next morning he learned that an entire family had been found in their home, mutilated, torn, and partially eaten. The horrible manner in which they had died indicated that a tiger had attacked them. Significantly, the Englishman learned through village gossip that they had been blood enemies of the young man that he had seen transform himself into a weretiger.
When Perkins asked a village elder why he thought the weretiger had spared him, the old man asked him for an exact description of where he stood when the beastman attacked. Listening carefully, the elder explained that Perkins had unknowingly sought refuge at a holy tree that bore an inscription of the name of the god Vishnu’s incarnation. Merely touching the tree would protect anyone from attack by animals.
Perkins concluded his account by stating that he inspected the tree later that day and found upon it an inscription in Sanskrit. He never returned to that village again, but he swore that his witnessing of the weretiger transformation was true.
The rites of Taigherim consist of a magical sacrifice of cats that originated in old Scotland as a ritual to appease the subterranean gods. Beginning with the Christian era in Scotland, the rite was forbidden, but it still was performed in secret by sorcerers to invoke a special shape-shifting demon that would manifest as a very large black cat.
The rites themselves involved the systematic roasting of live black cats on a spit slowly turning over a fire. As each cat was dedicated to the demons of darkness, its terrible howls of pain were believed to summon a particular monster of demonic power.
After the cruel sacrificial rites had been conducted, small demons would begin to materialize in the form of black cats and match their cries with the yowls of theunfortunate true cats that were being roasted alive. As the sacrifices continued, celebrated by the screeching of the cat-demons, the sorcerer would at last behold the materialization of a frightful catlike creature of great size, much larger than a black leopard of the jungle. The appearance of the great demon signaled demonic acceptance of the sorcerer’s sacrifices, and he was now permitted to make his demands of the huge black cat, whether it be the gift of prophecy, a bag of gold, or the ability to shapeshift into a wolf or black cat.
On April 10, 1970, Mike Busby of Cairo, Illinois, was traveling on Route 3 to Olive Branch to pick up his wife.
About a mile south of Olive Branch on the dark, deserted road that parallels the edge of the Shawnee National Forest, Busby experienced car trouble. Grumbling his frustration, Busby got out of his car and popped open the hood.
He had not even had time to glance at the motor when he was distracted by a noise to his left. An incredible form, over six feet tall, moved in on Mike and hit him in the face.
Busby and his monstrous attacker fell to the highway. Dull claws ripped at his clothing, and Busby sought desperately to hold the thing’s mouth open and at arm’s length so its teeth could not tear his throat.
Busby was unable to clearly identify what it was that had seized him but he said later that he could feel something fuzzy around its mouth and that the thing’s body hair was as short and wiry as steel wool.
“The thing kept letting out these deep, soft growls,” Busby remarked. “Those sounds were unlike anything that I had ever heard.”
After what must have seemed like an eternity locked in a death struggle, a diesel truck approached with bright headlights and the roar of a powerful motor—a combination of factors that frightened Busby’s attacker back into the forest.
“It was a sleek, shiny black color,” Busby said, “and it ran away with heavy, thudding feet.”
John Hartsworth, the truck driver, reported that the thing that he had seen in his headlamps looked like some kind of “giant cat” until it had jumped off Busby and run into the forest on its hind legs.
Lately Robin Swope, the Paranormal Pastor, has been doing per diem hospice work for a local hospital. He was delivering medication to a patient at the end of one February in the middle of suburban Erie, Pennsylvania. There was quite a bit of snow on the ground from recent storms and the snow banks on the sides of the road were about two to three feet high.
Busby and his monstrous attacker fell to the highway. Dull claws ripped at his clothing, and Busby sought desperately to hold the thing’s mouth open ….
Pastor Swope was traveling up a small hill …
“… when I saw a dark shape slowly move across the street in front of me, two blocks ahead. It was about six or seven feet long and lurched like a quadruped with shoulders and hindquarters rocking. It passed in front of a few snow banks as it made its way across the street and eventually disappeared behind a house.
I arrived at the spot seconds later, and nothing was there. The creature was pure black, like a shadow being. I have passed by the same location at least six times since then at around the same time and am sure it was not an optical illusion. In fact, when I saw it I knew it was something not right. The head was not distinct, but the tail was long. It had an appearance of a phantom Black Cat.
Erie’s Native American populace, the Eriez Indians, were called the ‘cat’ people by the Seneca and French. They dressed in panther fur, and there were accounts of some of the pelts being black. They were later eradicated/absorbed by the Seneca tribe, of which I have ancestry.
Was the phantom cat a residual haunting, a spirit from the ancient Eriez or a literal black cat to cross my path?”
BIGFOOT-NORTH AMERICA’S KING KONG
In the spring of 1967, Carla, one of the English Department’s student assistants, pulled a very reluctant young man into my office and insisted that he tell me what he had seen that weekend.
She introduced me to Bob, her boyfriend, but I acknowledged that we were already acquainted with one another. Although my principal teaching assignments were classes in creative writing and journalism, in 1963 I had also been an instructor in the Freshman English Core Program—where everyone, from future medical doctors to physics teachers, studied the classics of world literature. Bob had been in one of my classes, and even though he was a very polite and pleasant young man, he never made it a secret that he was a science major, concentrating on biology.
Although Dostoyevsky and Goethe may not have held an enormous amount of interest for him, when called upon in class, Bob’s answers were concise and demonstrated that he had been paying attention. And now, four years later, in his senior year, his excited girlfriend was dragging him into my office and pressuring him to relate the details of an experience that he obviously he felt very awkward discussing. Finally, after a bit of coaxing from Carla and my assurance that I was no longer grading his work, he told a remarkable story—that weekend he had encountered a creature that was nowhere to be found in his biology texts.
He had
