I was reminded by my old Day Books about a woman who was living in the counttryside in the north of England and while out walking her dog on a dark evening stopped to let a car go by and as it did so the headlights illuminated a very large black cat sat on a wall she usually walked past.
"I don't mean a big domestic either -this thing was bigger than my dog which is on the larger size of medium dogs!" During daylight the lady, who the police checked on and told me she was known as a straight forward sensible type, checked the area in question and there was no doubt that it was large and from her description likely a leopard.
A few days later I was asked to contact the lady who had seen the same or similar cat nearer to her home. Where she lived she considered her "dream property" but the cat had shaken her. A third sighting and that was it. She discovered how wide spreadreports were and if she moved anywhere in England there might be a large cat. Apparently she had never taken "silly cat" stories seriously and her whole world view had been shattered that these cats were living in England.
Eventually the lady moved to Ireland and a nice country area that she was enjoying. Until... one evening I got a phone call "Do these bloody things follow you?!" she asked. I told her that she might have seen some other animal and her memories of the cat in England made up the rest. It seems that she had been with a new neighbour in fairly good and close up viewing conditions so the likelihood of a mistake was very low. The neighbourt told her the cat was seen occasionally by locals.
Not sure whether she moved again or simply accepted the fact that the cats were around.
I do recall another series of sightings in Nottinghamshire when a land owner told me that she ran the land as a wildlife reserve and had several times sighted a "very big" black cat casually moving through. It had never shown any aggression but she was concerned as she had volunteer workers and had no idea what to tell them. We corresponded by mail and spoke a couple times by phone
About a month later I received a phone call and had to convince the caller that all information was private. Assured, he started telling me about a little nature reserve he helped maintain and that the woman who ran it lived on site and he was worried as he had seen a huge black cat moving through one day. It was the same woman I had been in touch with so got them to both chat to each other!
Probably the oddest coincidence that helped confirm reports from one area in Wiltshire started after a local newspaper gave out my phone number.
A woman who was a teacher in the area told me about the fact that her village was supposed to have had 2big cat" sightings. She said that she felt silly telling me as she was not really a believer in urban legends but thought the info might be useful to me.
A couple of days later I had another phone call from a man who did not want me laughing at him but he wanted to just let me know that he was driving into the village and slowed down as "there's this nutty old lady lives in the farmhouse at a turning and she often walks about with an old pitchfork" The man described his cat in detail as it just slowly sauntered across the road in the evening sunlight. A puma.
I never let on that I had already had someone tyell me about sightings in the area as the information was confidential. I did tell him that someone in the past had reported seeing a similar cat and that was it.
A week later a much older woman with a very strong Wiltshire accent contacted me after her son urged her to as he thought she needed to confide in an "expert". She told me how she had spotted two very large cats in a water trench by hedges one day but dismissed it as foxes or badgers. One day she had to go into the village and as she lived on the corner by a turning she just slowed slightly in case there was a car coming. At the same time a very large cat, very well described puma, turned the corner. "She both just stared at each other for a minute and we both turned and ran in opposite directions!"
I was suddenly putting two and two together when she explained that it had scared her so much that when she left the farm she always carried a pitchfork with her -"everyone thinks I'm off me head and I never told them about the cat!"
I checked older eports and the area is known(but never publicised) for cat activity and those reports are all consistent with a puma. There is no open chat about the cats just "everyone knows they are here". The teacher had mentioned an "odd old farm lady" and the motorist mentionedthe lady walking about with the pitchfork and I then got to find out who the lady was.
I noted in Red Paper Felids and the 2025 New Native Species how I was surprised to learn that some villages in England had histories of puma reports going back to the 1920s and how grandparents had warned their children who then grew up and warned their own children about the cats and what to do if they saw one. All of this going unpublicised because you never ran off to newspapers to "tell tales" back then.
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