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The formerly-known-as-Twitter account @mysteryanimals continues for the moment.
In view of the sudden and rapid decline of the hellsite formerly known as Twitter, bigcatsofsuffolk.com and updates and events around the book Mystery Animals of Suffolk now have a BlueSky account, @mysteryanimals.bsky.social.
The formerly-known-as-Twitter account @mysteryanimals continues for the moment.
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“PRAY resolve me in your next Week’s Paper, whether there be any such Thing in Nature as Mermen and Mermaids, I being not yet satisfied in the verity thereof, notwithstanding the Reports of Seamen and others.” That was the plea from a letter writer to the Ipswich Journal, 27 May 1721. The vexed reader of the Ipswich Journal may well have believed in mermaids, possibly because his parents had told him from an early age to believe in mermaids (as they might convince their infants to believe in Father Christmas today). His parents would have a very practical reason for doing so, as we will see.
With the possible exception of the Orford “merman” found by fishermen off the coast at Orford Ness and described by medieval chronicler Ralph of Coggeshall, Suffolk’s merfolk were all female – mermaids rather than mermen. And “Reports of Seamen” didn’t feature in Suffolk mermaid traditions. The Orford merman – possibly just a human gone feral – was the only merperson found off the coast, as all the Suffolk mermaids were freshwater mermaids, found in the county’s rivers, lakes, wells, pools and even its drainage ditches.
Rendlesham had a “Mermaid’s Pond,” also known as the S-pond, as it was shaped like a letter “S”. A reader of the Ipswich Journal in the 1870s – a man who wrote to the newspaper describing his childhood there some 50 years earlier – recalled there were trees around the edge of the S-shaped pond at one end, and the grass around it “in early spring full of flowers.” (It’s near Cottage Wood and a tumulus, and now just north of the sewage works.) But if our Ipswich Journal reader who was a boy back in 1814 strayed too near the edge of the pond, “our nursemaid would call out to us not to go so near ‘lest the mermaid should come’” and hook him and his playmates in with a crome fork, which was a sort of rake with curved teeth, used as a muckraker. (“Suffolk Notes & Queries”, Ipswich Journal 1877, quoted by the Fairy Investigation Society website.)
This figure on a shopfront in the Suffolk town of Woodbridge, a port on the River Deben, dates from the 1660s. It could be a melusine, a twin-tailed mermaid said to live in fresh water. The twin tails are on either side of her torso, with the tips of the flukes of her fishy tails pointing outwards.
The “S-Pond” at Rendlesham today, on the western edge of Cottage Wood. Photo: copyright Google Maps.
The author of The Book of Days wrote in the 1860s how he was told by one Suffolk child that mermaids were “them nasty things what crome you into the water,” while another child from the county told him he’d actually seen a mermaid once, “a grit hig thing loike a feesh.” Kate Welham of Bacton, near Stowmarket, recalled being told as a child in around 1908 to stay away from mermaid-infested ponds. (The Book of Days, R. Chambers, W & R Chambers, 1863-4; Paranormal Suffolk: True Ghost Stories, Christopher Reeve, Amberley, Stroud 2009.)
Just outside Bury St Edmunds in Babwell Fen Meadows, once the private fishing lake of the Abbot of St Edmundsbury, there were in the mid-nineteenth century “an abundance of beautiful water” fed by springs, and in “the low grounds” near the road. (This is probably what’s now the Fornham Road.) A mermaid was to be found in the body of water then known as the Mermaid’s Pits. They were named after a “love-sick maid” who had drowned herself there, and who then turned into a mermaid; whether or not she was an evil mermaid who pulled in children wasn’t known, but there was supposed to be an “abundance” of mermaids in the drainage ditches and ponds locally. Local mothers warned their children to stay away from these. There’s now a Mermaid Close here, just off the Fornham Road, with a small body of water nearby. (A Handbook of Bury St. Edmunds, Samuel Tymms, F. Lankester, 1859. Alex McWhirter, Heritage Officer for West Suffolk, said his enquiries on the Mermaid’s Pits on my behalf had “drawn a blank.”
