My own grandmother, who is 92, tells of panthers that were hunted by her father, brothers, and other family members. She said that for years there was one that roamed the ridgetops, occasionally coming into the head of the our hollow. Sometimes at night they would hear it scream.

Panthers were considered very dangerous. Fifty or seventy-five years ago, most people in these parts were subsistence farmers, who raised vegetables, fruit, and livestock. The area was very isolated from the outside world, and people grew or raised just about everything their families needed. They kept the mountains clear of brush and undergrowth, almost all the way up to the bald rocks and laurel groves at the mountaintops, and panthers became very scarce. My grandma told me that “they were almost killed off”, leaving only the isolated animal here and there, back in the hollows that were too steep and rocky for farming and livestock. But since then, subsistence farming has declined. Most people do not grow their own food, and the hills have been allowed to become reforested. Most of the area is again heavily forested, with underbrush growing right down to the highway right-of-ways. Deer have returned in staggering numbers. Elk have been reintroduced. Black bears, which had been hunted almost to extermination in this area, have made a big comeback. If bears can make a comeback, why not panthers?

There are wild, rocky canyons here and there is lots of cover and game. Because of the (despicable) practice of mountaintop removal strip mining, areas that were wild and unfrequented by humans now see intensive human activity. I personally know two reliable people who have seen a panther on a mining road or a strip mine site (on different occasions and in different locations). Both of them say that they want to keep the location secret, because there are hunters here who would tear their toenails off getting to the woods to hunt the panthers down. There are many other people who SAY they have seen panthers, whose stories I take with a grain of salt. That doesn’t mean that those stories are necessarily false.

As for they many stories of “black panthers”, I think that most of those stories are inaccurate, even the handful that are true sightings. Forest animals tend to be darker than desert animals, and the eastern puma is known to range in color from tawny golden brown through reddish brown to grayish brown or gray. To my knowledge there is not a black color phase today. However, consider the case of the red wolf. Its latin name is now Canis rufus, but they used to be called Canis niger (meaning black wolf). There was a black color phase which was a very black animal, very unlike black timber wolves, which have a lot of gray tones in their coats. Although the black- and red-phased wolves were the same species, and sometimes both phases occured in the same litter, the reddish animals were more common in coastal area, and the black phase was the most common color in the deep forests and swamps. Well, the red wolves were hunted and trapped to virtual extinction. Their population was reduced to less than one hundred animals, most of which were taken into captivity in a last-ditch effort to preserve the species through captive breeding and protection. All of the surviving wolves are red-phase. No black-phase animals are left, and the black color phase of the red wolf is considered extinct.

What has that to do with pumas or “black panthers”? I once met a captive puma, which was tawny, but its undercoat was a very dark grayish color. In dim light, or in the dark, a puma’s dense, unmarked brown coat could be mistaken for black. When a person glimpses a puma the glimpse is usually very brief, and it is such a surprise that the person is shocked. If the person’s brain says “black panther”, then the person will remember that fleeting glimpse as a black panther. But perhaps there is another explanation. Perhaps there was a black, or at least a very dark, color phase of the eastern puma. And perhaps that black-phase puma went the way of the black-phase red wolf: the population reduced to just a few dozen animals, none of which carried the genes for the dark phase.

As far as lion sightings, etc., well, there has been a thriving business in breeding big cats, and not all breeders are honest people. If their animals escape from captivity, and they are unable to recapture them, some people would just keep the escape quiet, rather than incur possible criminal charges and monetary losses for damages caused by their escapees. I think that that probably happens more often than we’d like to think. Experts estimate that there are more tigers, for instance, in Texas alone than there are wild tigers in the whole world. And that’s just in Texas. There are dozens of “breeders” of exotic cats in the United States, from smallish cats like servals bobcats all the way through the range of species to to lions and tigers. Many of these people abandon their animals when their money runs out or the novelty wears off. I think that most of the big cats sightings, of maned lions, for instance, can be attributed to escaped captives or their descendants.

And for the circus trains, this is a reoccurring theme. If indeed so many hundreds of circus trains have wrecked and de-railed over the years, this in and of itself would constitute a phenomana that needs to be explored.

In southern Indiana where I’m from, big cats and black “panthers” weren’t a phenomena, they were a fact of life here that every mother’s son understood perfectly. Don’t go into the woods at night or the panthers will get you.

When a friend’s parents here called the DNR to please come out and do something about the panther sunning itself in their driveway, they were laughed at and hung up on. This is the mindset of the educated experts, these ignorant country people don’t know the difference between a panther and a coon dog.,

The Indians knew about them, the settlers knew about them, and the locals still do. So why cant science accept that? It’s not the cats that are the mystery, it’s why “big brother” wants you to think that you’re stupid for seeing what’s always been here.

That’s the BIG mystery to me.

Also, in the last paragraph of the above story about the 1948 incidents, the Ohio county mentioned as Drake should be DARKE county. There is no Drake county in Ohio and if the cats were travelling in the direction mentioned, it would lead into DARKE county.

That, I find, unbelievable.

Anyway, our final presentations were supposed to have something to do with the Pleistocene in some way, but seeing as some people did theirs on life on Mars or recycling, I figured I had some leeway. I did mine on the possibility of some “extinct” Pleistocene animals having survived into modern times, including Panthera atrox (I believe I mentioned these sightings, among others).

Well, when I got to talking about their possible melanism, the instructor interrupted me. Seems that when he was on a geological expedition in Nevada, he and his fellow grad students saw a very large black cat wandering the desert hills nearby. He described no mane, but said otherwise it could easily have been a lion.

I’ve also mentioned in other posts how cougars are often sighted in NJ, but remain unrecognized by science or NJ Fish and Wildlife Service (at least officially). There was even one on the outskirts of Philadelphia not too long ago.

I was told that up the hill some behind my one uncles house was a cave. It was said that years before a lion lived in that cave and was killed by a local farmer after killing a cow.

This was said to have happened a couple of years after WWII and that the loin had escaped from Crane Navel ammunition depot that is not far from where I am from. It was said that crane turned some loose to keep people from sneaking into the place during the war. I guess if the story is true then this story could account for where one of the others went when they escaped. It would be a long way for them to go (around 100 miles or so) but who knows I guess.

The “circus train wreck” archetypal “one size fits all” excuse has been used literally EVERY TIME a cryptoid is seen, but those who use it can never point to the train wreck, or if any animals escaped.

Good to see two actual accounts, albeit from a century ago…