Monthly Archives: October 2021

Episode 247: Shapeshifters

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Happy Halloween! Let’s learn about some shapeshifters of folklore, including the werewolf and kitsune (thanks to Joel, Pranav, and Emma!), and a real-life shapeshifter.

Don’t forget the Kickstarter, as if I’d let you forget it: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/kateshaw/beyond-bigfoot-and-nessie

Further reading:

Folklore and Mythology

Breeding Butterflies

Further listening:

MonsterTalk (note: sometimes there’s adult language or really scary themes)

Sandman Stories Presents podcast

A death’s head hawkmoth, looking spooky:

A death’s head hawkmoth caterpillar, not looking spooky at all:

Show transcript:

Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw.

It’s Halloween week and that means we need to talk about a truly spooky monster! Both Joel and Pranav suggested the werewolf a while back and Emily suggested the kitsune [kee-tsoo-neh], so let’s learn about shapeshifters and were-animals of all kinds. “Wer” is an Old English word that just means “man,” and just to get confusing, the word “man” used to refer to any person. The word “wif” referred to a woman, with wifman actually meaning woman. From those words we get the modern uses of wife, woman, and man, while “wer” is obsolete except in werewolf.

Let me derail myself from talking about language by reminding you about our Kickstarter! It ends pretty soon, on November 5, 2021, so if you’ve been thinking about backing the project this would be a great time. It’s to help me publish a book all about mystery animals, called Beyond Bigfoot and Nessie: Lesser-Known Mystery Animals from Around the World. The book has a foreword by Blake Smith of MonsterTalk, the science show about monsters, and if you don’t already listen to that podcast, it’s a whole lot of fun and informative too. Thanks to everyone who has already backed the project!

Now, Happy Halloween and on to the spookiness!

The important first question we need to answer is if werewolves really exist.

No. They do not exist outside of folklore and fiction, and I’ll explain why later so you don’t ever have to worry about werewolves or any other shapeshifters. But first, let’s learn what werewolves and kitsunes are.

Werewolves are supposed to be people who can turn into wolves. Depending on the story, this can happen when the person wants to turn into a wolf or it can happen during the full moon whether the person wants to be a wolf or not. Sometimes the person has a magical wolfskin or some other item that they put on in order to transform. Sometimes they have to cast a magic spell, but sometimes it’s a curse that someone else has inflicted on them. Some stories say that the only way to kill a werewolf is by shooting it through the heart with a silver bullet, especially one that’s been blessed by a priest.

The werewolf is mainly from European folklore, where for many centuries all werewolves were also supposed to be witches. Until about the 18th century in some areas, if someone accused you of being a werewolf, you could be put on trial as a witch. Lots of people were convicted of witchcraft and killed during waves of witch-hunts in various parts of Europe. Most of the people accused were women, especially elderly women, especially women who were widowed or single, especially women who owned land that someone else wanted. Hmm.

The kitsune is a creature of Asian folklore, especially from Japan, that’s basically a fox that can work magic. It’s sometimes said that all foxes can turn into humans if they want, especially older foxes. The older and more powerful a kitsune is, the more tails it’s supposed to have, up to nine. Kitsunes sometimes play tricks on people but they can also act as guardians and friends.

About the same time that old ladies were being accused of being werewolves in Europe, though, around the 15th to the 18th centuries, something similar happened in Japan. People were much more superstitious during this time and thought the kitsune was a dangerous goblin-like creature that could possess people and make them act like animals. These days the kitsune is back to being considered mostly a friendly trickster.

Werewolves weren’t the only shapeshifters in the folklore of Europe, although they were the most common. A German story collected in 1879 is about someone who could transform into a fox using an item called a strap.

“In the village of Dodow near Wittenburg there lived an old woman who possessed a fox strap. With its help she could transform herself into a fox, and thus her table never lacked for geese, ducks, and all kinds of poultry.

“Her grandchild knew about it, and one day when the schoolmaster was talking about magic in the school, the child told about the fox strap, and the next day brought it to school.

“The schoolmaster took it into his hand and unintentionally approached his head with it. Suddenly he was standing before the children, transformed into a fox. They broke out with a deafening noise. This so frightened the little schoolmaster that he jumped out the window with a single leap.

“He ran to the hill that lay near the village and there built himself a den.

“One day a great hunt was organized, and our fox was among those pursued by the huntsmen. A bullet hit him, and suddenly a schoolmaster was lying there before the bewildered huntsman. The bullet had struck the fox strap and ripped it apart.”

Witches were also supposed to be able to transform themselves into hares, cats, dogs, even geese in European folklore. In other parts of the world, though, folklore is full of people who can turn into different animals, and the animals are always ones local to the area. In various parts of Africa there are stories of people who transform into hyenas, leopards, and lions, while in various coastal areas of the world there are stories of seals, orcas, dolphins, and other water animals that can transform into people or which are humans in disguise.

The nagual is a story from many places in Mesoamerica, dating back to the ancient Aztecs and Olmecs and other people who lived in what is now Mexico and parts of Central and South America. The nagual was supposed to be someone who could shapeshift into a jaguar. Some people today still believe in the nagual the same way some people still believe in werewolves, and like many other shapeshifters it’s often connected with witches. Modern nagual stories are about witches who can transform into various animals at night, including owls, bats, turkeys, pumas, and even wolves. In some stories they’re thieves and murderers, while in other stories they help people.

Of course, not all folktales about shapeshifters are spooky. Sometimes they’re just meant to be funny, like this story from India.

Once there was a boy who herded buffaloes, and he noticed that at noon every day a dog would visit some nearby pools of water in a little valley. One day he hid to watch the dog. To his surprise, when the dog reached the water, it took its skin off and out stepped a beautiful young woman! She bathed in the pool, then put her dog-skin back on and left. The boy followed her to see what house she went to, then went back to watching his buffaloes.

Later that year the boy’s parents decided it was time for him to marry and began to look for a wife for him. But he told them he wanted a dog as his wife and even had a particular dog picked out. Everyone laughed at him, but he was determined to marry the dog and so his parents agreed.

The wedding took place and that night the new bridegroom pretended to fall asleep, and when the dog got up he watched to see what she would do. She took her dog-skin off and started to leave the house, but the groom jumped up and threw the dog-skin on the fire, where it burned up. His wife remained in her human form and they lived happily ever after.

Here’s another story, this one from Korea and published in 1911. Once a very poor old couple lived on the edge of a town, where they grew just enough rice to keep from starving. The old man caught fish to sell for extra money, but one day when he went to the lake, it was almost dried up and all the fish were gone. In the middle of the lake was a giant frog.

The old man shouted at the frog, “How dare you drink up the lake and eat up all the fish!” But the frog said, “You’ll thank me for it one day. Take me home and let me live in your house, and you’ll see how lucky you’ll be.”

