Another Perthshire Big Cat

From Big Cats In Britain, a further sighting of what is presumably the same animal mentioned on previous post:

"06/09/2010
Aberuthven. Behind houses in fields.

Jet black, blacker than black, chasing roe deer.
Pointed ears
This is the strange part I can't remember noticing the tail.
Same size as roe deer but longer in length.
250yrds down field, from my house.
I was just up and standing having my coffee and went out to have a cigarette on my decking and I always look down the field when I saw roe deer running away from this jet black creature, at first I thought it was a bear, but it ran into woods on all four!
I am more vigilant. I have been down field with my dog looking for prints, thats's how sad i have become!!"

Aberuthven is a village on the road between Perth & Stirling, close to Auchterarder, and just north of the Ochil Hills, which places it in the same general area as the previous couple of sightings. I'm fascinated by the recurring description of the cat being bear like, this suggests quite a heavily built animal (though I admit I'm mildly confused by the witnesses statement that they thought it was a bear until it ran off on four legs- does this imply it was on two legs at one point??)
Edit: having just reread the previous sighting, they sound pretty similar, so they could possibly be different accounts of the same sighting.

Another Perthshire big cat sight

Following on from my last post, this sighting from the Big Cats In Britain blog caught my eye:

"On Monday 6th September I was having my usual coffee while standing admiring the view out my back door in Strathearn when I noticed Roe deer running, then what I thought looked like a jet back bear/cat, it was chasing the roe deer into the woods. I nearly choked on my coffee.
I told my husband and some colleagues. I didn't think they believed me until my husband came home on Thursday with an article that was in the Sun newspaper about Ray Mears saying he had saw 3 cats in Scotland. The article had two pictures and the cat/bear I saw was like the second picture.
I have since spoken to the Strathearn Herald (local newspaper) and they are going to do an article this week about my sighting, they also told me to get in touch with you guys, well I think it was you! So I just thought I'd let you know about my sighting."

The Sun article referenced is here. The second picture that the witness compared her sighting to looks a still taken from this video, filmed in Helensburgh last year. I find her description of the animal as a bear cat interesting as the squat, muscular build combined wth the short face is something that crops up in big cat sightings from time to time, and has lead researchers such as Di Francis to speculate that Britain may be home to an as yet unrecognised species of big cat, sometimes referred to as the mastiff cat hypothesis. The idea of a large predator surving unrecorded in the UK into the 21st century, is of course, unlikely. However, the occasional snippet of intriguing evidence does crop up, such as a photo taken by a camera trap in Argyle, which shows a squat, muscular black feline in quite clear detail. (This photograph has not appeared online, though it has been used by the Centre For Fortean Zoology on the cover of a previous issue of Animals & Men, though if my memory serves me correctly, it does appear in this video, which is  talk given by Shaun Stevens of Big Cats In Britain).

As a footnote, I went to the Strathearn Herald website, and found this article from last year which had a completely different interpretation to the above, suggesting that a binturong (also known as a bear cat) was loose in the area, so maybe this coloured the witnesses choice of words? Certainly seems to have been a fair few sightings in the area.
NB- Strathearn is an area of Perthshire, covering Comrie/Crieff/Auchterarder, plenty of country for a cat/bearcat/whatever it is.

Big cat in Perthshire

I've been meaning to post this for a while, so it's slightly old news now, but I found this report of a big cat just outside Perth to be really interesting. Rather the usual panther or puma type sightings, it sounds a bit more like a Kellas cat, a hybrid between a domestic and Scottish wildcat, or possibly even a rabbit headed cat, the status of which is a bit more controversial.
My mum had an encounter with a large black cat outside of Luncarty (the other side of Perth to where this encountered occurred) around 20 years ago. Flicking through a book, she tenatively identified the Kellas cat as being closest to what she saw. One of her workmates spotted what was presumably the same animal a few days later, which crouched in a field and hissed at her. Could they range much further South than is generally assumed?
For more info on the Kellas Cats, I recommend My Highland Kellas Cats by Di Francis, who first brought them to national attention, and even attempted breeding them.

Perthshire Bloodsucker

I've finally managed to track down the story I referenced in my previous post, regarding a possible sheep mutilation in Perthshire. I had it in my head that it occurred in the general vicinity of Loch Tay, but actually it occurred further North, north west of Glen Tilt, hence my inability to find it in my copy of Geoff Holder's Guide To Mysterious Perthshire, from which this account is taken:
The story takes place around 1923, in an old bothy to the north west of Glen Tilt. Two poachers decided they were going to stay the night in this remote location. The door was locked so they broke a window to gain entry and lit a fire. One of the poachers climbed back out through the window to get some water when something attached itself to his leg and began drinking his blood. He broke free and he and his companion searched the area to try and find what had attacked him. They could see some white winged objects and some faint blue lights. Somewhat perturbed, they forced the door of the bothy, cooked a meal and didn't sleep a wink.
In the morning, the only physical traces they could find were their own footprints, though the poacher carried the scars for the rest of his life. They never returned to the area. The bothy had an evil reputation among locals, but it's not clear whether this was a result of this incident or whether there were other tales attached to it.
Obviously, it's difficult to know what to make of a story like this. However, it does sound reminiscent of accounts such as The Skinwalker Ranch where small balls of light were associated with livestock mutilation.
Could whatever these things are got fed up of sheep and fancied a bit of poacher? Or, maybe more likely, did a wily gamekeeper spread a tall tale to deter poaching on their patch?
As an aside, Geoff Holder's written a whole series of guides to the mysteries of various Scottish counties, including Perthshire, Stirlingshire and Invernesshire, which I highly recommend. They cover everything from local myths to ancient sites to curious buidling and modern UFO and creature encounters. Invaluable for the Scottish Fortean (or Forteans with an interest in Scotland).

