was like a dog's. There was no chance it was a dog. It was miles too big for that. I thought it was a panther.'

  Marine John Holton saw something at 5.30 on a May morning. 'It was very big, all black and looked very powerful. It was crossing a railway line, but there was a farmhouse in the background and it wasn't safe for me to shoot.'

  And so the sightings went on: school bus driver John Franks finds himself following a black beast with powerful legs and shoulders down a country lane; Mrs Doreen Lock sees it cross the road in front of her car, three miles from Drewstone Farm; taxi driver Wayne Hyde catches the beast in his headlights on Silcombe Hill: 'It had a cunning look in its eyes and very powerful shoulders.'

  Game park boss Philip Lashbrook, relying on his experience in the bush in South Africa, offers to track the beast.

  The Torrington Foot Beagles, assisted by police with a helicopter, spend all day scouring the moor around Drew-stone. But the beast eludes them all.

  The Chairman of the South Molton Farmers' Union is impressed by the violence of the kills. This thing kills and eats lambs like no dog or fox ever did. It eats wool and all and goes for the chops. It leaves the bone structure of the neck like you would leave a fishbone.' Another local farmer reports a cow killed, 'the skull crushed by one incredible snap of the jaws'.

  A beast of some description has been seen by reliable witnesses around Exmoor for at least twenty years. Police Constable John Duckworth of Tavistock saw the beast twice and collected eyewitness accounts of many other sightings. The first time he saw the animal was at Coxtorr in October 1969. He and his son had been flying a kite, but had got back into their car to warm up.

  Then, about 40 yards in front of them, they saw a strange animal coming towards them. 'It was about the size of a pony,' said Constable Duckworth, 'with a dog's head and ears, wolfhound head, and a short tail. It was slatish grey, with heavy shoulders and a smooth coat.' Three years later he was out shooting, also in October, about two and a half miles away from Coxtorr. The same, or a similar creature appeared, loping across some fields about 100 yards away. This time PC Duckworth had some binoculars with him and followed it until it disappeared over a wall.

  Sporadic reports of sightings continued until the Great Beast Hunt of 1983. Many described the beast as more cat-than dog-like. Indeed, a landowner from Stoke Gabriel, Mr Kingsley Newman, has seen a black panther-like creature at least five times - once at close quarters behind his house after he had loosed off a shotgun at two creatures in the dark.

  One leapt up on to the beam of an uncompleted building. In the light of his torch Mr Newman was reportedly transfixed by the cat's blazing red eyes. The animal's coat seemed blue-black and it had a long furry tail which lashed around until the beast leapt away.

  One man claimed to have shot a strange animal and buried it because he thought he might have committed some offence. Others have delayed reporting night sightings on the grounds that it might be a provocation to breathalyser custodians. There have been casts taken of awesomely large pug marks. But neither hide nor hair of the beast has fallen into the hands of its pursuers - not even a reasonable photograph. Yet still the farmers of Devon find sheep with their necks crushed, and the readers of the Devon newspapers report their close or distant encounters.

  There is no doubt that there are strange animals loose in Britain. There are wallabies in Derbyshire, feral porcupines in Devon, beavers and raccoons, and probably some Arctic foxes. Many animals were released when the 1976 British Animal Act introduced much stricter controls on the keeping of large and dangerous animals. Animal societies believe that at least two black leopards were turned loose at that time. And who would have been believed if they had reported seeing a fully-grown bear on a Hebridean island? Yet Hercules the bear, famous for his television commercials, lived quite happily for two weeks on Benbecula in 1980 after escaping from his owner.

  Evidence does turn up. Ted Noble, a farmer at Cannick near Loch Ness in the Scottish Highlands, repeatedly, over several months, saw his sheep savaged by what looked like a panther or leopard. His neighbour, Jessie Chisholm, had seen the animal only yards away when her hens suddenly started to clamour. By the hen run was a black cat, bigger than a labrador dog, with a thick tail longer than its body. Then a visitor to Mr Noble's farm brought in the carcass of a lamb: he said he had seen it dropped by a large cat as it jumped over a deer-proof forestry fence. The head of the lamb had been almost severed and there were deep puncture wounds on both sides of the chest.

  Mr Noble and his sister-in-law saw the animal several times, once even stalking one of his Shetland ponies. Finally, spurred by local derision, he constructed a trap. The bait was a sheep's head hung at the back of a disguised cage. One October morning in 1980 Mr Noble found the trap sprung. Inside was a full-grown female puma. Mr Noble's losses diminished and the puma went to the Highland Wildlife Park at Kincraig, where she lived happily for another four years. Ever since, there has been the strongest suspicion of a hoax. The puma turned out to be well fed to the point of obesity and positively friendly to humans. Yet who was hoaxing who? And where did the puma come from?