The old man didn’t know what to do. Without the water from the lake, his rice would die, and without the fish from the lake, he had nothing to sell. He took the giant frog home.

The old man and his wife gave the frog the best room in their small house and the best food they had. In return, the frog turned out to be a very pleasant lodger and would talk and laugh with the couple long into the night, telling stories and singing songs.

After a week, the frog said he needed to take a wife, but she had to be beautiful and of noble birth. The old man went to the town’s magistrate, whose youngest daughter was the most beautiful woman in the land, and explained that a giant frog would like to marry the magistrate’s daughter.

The magistrate laughed at first, but when he realized the old man was serious, he ordered him to be beaten. But immediately, hail began to fall from the sky—first tiny hailstones, then bigger and bigger ones. The magistrate hastily changed his mind and said his daughter could marry the frog, and the hail stopped.

In this time and place, a bride went to her wedding with her eyes closed and painted over with wax so she couldn’t see her husband until after the ceremony. Imagine the bride’s horror, after the wax was removed and she took her first look at her new husband, when she discovered he was a giant frog! The bride was furious, but the frog said, “You’ll be glad you married me. Will you take these scissors and loosen the skin of my back? It’s too tight and hurts me.”

The bride was so angry that she took the scissors and cut the frog’s skin open all the way down his back. Then, to her astonishment, he wriggled right out of his skin and out stepped a handsome prince wearing fine silk clothes. He had been enchanted and the spell could only be broken when he married a human woman. He and his wife lived happily ever after, and the poor old couple who had helped him were given all the riches they desired and lived in a palace to the end of their days.

I could keep going forever, because there are a whole lot of stories about shapeshifters from around the world. If you want more folktales, I recommend the podcast “Sandman Stories Presents.” Each episode is another folktale. It’s really interesting and the host’s voice is soothing if you need a podcast to help you fall asleep.

Outside of folklore and mythology, shapeshifters aren’t real. To understand why, we have to look at a very different animal, the butterfly—or, since this is a Halloween episode and most moths are nocturnal, the moth. Let’s learn about an especially Halloween-y moth, the African death’s-head hawkmoth. It gets its name from a pattern on its back that looks sort of like a human skull. Its upper wings are black and its lower wings are usually yellowy-orange. Its wingspan is as much as 5 inches across, or 13 cm. It lives in parts of Africa and migrates to Europe for the summer.

The deaths-head hawkmoth caterpillar can grow up to 6 inches long, or 15 cm, and has a curved horn-like structure basically on its butt. After it hatches, it spends the next month or two eating leaves, especially the leaves of potato and tomato plants. During this time it will go through five stages of development, called instars, where it sheds its skin and grows larger. Finally, the caterpillar burrows into the ground and forms a little nesting chamber in the dirt. For the next few weeks it just sits in the chamber while moisture evaporates from its body and it forms a hard shell-like structure called a pupa.

Inside the pupa, the caterpillar transforms into a moth by breaking down its own body with digestive juices. The resulting goo of undifferentiated cells reforms into a moth body, a process that takes weeks. Finally the newly formed moth emerges from the shell of its pupa and from the ground, climbs onto a leaf or twig, and hangs there for a little while as its wings uncrumple and extend to their full size.

The transformation of a moth or butterfly, or other insects that go through the same process, is astounding and not fully understood. What we do know is that it takes massive amounts of energy. A caterpillar eats all the time in order to store up energy to metamorphose into a moth or butterfly. If there was an easier way, for instance if a caterpillar just had to cast a magic spell or put on a mothskin coat to transform, they would do it the easy way. But they don’t, because this is the most efficient way to transform from one body to another that nature has developed. It takes weeks, it’s messy and dangerous because the animal is helpless the whole time, and it only happens once in an insect’s lifetime.

So that’s that. Werewolf movies are a lot of fun to watch, especially this time of year, but you don’t have to lie awake at night afterwards worried that a werewolf is going to bite you.

You can find Strange Animals Podcast at strangeanimalspodcast.blubrry.net. That’s blueberry without any E’s. If you have questions, comments, or suggestions for future episodes, email us at strangeanimalspodcast@gmail.com. If you like the podcast and want to help us out, leave us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts or Podchaser, or just tell a friend. We also have a Patreon at patreon.com/strangeanimalspodcast if you’d like to support us for as little as one dollar a month and get monthly bonus episodes. There are links in the show notes to join our mailing list and to our merch store.

Thanks for listening!

Episode 246: MOTHMAN!

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Don’t forget our Kickstarter! I can’t believe it reached its funding goal THE FIRST DAY!

We’re getting so close to Halloween! This week we’ll learn about Mothman! Is it a moth? Is it a ghostly entity from another world? Is it a bird? (hint: it’s probably a bird)

Sandhill cranes (not mothmen):

A Canada goose (not mothman):

A great bustard (not mothman):

A green heron (definitely not mothman but look at those big cute feets and that telescoping neck):

A barn owl’s eyes reflecting red (photo taken from Frank’s Barn Owls and Mourning Doves, which has lots of lovely pictures):

Barn owls look like strange little people while standing up straight:

Barn owls got legs:

All owls got legs:

Show transcript:

Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw.

This week for monster month, let’s cover a spooky monster with a silly name, mothman! We’ll go over the facts as clearly as possible and see if we can figure out what kind of creature mothman might be.

First, though, a quick reminder that our Kickstarter is still going on if you’re listening to this before Nov. 5, 2021! There’s a link in the show notes if you want to go look at it. We actually reached our funding goal on the very first day, so thank you all so much for backing the project, sharing the project on social media, or just putting up with me spamming you about it all month.

Now, on to mothman.

As far as anyone can tell, it all started in 1966, specifically November 12, outside of Clendenin, West Virginia, in the eastern United States. Five men were digging a grave in a cemetery outside of town when one of them saw something big fly low across the trees and right over their heads. The witness thought it looked like a man with wings, but with red eyes and an estimated wingspan of 10 feet, or 3 meters. This definitely happened, even though it sounds like the opening scene of a scary movie.

That story didn’t come to light until after the next sighting hit the newspapers and caused a lot of excitement. The second sighting took place only three days later near Point Pleasant, West Virginia, in the McClintic Wildlife Area. Locals call it the TNT area, since explosives were stored there during WWII. The TNT area is about 70 miles, or over 110 km, away from Clendenin, which has led to a lot of people discounting the gravedigger’s sighting. We’ll come back to that later, though.

On Nov. 15, 1966, two young couples decided to go out driving. They were bored and it was a cold, clear Tuesday night. Remember, this was the olden days when there weren’t as many things to do as there are today. You could watch TV, but only if there was something you wanted to watch on one of the three TV stations available in the United States. If you wanted to watch a movie, you had to go to a movie theater, and so on.