Pub sign for The Mermaid pub on Ipswich’s London Road, on the banks of the River Gipping.
A look at Google Earth shows some features round there that appear on older maps as pools but have now been drained. Some of the Mermaid’s Pits may have fallen on hard times, ending up as the settling ponds at what’s now the Silver Spoon factory. It was previously the British Sugar factory, manufacturing raw sugar from sugar beet in a process that involved washing the beets in a lot of water, which had to end up somewhere. For this reason, sugar factories tended to be built near where there was a ready supply of water. The smell of sugar beet tended to attract coypus, and the East Anglian sugar factory settling ponds usually had a “terrible smell” attached to them, according to a source who worked in other East Anglian sugar plants back in the 1970s. You can still see the silos of the Bury Silver Spoon plant as a landmark near the station, with big piles of sugar beet often stacked nearby. In any event, these settling ponds today would be no place fit for a freshwater mermaid to lurk, however evil.
The Silver Spoon sugar factory in Bury St Edmunds, along the Fornham Road. At the top of the photo are the settling ponds for the factory that could be the ancient “Mermaid Pits,” also known as the “Merry Maid Pits.”
A short distance from Bury St Edmunds, on the River Lark at Fornham All Saints and just a little bit further upriver at Hengrave, there was said to be a mermaid, either in the river or in the well. The mermaid – apparently without the use of a curved rake – would grab and drown children who ventured too close or even touched the water. There was also a phantom woman on a horse who was seen to ride across the surface of the nearby mere (lake) on certain days of the year. The ghost story writer MR James grew up nearby, at Great Livermere, and penned many a short story about “antiquarians” researching the more peculiar corners of forgotten Suffolk history and archaeology and ending up meeting a sticky end at the hands of some ancient malevolent East Anglian entity that they’d stirred up. The area around Fornham All Saints, with its massive Neolithic and Bronze Age monument (now threatened by housing development) inspired James’s ominously-titled ghost story A Warning to the Curious. (Alan Murdie, “Ghostwatch”, Fortean Times FT 325;18, March 2015, quoting “Folklore from S.E. Suffolk”, Lady E. C. Gurdon, Folklore, December 1892.)
The people of the fens were thought (by others) to have some fairy or mermaid blood in them, or were believed to be born web-footed. The “half-mermaid” fen-dweller girls in particular were feared. It was whispered of them that they loved to play near pools and dykes and push their normal playmates in.
There was yet another freshwater mermaid said to live somewhere in Suffolk’s River Gipping at some unknown point in history. The mermaid that frequented the Gipping would prey on children who played near the deeper waters of the river. Then there’s The Mermaid pub on the banks of the River Gipping, the old Stowmarket Navigation canal at the point where the London Road crosses it in Ipswich, just before it comes out into the Orwell. As it wasn’t clear exactly where the mermaid was to be found, it was wise for children to stay away from the Gipping altogether. (The entity in Wimbell Pond near Acton (just east of Long Melford) may or may not have been a mermaid. A chest of money is said to lie at the bottom of the pond. Those who have thrown stones into the pond have heard it make a ringing noise as it strikes the chest, and seen a small white figure whimpering, “That’s mine.” (The Folklore of East Anglia, Enid Porter, BT Batsford, London 1974; Paranormal Database.)
Mermaids tempt seamen away from drink and into the Sailors’ Reading Room in the Suffolk seaside town of Southwold. Suffolk’s evil freshwater mermaids, however, are a freshwater phenomenon and there are no tales of them along Suffolk’s coast.
You’ve probably already guessed the perfectly rational explanation for all of Suffolk’s freshwater mermaids. Until recently, Suffolk children were expected to be out of the house and out and about all day, and not expected to show up again until teatime. The temptation to play – unsupervised – near ponds, lakes, drainage ditches, rivers and meres was great. Parents made up stories about absolutely lethal and terrifying mermaids living in these bodies of water in an attempt to keep their children away from them. In other parts of England, there were witches instead of mermaids living in wells.