  Sightings of puma-like animals have continued
in the Highlands, as have rapacious killings of sheep and deer. At Dallas in Moray three very large black cats were shot which appear to be a large mutation of the Scottish wildcat. And in February 1985 another expert witness saw a strange animal in the Highlands. Mr Jimmy Milne is gamekeeper and ghillie on the Wester Elchies estate at Aberlour. Early one morning he saw an animal around 2 1/2 ft (75 cm) tall in a field on the estate. 'It was a massive beast with a black coat,' said Mr Milne. 'I've been a gamekeeper here for forty years and I have never seen an animal like it before.'

  There are vast areas with neither roads nor tracks in the Scottish Highlands, and some exotic and unexpected sights - eagles that have been trained to hawk against deer by local gamekeepers, sea eagles and polecats illicitly introduced to ancient habitats where they had long been extinct. If there is a place where a wild leopard might subsist, then it is in the great wild tracts and glens to the north and west of the Caledonian Canal.

  Least likely site would be the Hackney marshes in the East End of London, yet here, just after Christmas 1980, the police were occupied for three days hunting a wild bear. The story had all the marks of a hoax, reported as it was by a ten-year-old boy, Elliot Sanderson, and his two twelve-year-old friends, Darren Willoughby and Thomas Murray.

  They said they had met the bear out on the marshes and had seen it claw at trees before it made off. But the story had had a macabre prelude. Only three weeks earlier, the bodies of two bears had been found floating in the nearby River Lea. They were skinned and headless. But they were bears all the same, and had presumably been alive and in the area not long before. There were what looked like claw marks on the trees. Then there were the footprints. Yeti-watchers know how difficult it is to draw conclusions from footprints in the snow. They melt and grow larger in the sun. However, they are also hard to fake. The Hackney bear left very distinct bear-like footprints - four-clawed and meandering across the marshes. Mounted police, dog-handlers, police with rifles, all scoured the East End of London for three days before calling the hunt off.

  But the animal which has surely absorbed more of the British policeman's time than any other is the puma which has appeared now for more than twenty years in the back gardens, suburban roads, parks and woods of Surrey - or so many hundreds of people believe.

  Policemen themselves have been among the most assertive witnesses. Back in 1963, in the early days of the puma, an animal (in this case described as a cheetah) was seen by Mr David Back. It apparently jumped right over the bonnet of a pursuing police patrol car, thus precipitating a search, fruitless, like so many that were to follow, by 126 policemen, thirty soldiers and assorted officials.

  Just over the Surrey border in Hampshire, Police Constable Anthony Thomas was on patrol in Queen Elizabeth Park, Farnborough, when he had his encounter with the beast in June 1973.

  It was in the early hours of the morning, but the light was good. It stood about ten yards away from me. It was three or four times the size of a cat with a long tail and pointed ears. It definitely was not a dog or a fox. There were other officers in the park with me so I radioed for help. P.C. Martin King came to my assistance, but he came up from behind the animal. As he came through the undergrowth the animal fled, but he did get a look at it. I never believed all the stories about the Surrey puma before, but I certainly believe them now.

  The puma was already established in the Farnborough habitat. Mrs Heather Barber had seen it cross her path when she was cycling from the town's Queensmead shopping centre. Bricklayer John Bonnor had seen it walk from behind a pile of empty crates at the nearby Royal Aircraft Establishment in 1971. There were other sightings that year in Canterbury Road and Harbour Close.

  As it hangs out amongst some of the most expensive real estate in Britain, the Surrey puma has naturally had some distinguished witnesses. Maurice Gibb of the Bee Gees pop group saw it at his home in Esher in January 1985. He said, 'We were sitting around watching television, when the guard dogs suddenly tensed. I let them out and they were halfway across the lawn when they stopped dead and this huge shape sprang across the driveway and disappeared.' Mr Gibb had the large pug marks examined by experts from nearby Chessington Zoo. Their verdict was 'puma'.

  Lord Chelmsford's daughter, Philippa Thesiger, came across the creature at Hazelbridge Court, near Godalming, and waved a walking stick at it to chase it away.

