wall on the side of the road. It stood about four feet tall and carried its hairless, rough-textured body on two spindly legs. Its arms were also thin and peach-colored. The creature’s huge, watermelon-shaped head was disproportionate in size to its relatively small torso, and it had two large, glowing, red-orange eyes.
Bartlett, who has made his career as a painter, told the Boston Globe (October 29, 2006) that he definitely saw something weird that night. “I didn’t make it up,” he said. “It’s a thing that’s been following me for years. Not the creature—the story.”
In Real Monsters, Creepy Creatures, and Nightmarish Beings, we shall meet these frightening Top Ten fiends, devils, and monstrosities and many, many others. Be thankful that you can encounter them from the safety of your own home. Just ignore those shadows and strange noises that might occur while reading this book.
BIG CATS –PREDATORS OUT OF PLACE
When I was boy growing up in Iowa during the 1940s, I came to look forward during the winter months to the arrival of a curious guest—in addition to Santa Claus—who would faithfully visit our state. Santa, of course, was a welcome guest at our house on Christmas Eve. The other visitor was not at all welcome at any time. According to newspaper accounts, each winter a mysterious black panther somehow materialized among the snow banks and proceeded to frighten folks with its threatening growl and piercing yellow eyes.
Startled eye-witnesses from across the state sighted the beast near the mailboxes at the end of their lanes when they went to retrieve the day’s newspaper and bills. Others spotted it running through the groves near their homes. Livestock was killed or mauled, victims of the black panther.
Each morning, my little sister and I had a very long lane to walk in order to be picked up by the school bus, and we kept a wary eye on our thick groves and apple orchards, hoping that we would never spot the big cat stalking us. During the winter months, it was nearly dark by the time the bus dropped us off to begin the trek back down the lane to the safety of our home. On each side of our lane, there were fields with fallen cornstalks awaiting next spring’s plowing. A panther could easily crouch behind clumps of dried stalks, hungrily awaiting his prey.
Journalists had a wide variety of theories as to how a black panther could make its way to Iowa. Most common of these hypotheses was the obvious one: someone had obtained a panther as a pet and it had escaped when it reached its maturity. Pleas were made to whomever might know the origins of this dangerous creature to come forward and help provide clues to its possible whereabouts.
Experienced hunters suggested that a mountain lion (also called a cougar, puma, or panther, depending on regional preference) might easily have found its way down to Iowa from northern Minnesota, and they assured the populace that they would soon be able to hunt it down. Most people knew that cougars were not black, but others argued that the panther could be a freak of nature, turning black, rather than a cougar’s typical tannish-brown color.
Actually, a black panther is a kind of deviant cat from the norm of its kind. In South America, the black panther is actually a jaguar, whose typical markings are covered by an excess of the black pigment melanin. Although it has been rarely reported, black jaguars have been sighted in the southwestern mountain ranges of the United States. There are no substantiated sightings of black cougars. Apparently melanism never becomes dominant in the cougar as it does occasionally in the jaguar.
In the January 25, 2010, issue of the New York Times, Alan Rabinowitz, the president and chief executive of Panthera, a wild cat conservation group, responded to the recent announcement of the United States Fish and Wildlife Service that it would begin to take the initial steps toward mandating a jaguar recovery plan. The jaguar had been on the endangered species list in the United States since 1997, based on occasional sightings of the big cats crossing north over the United States–Mexico border.
Rabinowitz pointed out that although the jaguar may have inhabited large sections of the western states in prehistoric times, the last documented sighting of a female jaguar with a cub was in the early 1900s. The Arizona Game and Fish Department reported one male jaguar desperately had attempted to survive in the harsh, dry region, but they concluded that he had been dead for quite some time.
Because natural jaguars are a rarity in the American Southwest, and are tracked closely by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, is there some other explanation for the large cat sightings in that area (iStock)?
Rabinowitz presented his argument that regardless of the few jaguars sighted crossing into the United States from the northernmost population of the cats in Sonora, the American Southwest is, at best, a “marginal habitat for the animals.” Rather than waste any of the sparse federal funds allotted to the Fish and Wildlife Service to create a habitat for the jaguar, Rabinowitz stated that it made far more sense to help those countries in the “Jaguar Corridor,” where thousands of jaguars flourish from Mexico to Argentina, to conserve the big cat’s true habitat.
Because the Fish and Wildlife Service has been keeping a watchful eye on the handful of jaguars that cross the border between Mexico and the United States since the early 1900s, it is unlikely that sightings of jaguars can account for the twice-told winter tales of black panthers. Nor, if Mr. Rabinowitz’s sage words are heeded, are we likely to see any black jaguars creeping into our livestock barns in the Midwest.
In addition to jaguars that fade their spots under darker hair, there are leopards with skin color containing a mixture of blue, black, gray, and purple—thus appearing “black”—but they are found in the dense forests of southwestern China, Myanmar, Assam, Nepal, and parts of southern India. Melanistic black leopards are thought to be more numerous in Java and the southern part of the Malay Peninsula than the spotted leopards. Interestingly, a female jaguar or leopard may give birth to spotted kittens along with black and albino siblings in the same litter.
Of course I knew nothing about melanistic mutations when I was a boy, nor did I realize that there were actually no species of big cats that were categorized as “black panthers,” but I surely knew that any kind of cat as large as eye-witnesses described them did not belong in Iowa. Especially, perhaps, in the winter months.
As I became older and came to specialize in the investigation of such phenomena as ghosts, UFOs, monsters, vampires, zombies, and other strange creatures that go bump in the night, I discovered that out-of-place black panthers are not only sighted in Iowa during the winter months, but reports of big cats have come from nearly every state and province in North America.
On February 9, 2010, Click Orlando (http://www.clickOrlando.com/print/22506062/detail.html) reported that a number of local residents had begun to feel nervous on their evening walks and noticed that they were being joined by bobcats, a feline about three feet in length and thirty pounds in weight. Spokespersons for Florida Fish and Wildlife said that bobcats migrate all over the state, and even though residents do not wish them to get in their homes or to attack their pets, it is not unusual to spot bobcats scavenging on the beach.
Interestingly, on that same date in February, three coyotes were spotting sprinting across the campus of Columbia University in Manhattan—that’s Manhattan, New York, not Kansas. A few hours later, according to Andy Soltis of the New York Post, a coyote was seen sliding across a frozen lake in Central Park.