Anyway, Steve Mallette and his wife Mary and their friends Roger Scarberry and his wife Linda went out driving that Tuesday night. Toward midnight, as they drove through the TNT area, their car came over a hill and they saw a huge creature in front of them.

Some 35 years later, in July 2001, Linda gave an interview to the author of the book I used as my main reference for this episode, called Mothman: The Facts Behind the Legend. She mentioned details that aren’t in any of the newspaper articles from 1966, or that give a better explanation of what happened than the articles did. There’s always a possibility that after 35 years, her memory wasn’t accurate, so I’m mostly going by the newspaper articles for my information, but she does mention something interesting in that interview.

She says this about the very first sighting of the creature:

“We had just topped a hill in the TNT area, and when the headlights of our car hit it, it looked directly at us, as if it was scared. It had one of its wings caught in a guide wire near a section of road close to the power plant, and was pulling on its wings with its hands, trying to free itself. Its hands were really big. It was really scared. We stopped the car and sat still while it was trying to free itself from the wire. We didn’t sit there long, just long enough to scare it, I think. It seemed to think we were going to hurt it. We were all screaming, ‘Go! Go! Go!’ But, we couldn’t perform the actual action of leaving the scene. It was like we were hypnotized. It finally got its wing loose from the wire and ran into the power plant. I felt sorry for it.”

In the original reports from 1966, the couples said the creature was 6 or 7 feet tall, or 1.8 to 2.1 meters, with a wingspan of 10 feet, or 3 meters. Its eyes were big and glowed red in the car’s headlights and its wings were white and angel-like. Its body was gray. While it was a clumsy runner, it could fly at an estimated 100 mph, or 161 km/hour.

Let’s stop right here before we talk about what else happened that spooky night. A ten-foot wingspan is big for a bird but not unheard-of. The trumpeter swan, several species of vulture, Andean condor, Marabou stork, two species of pelican, and several species of albatross have wingspans of at least ten feet across. Some of those have wingspans of 12 feet, or 3.7 meters.

The heaviest bird that can still fly is probably the great bustard, which has a wingspan of up to 8 feet, or 2.5 meters. A big male can weigh up to 44 lbs, or 18 kg. Mothman is described as a man-sized creature with wings. Even if it was stick-thin, a person that tall would weigh far too much to get off the ground with a wingspan barely longer than its armspan.

So that’s one thing to keep in mind. Let’s find out what happened next on that cold November night.

After their initial fright, Roger Scarberry, who was driving, naturally decided to get out of the TNT area. He headed back to town. The newspaper articles report that the strange creature followed them for some distance, gliding above their car. All four of the people in the car were frightened, and after about half an hour they decided to go to the police. In her 2001 interview, Linda said,

“We wouldn’t have went to the police, but it kept following us. We saw it sitting in different places as we drove back down Route 62 toward Point Pleasant, and saw it sitting in various places once we got in town, too. It was as if it was letting us know that it could catch up to us, no matter where we went, or how fast we went there. When we first left the TNT area, it was sitting on the sign when we went around the bend and when the headlights hit it, it went straight up into the air, very fast. That’s when it followed us and hit the top of the car two or three times while we were going over one hundred miles per hour down Route 62, toward Point Pleasant. The last place we saw it was sitting on top of the flood wall. It was sitting crouched down, with its arms around its legs and its wings tucked against its back. It didn’t seem scared, then. I guess it figured out that we weren’t going to hurt it, so it followed us. We didn’t know what else to do but go to the police station.”

So, the people in the car initially saw the creature with its wing caught in a guide wire, and when it got its wing free, it ran clumsily into a nearby abandoned building. But Linda says they then saw it as they were driving away from the TNT area, presumably just a few minutes later, and that it was sitting on a sign and flew straight up in the air when the headlights lit it up.

Next, she said the car was going about 100 mph but the creature was flying above it, keeping pace, and even hit the top of the car a few times. No one said they had their head out the window to look up, so how did they know the creature was flying over their car? Presumably they assumed that’s what it was doing because it thumped the roof of their car a few times—but how do they actually know that’s what happened? They heard some thumps and made an assumption because they were scared, but at 100 mph on a back road a car is naturally going to be making a lot of noise and shaking a lot as it goes over uneven pavement. Not to mention that none of the newspaper reports mention that the creature hit the roof of their car.

I don’t think the creature was ever flying above their car. I also think the creature they saw initially was not the same creature they saw fly up from the sign. I especially don’t think the thing they saw repeatedly as they drove to town was the same one as the others. But we’ll come back to that again too in a few minutes.

The story appeared in the papers on Wednesday, November 16 and that evening, half the town went to the TNT area to look for the creature. They spotted it, too. Four people reported seeing a huge bird at 10pm on Wednesday night. The creature stared at them as they sat in their car, then flew away. Reporters also turned up another sighting of a creature with red-reflecting eyes a few hours’ drive away, also on Tuesday night, and the gravedigger’s story from several days before. By Thursday night an estimated 1,000 people arrived at the TNT area to look for the creature.

By the end of November 1966, though, things were quieting down. A November 22 article in the Huntington Herald-Dispatch is titled “Mason Bird-Monster Presumed Gone Now.” I’ll read part of the article.

“It was a week ago today that the first sighting was reported of a large red-eyed winged creature in the McClintic area. Since then there have been about 10 or more similar reports.

“The latest report was by four teenaged youths who said they saw a large bird with red eyes fly away from their car at a very high rate of speed. This was 3 a.m. Sunday.”

The article goes on to quote various authorities, including a wildlife biologist who suggested it might be a sandhill crane. It also ends with the suggestion that the sightings may lead to an eventual legend and tourism draw, which is exactly what happened, although it took almost 50 years for it to really gain traction.

The sandhill crane theory is repeated in a lot of newspapers and occasionally crops up today, so let’s learn a little bit about the sandhill crane and see if it makes any sense as a solution.

The sandhill crane is a big bird. A big male can have a wingspan of almost 8 feet, or 2.3 meters. It’s mostly gray in color and since it has long legs, it can stand 4 ½ feet tall, or 135 cm. In the dark, this might look like a man-sized gray creature with angel wings.

But actually, the sandhill crane theory is nonsense and here’s why. First, sandhill cranes don’t migrate through West Virginia. By mid-November the nearest sandhill cranes are in their wintering grounds in Alabama or Florida, where they congregate in wetlands in the thousands, or on their way to those areas from their breeding grounds in Canada. Second, sandhill cranes are not nocturnal. They’re not active at night at all. They also aren’t clumsy on the ground—quite the opposite, since they’re well known for the elegant dances mated pairs perform. Third, the sandhill crane has a long neck, a small head, and a long bill, very different from the description given of Mothman. I’ve seen sandhill cranes and they’re beautiful birds, but there’s nothing spooky about them.