  Mrs Christabel Arnold of Crondall, near Farnham, claims:

  I think I have been closer to this animal than anyone. I saw it face to face in Redlands Lane. I froze and we just looked at each other, then it spat all the time. It had marks like a cheetah on its face and was greyish browny beige with spots and stripes. Its back was deep red brown and massive at the back legs. It had a beautiful striped red brown and beigy white tipped tail. It had yellow slanted eyes, wire-like whiskers and tufted ears.

  Mrs Arnold's neighbouring farmers also saw signs of the cat. Mr Leonard Hobbs of Marsh Farm glimpsed it once in his car headlights and often heard strange screams at night. Mr Edward Blanks found the remains of a 90-lb (40-kilo) calf which had been dragged across three fields, and then a heifer was found badly clawed.

  The puma reports have waxed and waned over the years, and the animal's territory has spread over much of commuter-belt England. Mostly they refer to a black, panther-like creature, but Mrs Arnold, after her face-to-face encounter, spent some time looking at big cats in zoos, circuses or wherever they could be found, and was quite sure her animal couldn't be a puma. Her best guess was a lynx.

  Again, as on Exmoor, neither hide nor hair nor convincing photograph has appeared in more than twenty years. Yet 1,000 people have surely seen something outside their normal experience. Something has been making a gory mess of a lot of livestock.

  Author Di Francis, who has amassed a great deal of eyewitness evidence of sightings, believes there is a large unknown breed of British wildcat at large which has never been captured or classified, no doubt because of supernatural wiliness. The very variety of the descriptions (black and cat-like, striped, spotted, red-eyed, yellow-eyed, dog-like, tawny, huge-footed, lion-like) suggests that many different animals are involved.

  Pumas and lions do escape or are set free; domestic cats can grow to a daunting size, and they do go wild; any visitor to the annual Lambourn lurcher show in Berkshire knows that mongrel and cross dogs do come out in the most fearsome dimensions and colours. But it is hard to associate any of these phenomena with the skull-crushing, sheep-stealing beast which has confronted more than 1,000 of our fellow citizens with sufficient clarity and certainty to warrant an official report to the constabulary.

  Throughout Britain now the observers are out, the cameras ready and the traps set in the hope that the next animal that takes the bait will prove to be a genuinely wild big cat and not just a tubby puma that doesn't eat raw meat and likes being stroked.

  Tigers out of Time

  Photographs exist which are, in theory, impossible: they appear to show a Tasmanian tiger digging away energetically at the roots of a tree in the south-west of Western Australia. The distinctive rigid tail and the striped haunches are remarkably clear. The photographs have a natural quality, and the attitude of the animal seems full of vigour.

  Yet the Tasmanian tiger, or thylacine, the scientists claim, has not existed on the Australian mainland for at least 3,000 years. There has been no carbon-dated evidence more recent than that; the creature seems to have been unknown to the Aboriginals, and was not seen by any of the early settlers. It hung on only in Tasmania, where the question of its survival is a separate and intriguing mystery, since the last known tiger died in Hobart Zoo in 1936.

  No one would be amazed if evidence emerged that tigers have survived in Tasmania. But the idea of tigers on the mainland seems absurd. Undoubtedly there were once thylacines on mainland Australia and, indeed, stories of their survival were finally corroborated in 1966 when David Lowry found the skin of a thylacine in a cave on the Mundrabilia cattle station in Western Australia. It was lying
among the bones of other animals, including other thylacines, bats, snakes, rabbits, kangaroos, wombats and a Tasmanian devil. These bones were dated as thousands of years old. The thylacine, by contrast, was only partly decayed. Lowry said:

  The animal lay on its right side, with its head raised off the ground. The skin and hair were largely intact on the exposed surfaces and the characteristic dark bars were clearly visible. The soft tissue had decomposed. However, the tongue and left eyeball were clearly recognizable. The tail was some twelve inches away from the rest of the body, probably moved there by rats.

  Many zoologists found it difficult to believe that the corpse could have lain in such conditions in this state of preservation for thousands of years. The first crack in the wall of certainty had appeared. It then emerged that there were people who claimed to have seen mainland tigers, especially in South and Western Australia around the area of the Nullarbor Plain and in the bush that runs away to the south-west tip of the continent. Dr S.J. Paramanov, a scientist working at Warrego in New South Wales, saw what he believes was a Tasmanian tiger in 1949. A party of five people travelling across the Nullarbor on horseback saw a thylacine, they say, early one morning in May 1976. Mr Kuon Johnston said he clearly saw the stripes and that his group was close enough to distinguish the bull terrier-like head.