Ginger werewolf of the East of England coast
Via Nick Redfern comes a story “passed down from generation to generation from a family in Kent”, about the Shirley family, who were picnicking in “an area of woodland” on the East Coast of England sometime at the end of the 1940s. Pat Shirley had been told the story by her grandfather, who was there, but she wouldn’t tell Redfern where the incident had happened (or possibly by the time the story had been passed down to her, the location had been forgotten).
Pat Shirley’s grandfather told her that during their woodland picnic somewhere on the East Coast, he’d caught the briefest of glimpses of a werewolf-like manbeast “covered in flaming red hair” and “possessing a pair of huge and powerful jaws.” It then vanished into the trees. (“The Werewolves of Britain” Nick Redfern, FATE magazine, March 2006; Cryptomundo website)
A look at an atlas shows that wooded stretches of the East of England coast – from the Thames Estuary in Essex and all the way up to Lincolnshire – are limited. There’s nothing very much going on by way of noticeable woodland near the coast anywhere in Essex. Nor is there anything noteworthy by way of woodlands on the Lincolnshire coast either. So a wooded stretch of coast in the East of England would probably be in Norfolk or Suffolk. Some stretches of the Suffolk coast with woodland nearby do spring to mind – around Sizewell, along the Dunwich coast as far as Dingle, and if you strayed inland from Walberswick beach you’d find yourself along some farm tracks and bridleways lined with dense avenues of trees on both sides. Benacre and Covehithe have woods close to the shore, and right behind Aldeburgh (away from the beach) there are woods.
I don’t pretend to be an expert on North Norfolk, but the Norfolk seaside resort of Sheringham to this day advertises itself as “twixt sea and pine”, with pine forests near the beach. Maps suggest that areas behind the North Norfolk beaches of Horsey, Stalham, Holkham Bay and Hunstanton also have some woodlands.
That’s the state of our East of England wooded coastline today, but what about in the 1940s? There may well be some little wooded stretches of the shore that have simply fallen into the sea since then, through coastal erosion. I recall that when I was a child, in the 1970s, there were trees at the top of the cliffs at Dunwich and at Iken Cliff with ropes hanging from their branches for children to swing on, and roots to clamber over, and these are both long gone. The great fallen trees that lie on their sides on the beach at Covehithe are all that remains of what was once a wood at nearby Benacre, lost to coastal erosion and floods in recent times. I invite readers to peruse large-scale 1940s maps of the East and England coast to pinpoint the location of an incident that I find it hard to believe could have happened in the first place.
The dog-headed man of Tuddenham
Tuddenham St Martin, just north of Ipswich, is home to the Magpies, Ipswich’s rugby club. Local business Tuddenham Hall Foods is England’s biggest asparagus grower. In Tuddenham St Martin, in the 1980s and 1990s, there was “a tradition of sorts” of a local “dog-headed man” that would “seem to be passed down from older brothers and fathers in that area,” according to Chris Field, who as a child moved into the village.
Is this a dog-headed man on the roof of All Saint’s Church, Blythburgh, “The Cathedral of the Marshes”? Or is it a bear?
Chris told me a friend’s dad had “told us a few things” about the dog-headed man, possibly while “trying to put the scares on us.” To this day he’s unsure as to whether the dog-headed man of Tuddenham was supposed to be “a spirit creature” or what, exactly, it was supposed to be. He did tell me there were “tales of a man with a wolf’s head in the area” and that these were “linked to certain locations, bridges and river ways.” Chris admitted that in the area around Tuddenham, some of the woodlands “do have a certain energy… the feeling like you’re being watched, copses that make you feel unwelcome.”
These were often the places locally where Tuddenham youths would play “manhunt” or “it”, games no doubt made more exciting by the prospect of the dog-headed man lurking behind you in your hiding place! (Chris Field, telephone interview, 9 September 2015. There is a Dog’s Head Street in the centre of Ipswich, this apparently has its origin in the pub sign of a medieval Flemish inn that once stood there.)