Other birds were suggested as culprits too, including a Canada goose, an Andean condor, and an oversized green heron. The Andean condor has never been seen in North America and isn’t nocturnal anyway, plus it looks like a gigantic vulture, which it is. The Canada goose is a common, well-known bird that has a long neck but short legs, and isn’t nocturnal. The green heron is a small and humble bird with a wingspan barely more than two feet across, or 68 cm. It has long yellow legs with really big feet and a long, heavy bill.

It’s worth noting that none of the newspaper reports mention a bill, although they do stress that the creature had big eyes that glowed red in the light. The head isn’t prominent either, with one newspaper quoting Roger Scarberry as saying the head was “not an outstanding characteristic.”

By the end of November, newspapers had started calling the creature Mothman more and more, and that’s the name that stuck even though it didn’t actually look like a moth. It did look like another animal, though, and the newspapers even picked up on that by the end of December 1966, when a snowy owl was shot in the area.

The snowy owl is also a large bird, mostly snow-white although young birds have black and gray markings. Its eyes are yellow. Its wingspan can be as much as six feet across, or 1.8 meters. It lives throughout the Arctic and nearby regions and is migratory, sometimes traveling long distances to find food. It mostly eats small animals like lemmings although it will also kill birds, including ducks. It’s rare for one to stray as far south as West Virginia, but the bird killed in December 1966 fits the description of a snowy owl. Its wingspan was almost five feet across, or 1.5 meters.

The newspapers declared that the snowy owl was the culprit behind the mothman sightings. Linda doesn’t agree according to her interview, and I actually don’t either. I do think it’s an owl, just not a snowy owl.

I don’t even think mothman was inspired by a very big owl, like a great horned owl. I think it was a much smaller, more common bird. The barn owl is common throughout much of the world, including West Virginia. Its wingspan is 3.5 feet across at most, or just over one meter.

The reason I think that mothman was a barn owl is because the four people in the car saw several of them around midnight, although they assumed they were seeing the same creature over and over. It’s nocturnal, although it’s also sometimes active at dawn and dusk or even in daytime, and it hunts low over the ground listening for the sound of small animals like mice. Because it flies so low, the barn owl is sometimes hit by cars and would certainly be vulnerable to getting a wing caught in the guide wire of a power pole.

The barn owl has a heart-shaped face that is usually white. Its body is pale underneath and gray or brown above. It doesn’t have ear tufts. Its eyes are large and completely black, but they reflect red at night. It also has an inconspicuous beak with a ridge of feathers at its base that can look like the suggestion of a human-like nose. In other words, it can look superficially like it has a human head and face, especially when seen at night in the glare of headlights, but weird and eerie because it doesn’t quite match up with human features.

One thing people usually don’t realize is that owls actually have quite long legs. An owl standing with its legs extended and its body straight genuinely looks like a tiny, creepy person with wings instead of arms. The male barn owl even shows off his legs and his flying ability in a courtship display called the moth flight, where he hovers in front of a female with his legs dangling.

The gravedigger who supposedly saw a manlike creature with wings fly over him only came forward after the story hit the newspapers. People who doubted it was the same creature because it was seen so far away from the TNT area are assuming Mothman was a single entity when it was probably different birds being seen in different places.

If you’re still doubtful, let’s go back to Linda’s interview that we quoted earlier. She says repeatedly that she thought the creature was scared and she also mentions she felt sorry for it. We can infer several things from these statements. First, Linda is obviously a compassionate person who can feel sorry for a creature even when she’s terrified by it. Second, she must be honest because she hasn’t changed her story to make Mothman seem menacing or dangerous. She seems to be reporting exactly what she remembers seeing and feeling. Third, Mothman does not actually seem to be very big.

When you’re scared, especially if it’s dark, anything threatening or out of place seems larger than it really is, especially when you think back on it. Combine that with most people not knowing that an owl has really long legs and not knowing how huge a big bird’s wings really are when they’re unfolded, and that’s the recipe for a monster story.

Linda does specifically say the creature had huge hands that it was using to pull at its wing. My suggestion is that the owl was standing on one leg, which was extended to its full length because it didn’t want to put any more pressure on its wing than it had to. It was either using its other foot to pull at its wing or, more likely to my mind, to try and grab the guide wire to hoist itself up to a better angle. In addition to having very long legs, owls have huge talons, and in the dark that huge talon would have looked like a human-like hand. With one leg on the ground and one leg stretched up toward its wing, Linda naturally assumed it had the ordinary compliment of two legs and two arms in addition to two wings.

Once the creature freed its wing, it didn’t fly away. Its wing was probably hurt and it ran toward the nearest shelter, an abandoned building. The witnesses said it was a clumsy runner, and that’s true of owls too. Their talons are made for grabbing, not walking on.

Then, a few minutes later, the witnesses saw the creature—or something that looked like it—on a sign as they left the TNT area. I don’t know the size of the sign but even if it was a big sign, would a human-sized creature really perch on it? It flew straight up, which also seems unlikely for a creature as heavy as a human six feet tall. Heavy birds can’t fly straight up, but an owl can because it’s actually not very heavy at all. It looks big because owls have such thick, fluffy feathers.

Later, Linda reports seeing the creature—or, again, something that looked like it—sitting on a wall. She says “It was sitting crouched down, with its arms around its legs and its wings tucked against its back.” This actually sounds like the way an owl usually sits except of course that an owl doesn’t have arms. Linda thought it had arms so she would have assumed they were wrapped around its legs, which is why she couldn’t see them.

Obviously the people who saw the creature were terrified. That’s a natural reaction to seeing something at night that you can’t identify and think might be dangerous and even supernatural. I don’t think any of the initial witnesses were lying or stupid or drunk, or anything like that. They had a frightening encounter they couldn’t understand, and that’s nothing to be ashamed of. Last year I woke up in the middle of the night and heard a little girl’s voice say, “Oh, hello there!” in the darkness of my bedroom in my locked house with no other people in the house with me. It was absolutely terrifying–but then I woke up better and realized that I’d been dreaming and my cat Dracula was snoring, and as I woke up my brain interpreted the little cat snores as a person talking. That doesn’t mean I was stupid and that doesn’t change the fact that I was really scared even after I realized what happened.

The trouble is that many people, after they’ve had a frightening experience like this, refuse to consider that they might have been wrong about what they saw. They say things like, “I know what I saw!” without taking into account that maybe their brain was doing its best to fill in details so they could better evaluate the potential danger. You brain is hard-wired to give you as much information about danger as possible so you can decide whether to run away or prepare to fight or just laugh and tell your little brother he didn’t actually scare you. If you can’t see details properly because it’s dark and the car’s headlights are making weird shadows, your brain fills in the details based on what you can see (and what you expect to see), and it’s not always correct. If in doubt, your brain assumes the thing you’re seeing is dangerous. That’s how our far-distant ancestors survived when movement in tall grass might actually have been a cave bear and not just the wind.