My own brush with the odd

I was born and grew up in an unremarkable but pleasant village in rural Perthshire called Luncarty.
One summer holiday when I was around 7 or 8 (which would make it 1982 or 1983), my brother, a friend and I were playing in the woods in the middle if the village around mid afternoon. We'd decided we'd had enough and were heading home along the footpath at the bottom of the big hill (the one that heads towards the Witches Wood, and now at the back of Sandeman Court and Marshall Road-both fields at the time). There was a ruined house to the left of the footpath (which was supposedly a wash house for Luncarty House- it was demolished in the late 80s/early 90s). As we approached this, something flashed from the bushes on the right hand side of the path in front of us and into the ruined house. I remember this as being a white blob- almost like the stereotypical image of a ghost in a shroud but featureless- although this may be due to seeing it side on, and it looked like it was slightly luminous. It was moving clear off the ground- maybe a foot or two. This is what convinced us to turn and run! We made it home in record time, but our mum didn't seem too impressed with our story.

To this day, I'm at a loss to explain this experience- the fact whatever it was clear off the ground (and moved a fair distance on the level) mitigates it being someone in a sheet- and I'm sure if we'd been hoaxed we'd have heard all about it no end eventually. The weather was overcast, and I don't recall it being windy.

I don't know of any other reliable stories of strange events in that wood- a school mate claimed that you could see spectral figures glide across the waste ground where Sandeman Court now stands, but I never met anyone who claims to have seen them first hand.

I've trailed through that wood at all hours of the day and night and never had any other weird experiences.
At the time, we interpreted it as a ghost, but looking back, I'd be more inclined to view it as some kind of light or energy phenomena. I recall writing it up as part of the "what I did during the holidays" essay we had to write when the new school term started, would love to see this to see if there's details in there I've forgotten, but it long gone. I spoke to my brother about this recently, for the first time in many years, and his unprompted recollection of the event pretty much tallies with mine.
I have had a couple of other odd experiences that were much more fleeeting and subjective which I may get round to relating (though they're not that impressive!)

A Sheep Mutilation in Perthshire?

I came across this story on the Scotsman website:

Police are appealing for information after a sheep was killed and mutilated in the Killin area.
The sheep was killed sometime between 6pm on Saturday 27 and 8.30am on Sunday March 28.

A Central Scotland Police spokeswoman said: "The sheep's carcass appears to have been taken from the scene. There was evidence of the carcass being moved over a distance. All that remained was the heart, lungs and two unborn lambs which were discovered nearby."

The discovery was made near to Pier Road.

Police are keen to hear from any fishermen or walkers who may have seen anything suspicious.

Of course, the report's too vague to put this into the high strangeness bucket. It had piqued my interest partly as it occurred in my home county of Perthshire and partly as the general area is rich in folkore, including fairy cattle and hellhounds. I recall a tale of some poachers spending the night in a bothy in the Loch Tay area and encountering small ball of light that drew blood from one of them, but can't find the reference- I'm sure I first read it in Jacque Vallee's Dimensions, but a flick through that and Geoff Holder's Guide To Mysterious Perthshire has failed to bring it up- I'll post it once I locate it.
I'd also not long listened to this episode of the Paracast, which was a discussion on the mutilation phenomena. One of the participants was Phillip Hoyle of the UK based Animal Pathology Field Unit, an organisation I have to shamefully admit I'd never heard of until their appearance on Danny Dyer: I Believe in UFOs! He puts forward the theory that many of these mutilations in the UK are part of a secret monitoring program to test for pathogens in the food chain, which seems like a viable explanation, though I do wonder why whoever's behind it doesn't just buy the animals and do whatever they've got to do behind closed doors? Could it be they actually want people to come across the caracasses?
An interesting point made by Christopher O'Brien in the same episode is that mutilation waves tend to start with high strangeness ones but then later ones will have more hall marks of human activity. Inspiration or training?
As strange events tend to clump together, I'd been idly thinking about this blog post for a week or so, and lo and behold, there's been reports of more sheep mutilations in the English county of Shropshire. Nick Redfern's written an interesting piece on it here.
Be interesting to see if it's co-incidence or the start of a flap?