Something like the dog-headed man of Tuddenham may have wandered 16 miles northeast to terrify two teenage boys. A Suffolk informant (we’ll call him “Paul”) described being stalked by something one summer night in 1995 while “wild camping”. The noises it made while “stomping around”, and the sounds of branches breaking on the forest floor, made Paul feel that it that walked on two legs, although he didn’t get a look at it.
This incident took place in Dodds Wood, near Sweffling, on the Glemham Estate. “Paul” and a friend spent their teenage years “roughing it” in unofficial campsites. In the summer of ’95, the two friends built one of these camps with a fire pit in Dodds Wood. Paul and friend stayed up most of the night after hearing something walking around the edge of their camp. The “stomping” and “branches breaking” came closer until an hour before dawn”, when the noises finally receded.
The boys returned the next night, with Paul’s dad’s dog. The noises resumed. When the dog “started going berserk and barking like mad… whatever it was… ran off very fast and we could hear the branches breaking as it ran.” Days later, during a thunderstorm, Paul heard a “huge howl that went on for more than half a minute,” which came from the friends’ camp area. (“Paul”, Pers. Comm. by email, 30 September 2015)
Some of Suffolk’s demi-humans were just stories made up to scare kids, others – while obviously impossible – have nonetheless been encountered by sane adults in disturbingly recent times.
Dog’s Head Street in the centre of Ipswich, Suffolk’s county town, commemorates the name a Flemish pub that once stood in the street.
Matt Salusbury is the author of Mystery Animals of Suffolk – including an account of over 150 mystery big cat sightings from which this is an extract. The book’s available via its distributor Bittern Books or via bigcatsofsuffolk.com. Matt is also Chair of Dunwich Museum and a regular FT contributor.
Copyright Matt Salusbury, 2023, 2024. For reasons of copyright, some of the illustrations are different to those in the Fortean Times article.
Merpersons (with wings!) on the panelling at Christchurch Mansion, Ipswich.
The county police forces of both Suffolk and Norfolk had multiple call-outs in April 1985 following a wave of big cat sightings in West Suffolk, according to newspaper articles from that time that I recently tracked down in the British Library. There was also a big cat alert at the time around the local RAF Honington air base.
This is significant as credible reports of big cat sightings in Suffolk in the 1980s are very rare. There was a lion escaped from a safari park shot dead in Cromer, Norfolk on 6 January 1984, there was “the Debenham Lion” seen in the Suffolk village of the same name around 1982 – but this could well have been a misidentified Maine Coon cat. (This breed of domestic cat was then new to the UK and still unfamiliar at the time.)
Other than that, there are a few anecdotal contemporary accounts of foresters being warned to stay alert for “big cats” around Nacton Woods, but there’s nothing else by way of Suffolk big cat reports. Suffolk big cat sightings don’t seem to have become a thing until the early 1990s. Most of these accounts of early Suffolk big cat encounters from over 30 years ago have come my way through witnesses contacting me within the last year to relate their experiences from more than a quarter of a century ago.
The news reports from 1985 that I recently found also make intriguing references to a previous big cat alert, “some years” earlier at RAF Lakenheath, which ended with the conclusion that the incident was an “elaborate hoax.”
I was first alerted to the April 1985 West Suffolk big cat alert by Janet and Colin Bord’s near-contemporary book Modern Mysteries of Britain, (1988, 1991). This was written before studies of British big cats had become a thing.
I recently contacted Janet Bord, who told me that in the subsequent four decades or so, she no longer had access to her original sources on the 1985 Honington big cat flap. I suspected, though, that her source was likely to be one of a very small handful of Suffolk local newspapers.
An afternoon in the News Room of the British Library later, and – bingo! The East Anglian Daily Times (EADT) of April 1985 and April both had articles on the Honington cat flap. (A 2023 cyber-attack on the British Library means that its newspaper collection is once again available on microfilm only for the moment.)