In other words, after a scary experience is over and you’re thinking back about what happened, ask yourself if it’s more likely that you saw a flying man with wings and red eyes, or if you saw an owl and your brain added other details to convince you to run just in case you were in danger.

You can find Strange Animals Podcast at strangeanimalspodcast.blubrry.net. That’s blueberry without any E’s. If you have questions, comments, or suggestions for future episodes, email us at strangeanimalspodcast@gmail.com. If you like the podcast and want to help us out, leave a rating and review on Apple Podcasts or Podchaser, or just tell a friend. We also have a Patreon at patreon.com/strangeanimalspodcast if you’d like to support us that way and get monthly bonus episodes.

Thanks for listening!

Episode 245: The Devil-Pig

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Don’t forget the Kickstarter, as if I’d let you forget it: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/kateshaw/beyond-bigfoot-and-nessie

Our next monster for monster month is the devil-pig! It’s probably not a devil although it might be a pig.

The Asian tapir and its remarkable snoot:

The New Guinea carving:

The “gazeka” as imagined in the early 20th century:

Domestic and feral hogs are common in New Guinea:

Show transcript:

Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw.

Don’t forget that our Kickstarter is still going on to fund the mystery animals book Beyond Bigfoot & Nessie! There’s a link in the show notes so you can click through and look at the different tiers available. We’re doing really well so far, so thanks to those of you who have already backed the project or just shared it with your friends! https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/kateshaw/beyond-bigfoot-and-nessie

Our next monster month episode is about a mystery animal from New Guinea. We’ve learned a lot about New Guinea’s birds this year, and it comes up repeatedly in other episodes too because it’s such a huge island with varied ecosystems. It also has steep mountains that have hardly been explored by scientists or even locals. If you want to learn more about New Guinea itself, I recommend episode 206, which is the first of our episodes this year about strange birds of New Guinea. But this week, let’s learn about the devil-pig! It’s also sometimes called the gazeka, but we’ll come back to that later.

The story starts in 1875, when a man named Alfred O. Walker sent a letter to the journal Nature about a discovery on the north coast of Papua New Guinea. It wasn’t the discovery of an animal itself but a big pile of dung from an unknown animal. The dung pile was so big that the people who found it thought it must be from some kind of rhinoceros. The problem is that New Guinea doesn’t have any rhinos.

The dung pile was discovered by a British expedition led by Lt. Sidney Smith and Captain Moresby from the ship H.M.S. Basilisk. After the report was published in Nature, a German zoologist wrote to say he’d been to New Guinea too and that the people living there had told him about a big animal with a long snout, which they referred to as a giant pig. It supposedly stood 6 feet tall at the shoulder, or 1.8 meters, and was very rare.

If you do a search for the devil-pig online, you’ll see it called the gazeka in a lot of places. Let’s discuss the word gazeka, because it doesn’t have anything to do with New Guinea. In fact, it comes from an adaptation of a French musical called The Little Michus. I bet you didn’t expect that. The musical is about two girls with the last name of Michu. One girl was given to the Michu family as a baby by her father, a general, who had to leave the country. The Michus had a baby daughter of the same age, and one day without thinking the father decided to give both babies a bath at the same time—and mixed them up. So no one knew which girl was which, but they grew up as sisters who think they’re twins and are devoted to each other. The play takes place when they’re both seventeen and the general suddenly shows up demanding his daughter back.

It’s a funny musical and was popular in the original French in 1897, but in 1905 an English translation was performed in London and was a huge hit. It ran for 400 performances and became part of the pop culture of the day. So where does the gazeka come in?

George Graves was a famous English comic actor, and he added an extra line or two to the play to get a laugh. He tells about a drunken explorer who thought he had seen a strange animal called the gazeka while under the influence of whiskey. The play was so popular, and the gazeka was considered so funny, that the idea just took off. The theater manager ran a competition for people to make drawings of the gazeka, and the winning drawing was made into a design that appeared on little charms, toys, and even in some advertisements for Perrier. The gazeka was even spun off into its own little song and dance in another play.

That was in 1905. In spring of 1906 an explorer called Captain Charles A.W. Monckton led an expedition to Papua New Guinea, and on May 10 two members of the team were sent to investigate some tracks the expedition had found the previous day. The team members included an army private named Ogi and a village constable called Oina who acted as Ogi’s guide. The two became separated at some point, and while he was looking for Oina, Ogi stumbled across two weird animals grazing in a grassy clearing. The devil-pigs!

The animals were only sort of piglike. Later Ogi reported that they were dark in color with a patterned coat, cloven hooves, horse-like tail, and a long snout. They stood about 3.5 feet tall, or 106 centimeters, and were 5 feet long, or 1.5 meters. He shot at one but missed, probably because he was so scared, but he claimed later that his hands were shaking because he was cold.

The tracks the two men were investigating were of a large cloven-footed animal. Captain Monckton thought the tracks must be made by the devil-pigs.

The story hit the newspapers while the gazeka craze was still popular. People started calling the devil-pigs Monckton’s Gazeka. Monckton didn’t appreciate this, because he didn’t like being compared to someone who saw imaginary animals while drunk.

So what could the devil-pig actually be?

One guess is that it was an unknown species of tapir. We talked about the tapir in episode 18, where I chose the only pronunciation of tapir that no one else in the world uses. The tapir looks kind of like a pig but it’s actually much more closely related to horses and rhinos. It has four toes on its front legs, three on its hind legs, and each toe has a large nail that looks like a little hoof. It also has a rounded body with a pronounced rump, a stubby little tail, and a long head with a short but prehensile trunk.

There are four known species of tapir alive today, three in Central and South America and one in Asia. It’s a shy, largely solitary, mostly nocturnal animal that prefers forests near rivers or streams. It spends a lot of time in water, eating water plants and cooling off when it’s hot. It swims well and can use its short trunk as a snorkel. Technically the trunk is called a proboscis, and the tapir mostly uses it to help gather plants.

As far as we know, there have never been any tapirs in New Guinea. The only tapir that lives in Asia today is the Asian tapir, which is mostly white or pale gray with black or dark gray forequarters and legs. It lives in lowland rainforests in Thailand, Sumatra, Myanmar, and a few other places, but not New Guinea. It’s the largest species of tapir alive today, up to 3 feet 7 inches tall, or 110 centimeters.

