Читать книгу Real Monsters, Gruesome Critters, and Beasts from the Darkside - Brad Steiger - Страница 29

The Beast of the Bay is a newcomer on the scene of Black Cats in England compared to the Beast of Bretton, which has been sighted by hundreds of people over the years.

In June 2006, Jennifer Pratt was cycling along a footpath at Orton Mere heading toward Peterborough when she saw a black panther about 50 yards ahead of her. As she picked up speed and peddled past the creature, it looked up at her with large and yellow eyes.

Michelle Esposito contacted The Evening Telegraph in Peterborough after she spotted a large animal that she described as a large cat, like a puma, sprinting across the road.

Mark Williams, from Bretton, who has been tracking the Beast, said he can understand why people might think that witnesses who claim to see Black Panthers in England or Scotland are overly imaginative, but he stated that there were just too many sightings, many by police officers, to scoff them all away as mistaken identity of some other creature, such as a large domestic cat.

Chris Crowther, a sheep farmer who has 12,000 acres of land in the rugged area above Greenfield, is among those who keep a wary watch out for the Beast. In February, 2008, he found the first carcass near the Dovestone Reservoir. The lamb’s coat had been torn off and all its bones picked clean. In June, he found another carcass, stripped of all flesh as before. It was then that he and other sheepherders began discussing the sightings that they had had of a “large black creature” near their flocks.

Crowther told Ken Bennett of the Oldham Advertiser that none of the farmers wished to cause people to become frightened, but it was his conclusion that “something really mysterious is happening here.”

The farmers had agreed that no fox was to blame for their loss of sheep. It was more likely a predator the size of a puma that could do such damage. A member of the British Big Cat society had told them the number of such panther-like attacks on animals had been increasing.

On Christmas Day 2007, Howard Moody was cycling to work in the evening and was nearly knocked over by a large cat, three feet high and five or six feet long. Later, he told Stephen Briggs of Peterborough Today that he was certain that the creature was a puma. Moody said that he had got a really good look at the Beast. It all happened so fast, Moody commented, that he didn’t have time to be frightened.

Briggs reported in the article that there had been several sightings of the Beast of Bretton in 2007 and in the years prior. In March 2005, Andrew Leatherland had encountered a huge black cat-like creature while walking in Castor Highlands.