The two EADT articles “Suffolk police on ‘safari’ duty” of 20 April 1985 and “Police mystified after ‘panther’ is seen again” (23 April 1985) describe five sightings of big cat in total over a period of seven days.
The first in that early mini-wave of mid-1980s Suffolk big cat sightings came early in the morning of 15 April, near the Elveden War Memorial by the side of the A11 road. The War Memorial is famous for being the tallest in England, it’s quite a landmark. The witness was reportedly a lorry driver – lorry drivers are higher above the ground in the cabs of their lorries than most motorists, which gives them a better view of the road and the ability to see over some roadside hedges.
Then at around 1am on the night of 19 April, a “serviceman” at Rymer Point on the A1088, just outside RAF Honington nearby saw a big cat. They “telephoned” (Telephoned who? The Police?) to say that a “panther” had jumped onto the road in front of their car. This would presumably have been seen in car headlights, it being the middle of the night. At the time, RAF Honington was a base for Tornado fighter-bombers. Today, RAF Honington is an RAF base without any planes, it’s become the depot of the ground-based RAF Regiment and the headquarters of the RAF Police.
There was more detail on these sightings in the EADT article “Police mystified as ‘panther’ is seen again”, which appeared three days later, on 23 April. This included a report of three more sightings.
The first of these was in Thetford Forest on 19 April, also at night, so also presumably seen from the road in car headlights. The witness described the animal as “large and black with flaming red eyes” – cat’s eyes show up red in headlights.
All the other sightings in this April 1985 wave were in Suffolk, but the latter of the two article refers to “police from two counties”, which suggests that for at least this one sighting it was Norfolk Police that were called out. This would probably put the sighting in the Norfolk end of Thetford Forest – it’s the largest lowland forest in England and it straddles the Norfolk-Suffolk border, with most of the forest being in Norfolk. (The EADT misprinted “Thetford” as “Thetfod” in the second of its two contemporary reports.)
Norfolk Police commented of the Thetford Forest sighting that they could not confirm that it was a “black panther, only that was a large black animal.”
Then there was a sighting on 17 April on the “Elveden Estate”, about half a mile east of the Elveden War Memorial along the A11. (In both articles, Elveden was mis-spelled “Elvedon”.) The Elveden Estate’s head gamekeeper, Ted Barfield, gave the time of his sighting as around 8.45pm and said the animal he saw was heading towards Lakenheaeth, so towards the west. Barfield followed the animal through binoculars but admitted he couldn’t get a good enough look at it to be able tell whether it had a tail like a dog or like a cat, but was convinced it was “not a hoax”.
Police advised Mr Barham to leave out animal carcasses in the area with a view to trapping the animal, but he had seen no evidence that the animal had “returned” since.
The final sighting of the 1985 Suffolk cat flap was late on the night of 21 April at Barham Camp, part of the RAF Honington complex, once again after dark. The EADT reported only that a “serviceman” had seen a “black panther” at that location.
All the sightings seem to have involved a “black panther”, likely a melanistic leopard. A Mr George Washington contacted the EADT to report his belief that the “black panther” was in fact his black chow dog Tarka, who had gone missing in the area after an earlier camping trip. As that great chronicler of strange phenomena Charles Fort often noted, the “perfectly rational” sceptical explanations for anomalous encounters are often deeply unconvincing, and this “black panther was my escaped chow dog” theory is no exception!
These sightings and police call-outs were all (just) within the county of Suffolk, with the possible exception of the Thetford Forest sighting. Suffolk Constabulary is the UK’s smallest county police force, Norfolk Police has always been much better resourced, so the first responders for a local police callout is more likely to be Norfolk Police than Suffolk Police, even within Suffolk. Hence the involvement of both police forces. The two forces now collaborate and have “joint units”, sharing infrastructure such as helicopters and their Freedom of Information department.