In 1962 some stone carvings were discovered in Papua New Guinea. The carvings are a few thousand years old and depict a strange animal. It looks a little like an anteater sitting up on its bottom with its front paws on its round belly, although there’s no tail. Its ears are small, its eyes are large, and it has a long nose with large nostrils at the end. It’s usually said to depict the long-beaked echidna, a small spiny monotreme mammal that lives in New Guinea, although it doesn’t look a lot like one.

In 1987 a mammologist named James Menzies looked at the carvings and made a suggestion. Instead of an echidna, he thought the carvings might depict a marsupial called a palorchestid diprotodont. The word diprotodont may make you perk your ears up, because we talked about it earlier this year in episode 224. Palorchestes is a genus of marsupials related to the diprotodont we talked about in that episode, but generally smaller, with the largest species being about the size of a horse. It had large claws on the front feet and a long tongue like a giraffe’s. Until recently, it was thought to have a short proboscis like a tapir, but a June 2020 study indicates it probably had prehensile lips instead. It used all these adaptations to strip leaves from branches.

Since Palorchestes probably didn’t have a trunk after all, and since its fossil remains have only been found in Australia, and since it went extinct around 13,000 years ago, the carvings probably don’t depict it. It probably also doesn’t depict a tapir. New Guinea is close to Australia and all of its native mammals are marsupials. The tapir is a placental mammal. That doesn’t mean a species of tapir didn’t once live on the island, but we have no fossil remains and the carvings don’t resemble a tapir all that much.

One animal that definitely lives in New Guinea is the pig, which was introduced to the island thousands of years ago by humans. Wild boars might be responsible for the huge cloven hoof prints found by explorers in New Guinea.

That doesn’t mean there isn’t an unknown hoofed animal hiding on the island, though. New Guinea is still not very well explored by scientists or even locals, so there are certainly animals living there that are completely unknown to science. Maybe one is a giant tapir or some other, more mysterious animal.

You can find Strange Animals Podcast at strangeanimalspodcast.blubrry.net. That’s blueberry without any E’s. If you have questions, comments, or suggestions for future episodes, email us at strangeanimalspodcast@gmail.com. If you like the podcast and want to help us out, leave us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts or Podchaser, or just tell a friend. We also have a Patreon at patreon.com/strangeanimalspodcast if you’d like to support us that way.

Thanks for listening!

Kickstarter bonus! The Ningen

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THE KICKSTARTER IS LIVE AND I’M SO EXCITED!

The Kickstarter campaign is HERE! If you’re not sure how Kickstarter works, that’s what we talk about at the beginning of this episode. I then go over the different rewards available and finally we have a very short chapter from the audiobook.

Kickstarter FAQ

I talk about the Kickstarter for way too long, so if you don’t care you can jump ahead to 9:56 to listen to the actual chapter. Also, I am definitely going to re-record that chapter for the actual audiobook because I recorded it before I made adjustments to my mic.

One of the pictures of a ningen you’ll find online. It’s art, not a photograph:

Show transcript:

Welcome to a special bonus episode of Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw.

The Kickstarter funded successfully so there’s no need to have a ten-minute explanation of the Kickstarter tiers. I’ve cut all that out so anyone who wants to listen to this little bonus episode about the Ningen can do so without fast-forwarding a lot first. This is one of the new chapters from the book Beyond Bigfoot & Nessie: Lesser-Known Mystery Animals from Around the World, although I will be re-recording it for the audiobook version now that I’ve learned a little more about making the audio sound good.

The Ningen

The seas around Antarctica are cold and stormy. To humans it seems unhospitable, a deadly ocean surrounding an icy landmass. But the Antarctic Ocean is home to many animals, from orcas and penguins to blue whales and colossal squid, not to mention the migratory birds, cold-adapted fish, and many small animals that live in the depths. New animals are constantly being discovered, but it’s also not very well explored.

Stories from Japanese whalers who visit the area supposedly tell of a strange creature called the ningen, which is occasionally seen in the freezing ocean. It’s usually white and can be the size of a big person or the size of a baleen whale. It’s long and relatively slender, and while details vary, it’s generally said to have a human-like face, or at least large eyes and a slit-like mouth. It also has arms instead of flippers and either a whale-like tail or human-like legs.

These stories don’t come from long ago, though. The first post about the ningen appeared in 2002 in a Japanese forum thread about giant fish. Interest in the topic died down within a few months, until 2007 when the ningen was the subject of both a manga and a magazine article.

The ningen didn’t start appearing in English language sites until 2010. While it’s never been as well-known as many so-called cryptids, it has been the subject of short stories and books, creepy art, a J-pop song, and lots of speculation.

The question, of course, is whether the ningen is a real animal or a hoax. The initial post was made by an anonymous woman who claimed to be repeating something an unnamed whaler friend told her he’d experienced, and her friend also said that the Japanese government was baffled, and that the government was engaged in a cover-up so no one else would learn about the mystery animal. This has all the hallmarks of a modern urban legend. I don’t think the ningen is a real animal.

Just for fun, though, if it was a real animal, what might it be? The beluga whale is the first thing I thought of, since it’s white, grows around 18 feet long, or 5.5 meters, and has a small rounded head with features that look sort of human-like. But the beluga whale only lives in the Arctic, not the Antarctic. That’s the opposite side of the world.

Of the whales that do live around the Antarctic for at least part of the year, none are white all over and most are dark gray or black. Very rarely, though, a whale is born with albinism, which means its skin lacks pigment. As a result, it looks white or very pale gray. An albino humpback whale called Migaloo has been spotted off the coast of Australia repeatedly since 1991, for instance.

An albinistic bowhead or right whale living in the Antarctic might be seen occasionally by whalers who don’t realize they’re all seeing the same individual. Both the bowhead and right whales have deep, rounded rostrums that could potentially look like a human-like face—slightly, if you were looking at it through fog or darkness, and were already aware of the story of the ningen.

Then again, if the ningen is a real animal, it might be a whale that’s completely unknown to science. There are still a lot of beaked whales we know almost nothing about, and new species of beaked whale are occasionally discovered. The ningen might not even be a whale at all but something else entirely.

Still, while it’s a fun story, it’s probably not real. You can’t believe everything you read on the internet.

Thanks for supporting the podcast and the Kickstarter! When we reach 100 backers on the Kickstarter, we’ll have a second bonus episode with another of the new chapters from the audiobook, even if all 100 pledges are just for a dollar.

Thanks for listening!

Episode 244: The Wampus Cat

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It’s the beginning of MONSTER MONTH! This episode’s not very spooky unless you’re outside at night and hear a terrifying scream! To be fair, that would be spooky even if you don’t know anything about the wampus cat.

THE KICKSTARTER GOES LIVE IN JUST TWO DAYS!!

Further watching:

The Growling, Ferocious, Diurnal Kitty Cat: The Jaguarundi

Further reading:

My original article about the wampus cat will appear in Flying Snake #21. You can order it and back issues here and here.

