Still, though, there must really be something in North Carolina that delights in mauling large dogs. Paul Jefferson (of starnewsonline.com) reported on December 12, 2007, that a monster that local residents had called the Beast of Bolivia had returned to wreak havoc on their pets.
Shelby Sellers returned from work at the Brunswick County Government Center to find Rosie, his three-year-old pit bull, mauled, with claw marks and wounds on its hindquarters and paws. The veterinarian assured Sellers that Rosie would survive, but she was more fortunate than his neighbors, who reported that their two puppies had been killed.
It appeared that the Beast of Bolivia who had terrorized the region in mid-September had returned. At that time, three dogs had been found mauled by an unknown predator in the area of Midway, Brown, and Gilbert Roads.
Area residents had been completely unsatisfied with the efforts of the county’s Animal Services department to identify the marauder. Some men came out to investigate the Beast’s track, scoop up some droppings and other specimens, but there was no announcement of the analysis of these clues.
Those who had lost their dogs to the mysterious creature agreed with local animal experts who had pronounced the mauling of the dogs to be the work of a cougar or an unusually large bobcat. Others speculated that a lion or a tiger had escaped from the Faircloth Zoo, and the managers just didn’t want to own up to their carelessness. The accusations against the zoo were silenced when authorities informed the citizenry that that particular zoo had been closed for 15 months and that all their animals had been shipped to other zoos.
In the meantime, attacks continued. While no one ever saw the Beast of Bolivia, some hunters theorized that the monster must have been a bear, judging from the size of the tracks.
On April 2, 2009, it appeared that the Beast was still roaming around North Carolina, but it must have become enraged when people began keeping their dogs inside. The Gilliam family of Lincoln County came out of their home on Sunday morning to discover that some clawed creature had ripped their 2004 Saturn Vue SUV to pieces.
To their astonishment, the vehicle that stood in their driveway was scarred with scratches, bite marks, and gaping holes. The Beast had ripped through fiberglass and caused thousands of dollars in damage. The monster had even destroyed the brakes of the SUV.
The most frightening thing of all to Holly Gilliam was that all that destruction had taken place while the family slept. None of them had heard a thing while an unknown, unidentifiable beast had demolished their car.
Although experts were called and pictures of the damages were taken, no one claimed to have seen anything quite like the scratches and bite marks on the SUV. One investigator suggested that a very large bobcat had taken out some kind of peeve on the automobile.
Whatever it was, it had left muddy cat-like paw prints on the hood.
Eight-year-old R. J. Gilliam said that he could not imagine that anything could trash their SUV with only its claws and teeth. And if it could do that to a machine of metal, what could it do to him? He promised Mario Roldan, News Channel 36, WCNC that he would stay alert and on the lookout.
In March 2009, Dorian Tunell and his eight-year-old son, Evan, were enjoying a pleasant bicycle ride in the woods near Tallman Mountain State Park in Rockland County, New York, when they sighted two very large black cats.
Tunell told his son to run to the road where the rock line was. Later, Evan said that he was so frightened of the two beasts that it was as if he were paralyzed.
Fortunately for the Tunells, the large black cats did not chase after them. Dorian Tunell said that the animals had bodies four or five feet long and had tails about three feet in length. Both of the cats stood about three feet tall.
Dorian Tunnel tells a frightening story of two huge black cats that chased after him and his son (art by Bill Oliver).
In Tunell’s opinion, the cats looked like jaguars, but with shiny black hair instead of spots. Later, father and son directed park rangers to the spot where they had seen the big cats. The rangers located what appeared to be large paw prints and the remains of a deer. The fact that the black panthers had just fed may have saved Dorian and Evan Tunell from being their dinner.
According to the park rangers, not long before the Tunell sighting, a woman had called to report seeing two big black cats running along the Palisades Parkway.
In the November 28, 2009 posting of his Cryptomundo website (www.cryptomundo.com), Loren Coleman listed a number of “Phantom Felids” that had been sighted in Belgium, Australia, the United Kingdom, Canada, and the United States. In each instance, the witnesses claimed to have been startled and frightened by seeing the image of a large cat, a creature that had no geographical right to be where it was.
Coleman makes an interesting point that the Eastern Cougar in North America has become a semi-mystical creature, such as Bigfoot is in other sections of the United States and Canada. Although the cougar once thrived in great numbers in Ontario, the last living member of that feline tribe was sighted in 1938. About the same time, the cougar was declared extinct in that part of Canada.
The problem is that no one got around to informing the cougars that they had become extinct in Ontario. Over the past decade, Coleman reports, a number of reported and confirmed sightings have forced many wildlife experts to ponder if they should reconsider and pronounce the cougar “endangered,” rather than extinct.
Phantom Black Cats have been sighted in Belgium, Australia, the United Kingdom, Canada, and the United States (art by Ricardo Pustanio).
If one is determined to collected samples of DNA through hair and scat, solid evidence can be found to support the 500 eye-witness accounts since 2002 that have been made by farmers who claim that cougars have been munching on their livestock or of hunters who swear that the big critter that they spotted in the forests was no deer or large dog.
In 2009, a black panther was reported on August 24 by hikers in the woods in the Meurthe-et-Moselle region of northeast France. Experts from the French Hunting and Wild Fauna Office found tracks that had been left by a very large cat, quite likely a panther.
Within a short period of time, more than a dozen sightings occurred of the black panther roaming throughout France. While some reports brought about jokes of too much wine or too lively an imagination, authorities found a sighting of the panther by a natural sciences teacher to be very credible.
By September, the mysterious, mercurial black panther had made its way to Belgium. On October 27, citizens of Luxemborg sighted the animal walking quite brazenly down the streets of a small community.
Luxemborg authorities took the reports seriously, sending out patrols with dog handlers and a police helicopter with a thermal camera. However, even such