What’s noteworthy is the fuss caused by a few of big cat sightings over a few days back in 1985, with the police sending out cars to investigate every reported big cat sighting and EADT giving it space in their columns. Suffolk folk seem much more blasé about big cats today than they did four decades ago, and much less likely to report these to either the police or their local newspaper – if there still is one! Police today certainly wouldn’t issue advice to leave out animal carcasses with a view to catching any reported big cats.
Compared to 1985, the East Anglian Daily Times now seem much less likely to answer the phone, if at all, and good luck reporting a big cat on the loose to Britain’s smallest county police force these days – never mind expecting them to actually send out a patrol car to have a look!
Both articles mention an incident “some years ago”- so probably in the late 1970s early 1980s – in which a “black panther had been seen to jump over the fence at RAF Lakenheath, a still functioning base for USAF fighter jets in an empty corner of West Suffolk close to the border with Cambrideshire.
According to the EADT, this earlier big cat incident at Lakenheath had seen “police” organise a “panther hunt” around the airbase after a “black panther” was seen to leap over the perimeter fence there. A “special watch” was kept on the base, plaster casts were said to have been taken of footprints and “panther excrement” was scattered in an attempt to attract the animal with a view to its capture. (The panther poo presumably came from Kilverstone Wildlife Park, just over the Norfolk border, which closed in 2011.). Both articles refer to a subsequent admission that the whole Lakenheath big cat incident was an “elaborate hoax.
Which “police” forces were called out to this hoaxed big cat incident is unclear – Suffolk Police? RAF Police? USAF Air Force Security Police?
Back in 1985, Lakenheath was a busy base for American fighter bombers in what was peak Cold War. Nuclear weapons had been stored at Lakenheath, there was a nuclear “incident” there in the 1950s. were stored there, this was never officially admitted. There were all sorts of rumours about which of the many Suffolk air bases had “the nukes”, a lot of which was probably Cold War psychological warfare ops to befuddle Soviet agents or a very active 1980s popular movement for nuclear disarmament.
Rumours of strange goings-on around Suffolk airbases culminated in the Rendlesham Forest UFO Incident on Boxing Day 1980. Some claimed this was all a hoax by local military police, while years later another claim emerged, that it was a prank by the Special Air Service. The suspicion now, though is that the story of it being a hoax was itself an April Fool. There was also the Lakenheath-Bentwaters incident back in 1951, with a series of local radar and visual contacts with UFOs.
In any event, rumours of “elaborate hoaxes” around Suffolk airbases have to be seen in the context of possible Cold War psy ops, possibly with the intent to throw people off the scent of some Cold War shenanigans such as top secret weapons testing. Could the reported “elaborate hoax” around a black panther sighting at RAF Lakenheath some time before 1985 have been one of these?
Any information on the “elaborate” black panther hoax at RAF Lakenheath would be gratefully received.
I was interviewed on Mystery Animals of Suffolk on Rick Palmer’s excellent Some Other Sphere podcast. We covered East Anglian wildmen and their origins, the Stowmarket cluster of fairies, Black Shuck, the Rendlesham UFO Incident, evil freshwater mermaids and finally Suffolk big cats, among other subjects.
It was my kind of interview – my host basically said, “Tell me about…” and then let me talk for an hour!
You can listen here. It lasts almost exactly an hour.
I made a few minor errors or omissions, not being able to have notes in front of me at all times. The street in Ipswich where the Flemish pub, The Dog’s Head, used to be is of course Dog’s Head Street not Dog’s Head Lane. The man who contacted EADT to tell them he’d released a male puma called Khyber did so in 1997, not 1977. And the London vicar who wrote A Straunge and Terrible Wonder, the sensational pamphlet describing “the devil in dog form” appearing in Bungay and Blythburgh in 1577 and whose name I couldn’t recall was of course the Rev. Abraham Fleming.
My talk on the big cats of Suffolk at Dunwich Museum on 20 July was a big success. We almost ran out of chairs in our small village Reading Room. It was recorded, there will eventually be a video linked from this website.
There was much testimony from witnesses at the Dunwich talk:
Wormingford, Essex border, 2015 – big cat prints.