The cougar:

A jaguar with her black jaguar cub (picture by Alma Leaper):

The jaguarundi looks kind of like an otter:

Jaguarundis come in different solid colors, including black or nearly black:

Show transcript:

Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw.

It’s October at last! Yes, that best of all months, MONSTER MONTH!

This episode started out as an article I wrote for the magazine Flying Snake, which is an awesome little magazine that you might like. I’ll put a link in the show notes if you want to order a copy.

Also, in only TWO DAYS we’re kicking off our Kickstarter to fund the Strange Animals Podcast book! It’s done and now I just need to pay the people who are going to make the cover and do the interior design to make it look great! The Kickstarter will go live on Wednesday, October 6, 2021 and will run through Friday, November 5, 2021, which gives you lots of time to decide if you want to back the project. On Wednesday I’ll be releasing a bonus episode to remind you that the Kickstarter has begun, explain exactly how Kickstarter works in case you’re not sure, and share a chapter from the audio version of the book about a mystery animal we’ve never covered before. If you want to look at the Kickstarter page now, though, there’s a link in the show notes so you can look at it and even set it so that Kickstarter will send you an email when the campaign starts. There’s an early-bird special that will only be available on the first day of the campaign, just saying.

But right now, let’s kickstart monster month with an episode about the wampus cat! The wampus cat, or just wampus, has appeared in folklore throughout North America for over a hundred years and probably much longer, especially in mountainous areas in the eastern portion of the continent.

The term actually comes from the word catawampus, probably related to the phrase catty corner. Both words mean “something that’s askew or turned diagonally,” but catawampus was also once used in the southeastern United States to describe any strange creature lurking in the forest. It was a short step from catawampus to wampus cat, possibly also influenced by the word catamount, used for the cougar and other large cats native to North America.

Whatever the origins of the word, the wampus cat was usually considered to be a real animal. Some people probably used the term as a synonym for catamount, but many people firmly believed the wampus was a different animal from the cougar, bobcat, or lynx. It was usually supposed to be a type of big cat, although not necessarily.

The word wampus also once referred to a dress-like garment resembling a knee-length smock worn over leggings, also called a wampus coat. The first newspaper use of wampus referring to an animal doesn’t appear until the very end of the 19th century. A Missouri paper wrote in May 1899:

They knew immediately the source of the hair-raising scream. The “wampus” was after them. They could see it; it was a big black thing with long hair and large feet.

What may be a follow-up to that story, from a different Missouri newspaper, appeared in November 1899 and was headlined “THE WAMPUS IS DEAD.”

Many described it as gray wolf, but others refused to believe such an animal was here and lightly spoke of the wampus. It frequented the dark woods at day time, coming forth at night and roaming around, uttering a strange cry. Woe unto the traveler overtaken by darkness, for the night was made hideous by the shrill cry. […]

On last Sunday night George Jolliff secreted himself in a tree south of his house and about 7 o’clock saw the long-sought monster, accompanied by several dogs, approaching; on seeing his dog, which was tied beneath the tree, they come under the tree and Mr. Jolliff fired, severely wounding the animal. Hastily climbing down, he fired again and this stopped the monster in his tracks. […]

It measured 6 feet 7 inches in length and 2 feet 4 inches in height; some say it is a female wolf, others a cross between the dog and wolf species. It is dark brown tinged with red and black.

This sounds like a coyote or red wolf, especially considering that it was accompanied by dogs. The size of the animal in metric is 2 meters long, presumably including the tail, and 73 cm tall. The height is accurate for a coyote or red wolf but is much longer than even a gray wolf. It’s possible the animal had an unusually long tail or there was a little exaggeration going on. Whatever the animal was, dogs, coyotes, and wolves don’t make a screaming sound, so this wasn’t the same animal that kept frightening people with its shrill cries.

By the beginning of the 1900s, the wampus as an animal had completely overtaken the use of the word as an article of clothing. The first baseball team named the Wampus Cats, from Texas, appears in 1908, which argues that the term wampus cat had been in common use for some time. The surge of articles about the wampus also suggests the term had made its way from local use into the popular culture. By the 1910s, any unidentified animal is referred to as a wampus, from a striped rodent-like animal to an exhibit in a traveling menagerie, which unfortunately wasn’t described. Humorous articles claiming to answer the question of “what is the wampus?” appear alongside humorous poetry about the wampus. Well, it supposed to be humorous but it’s not actually funny. More sports teams named the Wampus Cats also appear in the 1910s, along with a cheer squad in Oklahoma called the Wampus Kittens—although interestingly, the Wampus Kittens were cheering the Wildcats.

By the 1920s, newspaper reports of the wampus cat were routine. Its description varies and most reports are light on definite details. Here are some examples of descriptions.

November 1897 (near Clarksville, Tennessee): “Mr. Gaisser was within ten feet of the strange animal and describes it as being about six feet in length [that’s 1.8 meters], of a ferocious appearance, having long claws and looking as though it could attack and dispatch a man as easily as a hog. […] What kind of an animal it is Mr. Gaisser cannot say. It has the appearance of being either a jaguar, mountain lion or a catamount.”

November 1918 (near Vestal, Tennessee, a community in south Knoxville): “It looked very much like a leopard. It was a short haired animal, with a slick, glossy coat. It was white and gray spotted, and had a long tail, with a bushy end.”

December 1921 (in Howell County, Missouri): “Drake says it was a long lanky animal, had spots on it. Then Bill Webb saw the ‘wampus cat.’ It was in the day time. Bill says it was running and disappeared in a second. It was built like a tiger and light yellow in color, he reports.”

January 1926 (near the Spring Creek community of Crenshaw County, Alabama): “The animal has been seen by a number of people, and apparently either is a panther or a monster wildcat from the recesses of Patsalega swamp. The beast is described as being of the size of a large shepherd dog, dark of hue and shaggy of coat. It steps from eighteen to twenty inches while walking, and when running it covers the ground in huge leaps of from six to ten feet. It has long claws, and leaves a footprint measuring two and one-half inches in width.” That’s about 6.5 centimeters, which is not a very big pawprint for a big cat; a cougar’s print would be up to four inches across, or 10 centimeters.

By the 1940s, newspaper mentions of the wampus as an animal diminish, taken over by sports teams with the name. By the 1960s wampus cat articles are mostly space-filling pieces talking about traditions among local oldtimers, usually with a humorous tone although again, they’re not actually funny, and fewer sports teams carry the name. By the 2000s, when reporters were doing their research online, any mention of a wampus cat is accompanied by the bogus Cherokee story about a woman who could turn into a wildcat, and usually also claim that “wampus” is a Cherokee word.

