There are no reports of this animal being aggressive towards humans. Not one person was attacked and every report that I’m aware of, where it came into contact with humans, it ran away.

In the report form the Wilmington Star-News. It reports that one of the animals had a crushed skull. It really makes a good Halloween artical. I wouldn’t call myself an expert on the beast of Bladenboro, so I may be wrong. This is the only report that I’ve heard where the skull was crushed and the blood drained. The newspapers at the time used the term “vampire”, but they were in the business of selling newspapers and the more outrageous the headlines, the more papers they sell.

Like somebody said in one of the original report, this is 90% hoax.

Some of the reports were probably roadkill that was scooped up and then shown to reporters.

I do believe there was something that killed a few animals in the area. The question is what was it.

It probably started with one or two legitimate kills. Then as the hysteria grew, so did the fake reports.

The legitimate kills could have been any number of animals, with the highest probability being bear, panther, bobcat, and ocelot.

All these animals have a very high probability. Bobcats are very common in the area. Bobcats make the high pitched screams that was reported. Problem is it don’t match the eyewitness reports.

There was an ocelot, escaped from a zoo in Myrtle Beach. And one was killed in the Bladenboro area. I have no idea what kind of sound they make.

Bears and panthers are both native in the area. Minus the tail, the description fits a bear. Here is a bear that pretty much fits the size description that was hit by a car in the Green Swamp.

Bear photo 1

Bear photo 2

Bear photo 3

The bear was killed on hwy 211, the same road that runs through the middle of Bladenboro. This bear was about 40 miles from Bladenboro.

The Carolina panther has been known to inhabit the same swamp.

If you look at current satellite photos, you can follow a major wooded area that runs from the Green Swamp, to Big Swamp (just outside Bladenboro). If there is an undisturbed wooded habitat from where panthers are known to live, it is very likely that they inhabit or travel through this area. In 1954, this wooded area would have been an even larger area and more likely that panthers would live there then it is now.

Shouldn’t we expect that these and similar bizarre killings would be amply photographed, either by amatuers or professionals?

There seems to be no shortage of these kinds of stories, but inexplicably few photos.

Jaguars often kill their prey by biting through the skull, usually biting through the ears. This results in very little bloodshed. Jaguars are the only cats that regularly use this method to dispatch prey. They are also known to be able to use their forepaws to crush the skulls of animals up to the size of cows. Since jaguars are native to the Americas, and their range in the past did include North America, it is reasonable to suppose that a jaguar could have strayed north, or escaped from captivity, and that the beast could have been a jaguar. But, although jaguars make a wide variety of sounds, most of the sounds they make are similar to the roaring or coughing sounds made by other cats of the Panthera genus, so if the screaming sounds that were heard truly came from the same “beast” that did the killing, it probably wasn’t a jaguar, despite the similarity in the killing method.

A lion, tiger, or leopard would also be large enough, and powerful enough, to use the forepaw to crush a goat’s or a cow’s skull, and they are known to do that on occasion. Once again, though, the sounds would be roaring, coughing, or moanimg sounds, not screams.

Cheetahs are known to drink the blood from their kills, but no cheetah is big enough to kill a grown cow, and no cheetah is powerful enough to crush a large animal’s skull. Also cheetahs are not human-aggressive, and they do not make any kind of screaming sounds.

So that leaves pumas and lynxes. They do make screaming sounds. A puma would be my guess. Although bobcats and lynxes can be surprisingly large, and bobcats can be quite aggressive, they are not large enough to kill grown cattle. But pumas are, and dogs trained to bear would probably not pursue a puma unless they were trained to pumas too. It could have been a puma straying north from Florida (unlikely; Florida panthers are not as large and powerful as other pumas), or a western puma which had strayed east, or which had escaped or been released from captivity, or an Appalachian Mountain puma (although they had become very rare indeed by the 1950s). However it was that the puma ended up in the Bladenboro area, it probably killed domestic stock at first because it was easier to catch. During the 1950s, deer and other wild prey were much more scarce in the eastern US than they are now. After the puma became more familiar to the area it probably shifted its hunting to wild prey and so the livestock kills decreased.

There had been escapes from a traveling menagerie in the Bladenboro area. Maybe the animal that did the killings was not the same animal that made the screaming noises.

- Could be a mountain lion or large bobcat.

- Could be a bigfoot, and the animal tracks were animals investigating the kill. The blunt force trauma would seem consistent with this, also the weird vocalizations. Also the coonhounds refusing to track it are consistent with other accounts.

- Although this is fairly far away from the alleged habitat, these accounts sound sort of similar to the Ozark Howler. Most of the theories are that it is some kind of large cat, but there seem to be other possibilities in the mix as well. And the vocalization reports sound somewhat similar.

In any case its an interesting story. Good Halloween reading.

I have always been told that moutain lions make this sort of sound. I would think rogue or diseased animal esp as the attacks occured in quick sucession and then died away. Would rabies or distemper or any other feline diseases cause this amount of overkill?

As for the lack of blood, if the creature was severely iron-deficient (anemic) this is a possibility, but I would think that the excessive head wounds caused the prey to bleed to death and most of the blood seeped into the ground. But without forensics it is nothing but a guess.

Humans have been breeding the occasinal savage animal for centuries without modern ‘biological technology’

Was 1954 the only reorts of this?