Rooster, didn't we have the chupacabra as well?
Newspapers sometimes report sightings of a black panther loose in the mountains where I live. It doesn't exist, but the reports keep coming. Have there ever been reports of strange animals, ghosts, or other impossible things in your area?
We aways have the random sighting of the glowing deer during deer season. Truth be told, one old guy in the area said the glowing green deer is actually a deer that invaded his green house and knocked over a ladder that had a bucket of green paint on it. Why it glows no one knows.
Yes, but only in the weeks leading up to Christmas. There are sightings of a fat bearded guy, wearing a red suit. He's usually seen at the mall or standing outside Walmart ringing a bell while standing next to a bucket of coins.
We've had " Bigfoot" sightings for as many years as I can remember. No actual proof but plenty of people who say they saw it.
Here in central Florida there are reports of a Green Swamp Monster which is a cousin to Bigfoot. I saw something very early one morning about 8 years ago in my high car beams that gave me goosebumps entering the Ringling Brothers well guarded wood tract where the keep their retired elephants and cant explain what I saw but it was huge, walking erect and stepped over the 4 ft barb wire fence with ease and into the woods
Oh Didge! I had missed this question of yours...and I will say that there have been Bigfoot legends very close to where I spend my childhood here in Washington State.
The legends are so powerful that I do not discount them...at the same time it is hard to fully believe them, but still the stories are very very credible.
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Another instance; when I was camping in the Sonoran Desert of Arizona, a panther had come up from Mexico...closer to civilization than they usually come. In my tent, I could hear it at night and was fascinated, for some reason I have always been too dumb to be frightened.
This is not far from where I live:
Very early one morning in midsummer, the greater part of 20 years ago, I was out on my bike for an early ride around the villages, when I saw up ahead, what I thought was a large black dog sitting on the pavement.
As I got closer, it got up and crept away. It was clearly much more cat than dog.
I didn't report it, I didn't want to look like another idiot who'd misidentified a large domestic cat.
Over the next few weeks there were a couple of other sightings in the area, by people who were braver than me in talking about them.
Eventually, many years later I retold my story to a chap who has created a website about big cat sightings - it might even have been this one:
http://www.ukbigcats.co.uk/history.asp
Only to hear that a number of other people had already reported a big cat in the area.
The one thing that DOES intrigue me though is, that eventually, no matter how good such animals are keeping themselves hidden**, you'd expect, in a small island like ours, that someone would have come across a dead one, or skeletal remains, and as far as I can tell, no-one ever has.
(Is that the longest sentence since they sent down the Kray twins?)
** I was once in a South African Nature reserve, where the "number of Leopard is unknown, but believed to be plentiful". - Guess how many I saw? Yes, that's right, zip.
We have the black panther sightings, often seen in Cornwall. We also have the Big Foot sightings apparently he has got on a plane and is now living in woodland in Lincolnshire. Nearly every old pub has it's resident ghost. We have numerous UFO and extra-terrestrial sightings.
Chislehurst caves is meant to be haunted. The caves stretch some 20 miles and are entirely man-made. Some of the oldest parts date back 8,000 years. They were excavated by prehistoric man in order to extract the chalk and flint. During World War II, the caves were used as both an air-raid shelter and an underground hospital. During the 50′s 60s and 70s the caves became a popular music venue hosting some of the biggest names of the day in jazz and rock including The Who, Jimi Hendrix and the Rolling Stones. Because of the acoustics it was possible to hold several concerts at once in separate locations without them interfering with each other. Now they are often used as a location for horror and science-fiction films. The Chislehurst Caves ghost is a lady in white who is sometimes seen 'floating' across the water of the caves Haunted Pool. There is a tradition that she must have been murdered there by her husband. However, there does not appear to be any tangible evidence that this is the reason for her appearance.
There used to be a challenge that anyone who spent a whole night in the caves would win £5, quite a sum of money in those days. One man did succeed. However, in 1986 two cave guides attempted the challenge and one of them had to be hospitalised after having what appeared to be an epileptic fit. This was odd as he had never had a fit before. And from that date, the challenge was withdrawn.