Even though the term wampus fell out of favor slowly after its peak in the late 1920s, reports of cat-like animals were still appearing in newspapers. They just didn’t get called wampus cats. A search for “strange animals” on Newspapers.com will bring up dozens of reports. Here are a few from the 1950s and 60s.

January 1951 (Pennsylvania): “Sent to hunt a strange animal reportedly sighted in the Noxen-Harveys Lake area, three bloodhounds today were themselves the objects of an extensive search in that region. Meanwhile, other reports of ‘strange’ animals came from the Hazleton area. The three bloodhounds…began trailing the animal, variously described as a bobcat, lynx, or mountain lion….”

February 1955 (South Carolina): “A resident…reported today he had seen the animal yesterday and described it as being black and having long hair and a long bushy tail. Mr. Findley said he heard weird sounds about 10 o’clock last night and went out with a light and gun, but neither saw nor heard anything more. He said the sounds were similar to a huge cat.”

July 1962 (Cherrytree Township, Pennsylvania): “According to Mr. Black, the large animal jumped from the limb of an oak tree on his farm and fled into the cover of a nearby game preserve. […] He pointed out the marks on the ground where the animal landed and inspected claw marks on the tree. […] Asked to compare its size with that of a large dog, the farmer said it was considerably larger and tawney coated.”

February 1963 (near Roan Mountain in the Cherokee National Forest, south of Elizabethton, Tennessee): “It has a track larger than a big dog, and is black in color. A real shiny black. Most of the dogs refuse to track or bay this strange animal and those with nerve enough to get close to the animal wish they hadn’t. Mr. Birchfield had one dog that was real brave and ventured close, but the poor dog was carried home by Birchfield with broken bones.”

September 1965 (Fairview, North Carolina): “The ‘animal,’ described as dark in [color], resembling a cat but much larger, was first seen when the Thomasville-Lexington reservoir was under construction in the late 1950’s. […] It has been reported that the cries sound ‘like cats fighting, then ending with the sound of a bob-white bird.’”

I only stop in 1965 because otherwise this episode would be about two hours long and very repetitive.

Reports still occur today, posted online. In a May 2018 comment on an article about wampus cats, someone named Greg Brashear writes “I saw what the old farmers in my area in north central Ky. [Kentucky] call a ‘wompus cat’. […] It was bigger than a bobcat but smaller than a cougar with yellow eyes and a [disproportionately] long tail and it was solid black.”

The cougar (also called a mountain lion, puma, painter, catamount, or panther) was once common throughout most of the Americas but was hunted to extinction in much of the eastern United States around the early to mid-20th century. It’s a big animal, able to kill deer, with a big male weighing as much as 100 kg [220 lb]. It can leap enormous distances—up to 40 feet while running, or 12 meters, up to 18 feet straight up into a tree, or 5 1/2 meters—and can sprint up to 50 mph, or 80 km/hour. It doesn’t roar but instead produces an unearthly scream. It can also purr.

This is what a cougar sounds like:

[cougar scream]

There’s no doubt that at least some wampus cat reports were cougars. Cougar sightings have continued in the eastern United States and Canada through the present day. Young male cougars travel widely to establish a territory, so most modern sightings in the southeast are probably of young males who have traveled from populations in the west. There’s evidence that many more cougars have started moving into the northeastern United States and Canada and may have even established breeding populations.

The cougar varies in color from tawny to reddish and is occasionally greyish-white. Occasionally a leucistic individual (meaning white or partially white) is caught on camera traps, but there has never been a confirmed sighting of a melanistic cougar (meaning black). It’s likely that sightings of wampus cats described as yellow or gray and white are actually cougar sightings.

Another North American cat, the jaguar, is sometimes black in color. Jaguars are fairly common in South America but much less common in Central and North America. North American jaguars are also much smaller than South American populations, only about half the size of a cougar. The jaguar strongly resembles the leopard, with rosette-like black spots on a tawny or yellowish background. Melanistic jaguars are usually called black panthers and are rare in the North American population.

By 1960 the jaguar was almost completely extirpated in the United States (that means driven to extinction in a particular area), but a population remains in northern Mexico and occasionally one roams across the border into Arizona, Texas, or New Mexico. It prefers heavily forested areas near water.

It’s possible, though very unlikely, that a young male black panther could roam as far as the eastern United States and contribute to wampus cat sightings. On the other hand, the jaguar doesn’t fit wampus cat descriptions very well either. The jaguar roars instead of screaming like the cougar, and its smaller stature and extreme shyness make it unlikely to venture close to humans.

This is what a jaguar sounds like:

[jaguar sounds]

There is a third possibility, assuming the wampus cat isn’t an animal new to science. The jaguarundi is also native to the Americas, including most of South and Central America through northern Mexico. It’s related to the cougar and is solid colored, without spots, with a coat that can be black, gray-brown, or reddish. It’s only about twice the size of a domestic cat but looks much different.

The jaguarundi’s body is long and its legs are relatively short in proportion, which means it has a somewhat otter-like gait when it runs. Its rounded face has small round ears, also resembling an otter. Its tail is long, thick, and bushy. It lives in forests, rainforests, open areas (as long as there’s brush to hide in), deserts, and mountains across a wide range, but it’s not very well studied.

The jaguarundi used to be found in the United States, although its former range is unclear. Confirmed and/or credible sightings have been reported in Texas, Arizona, Alabama, and especially Florida, including roadkill animals. It mostly eats small animals like rodents, rabbits, birds, lizards, and fish. It’s mostly nocturnal but is somewhat active during the day as well. It has at least 13 different calls, including whistles, growls, screams, and chattering and chirping.

This is what a jaguarundi sounds like. I apologize for the music in the background; there’s not a lot of jaguarundi calls to choose from online and I had to grab this audio from a National Geographic video. There’s a link in the show notes to the original if you’d like to watch the whole thing:

[jaguarundi sound]

It’s interesting to compare the jaguarundi’s variety of calls to some of the wampus cat sightings. While the jaguarundi isn’t a large animal and can’t kill pigs and dogs, as is frequently reported for the wampus cat, it’s a vocal animal and can and does kill domestic poultry. Brashear’s 2018 comment about a black cat with a disproportionately long tail sounds like a potential jaguarundi, although he described it as bigger than a bobcat when the bobcat is typically larger (although not as long, especially if you include the tail). The 1965 report of a dark-colored cat whose screams ended with a bird-like call also sounds like the jaguarundi. The bobwhite referred to in that sighting makes a two-tone whistle that sounds like this:

[bobwhite call]

It’s exciting to think that many wampus cat sightings might be of the jaguarundi, especially since sightings continue to the present day. Fortunately, the jaguarundi is a protected species in the United States and throughout most of its range. It would be great if these interesting wild cats were found to have established breeding populations in the less populated areas of North America.

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