Levington, 1990, black big cat crossing road in snow at night.
Reydon Cliff c. 2005, looking inland – lynx seen in thermal imaging scope.
Black big cat, Bramfield, 2020. (I am prepring a follow-up list of questions for the witness now.)
Lymball’s Lane (Darsham-Dunwich) – “stone” grey-coloured cat, slightly smaller than a muntjac, walked as if elderly, 2022.
Lynx-like cat, spotted, long black-ringed tail, white paws, spaniel-sized, fast-moving. 15 July 2024, Haddiscoe, Norfolk.
Also multiple reports of mystery lights and Unidentified Aerial Phenomena, going back to early 1970s (peak Cold War!), Westleton, Minsmere, Snape.
My report for Fortean Times on the Cryptozoologie conference in Dinant, Belgium in November 2023, which included my talk on “Reportages en observations des felins dans la compe de Suffolk 1974-2022” (that’s “Reports and sightings of big cats in the county of Suffolk, 1974-2022”) is now online here.
Above is my map of the most recent big cat sightings I have received – mostly via the reporting form of this website since it went live in August 2023. Additionally, there was one report in the East Anglian Daily Times, one via Twitter and a couple to my personal email.
This is basically all the sightings in Suffolk (and one just outside Suffolk, just over the Norfolk border) that I’ve heard since Mystery Animals of Suffolk was published in mid-August 2023.
Are there any identifiable trends in the period of almost a year since Mystery Animals of Suffolk appeared?
Pumas are back, after an almost total absence since they dropped off the Suffolk radar in 2018.
There are many now more reports from female witnesses than in the previous half century. It tended to be men in traditionally male occupations that had them out and about very early in the morning or late a night. Now a significant proportion of reports are from women, often walking their dogs or driving, or as passengers in a car when the driver had to pay attention to the road and didn’t see the big cat. A greater diversity of witnesses to me adds to the credibility of the phenomenon.
In a year I have three reports of strange “growling” sounds, which informants tell me were suggestive of a big cat in the neighbourhood. This is many more than previously. One witness described a sound like a heavy object being dragged along a concrete floor. Another described a “sawing” noise and sent me an internet audio file or a growling leopard saying it sounded exactly like that.
Big cats which the witnesses thought looked like a lynx are back in a big way, especially around the peninsulars – the Felixstowe peninsula around Kirton and Nacton Shore and the tip of the Bawdsey peninsula. I’ve also had my first ever sighting from the Shotley peninsula – also involving a lynx-like cat.
The majority of big cats seen, though, are black big cats, strongly suggestive of melanistic leopards, as is usually the case in any “county samples”.
Most of the sightings have been in Suffolk Coastal – with a cluster around Saxmundham. There’s also been a couple of sightings in West Suffolk in the area around Ixworth and Stanton (just west of Bury), which has been a big cat hotspot for years. There’s a solitary sighting of a possible puma in Kennett, near the border with Cambridgeshire, also a long-established big cat stomping ground.
The last year has also seen more activity by what people are beginning to call “meso-predators”, medium-sized predators. These seem to be absolutely huge feral domestic cats or their descendants. I have been investigating a very large feral cat caught on camera in the Brightwell area (near Ipswich). This appears to be a cat at least three feet (1.5 metres) long. A young muntjac deer carcass stripped by a predator in Ditchingham is also suggestive of one of these “meso-predators.”
And yes, there has been one misidentification which was quickly sorted out.
Despite there now being a website dedicated to reporting big cats in Suffolk, the biggest number of sightings that I have heard of in a given year is still that for 2008.
The map doesn’t include historic sightings of big cats seen earlier that have come my way since October 2022. This follows and will be linked from this page.
There will be an update which talks through this data in the forthcoming talk at Dunwich Museum on 20 July.
For more data on big cat sightings from the earliest credible Suffolk sightings in the early 1970s up to October 2022, you’ll have to buy the book Mystery Animals of Suffolk.