I am presenting a talk on “The Mystery Animals of Suffolk” at Moyse’s Hall Museum, Bury St Edmunds, on Friday 21 February 2025. Kick-off is at 6.30. More details will follow, linked from here when the talk’s listing goes live on the West Suffolk what’s on website. (Check also on Moyse’s Hall’s formerly-known-as-Twitter for updates.)
Reconstruction of one of many sightings of “the Haverhill puma” around the Steeple Bumpstead Roundabout on the edge of the Suffolk town of Haverhill in 2010s
The talk coincides with Moyse’s Hall’s “Curiosity and Superstition” exhibition, which promises plenty of weird stuff, including at least one genuine fake mermaid. A whistlestop tour of the creatures of local Suffolk superstition and folklore from the Olden Days – wildmen, woodwoses, evil freshwater mermaids, fairies, Black Shuck – will be a jumping-off point for a more detailed examination of that much more recent, widespread and plausible phenomenon of Suffolk and beyond – sightings of mystery big cats!
I expect to include in the talk an update of some recent big cat comings and goings hyperlocal to Bury and its environs. There’s certainly been a lot of big cat activity around Bury in particular and in West Suffolk in general in recent months, according to reports that continue to come in to bigcatsofsuffolk.com, around one a week on average.
I expect to have some new maps ready showing the latest update on East Anglian big cat activity to show for the first time at the talk too. I hope to also cover briefly the West Suffolk big cat flap of 1985, recently unearthed through my researches.
Yes, Mystery Animals of Suffolk will be on sale, signed, for a discount at the talk. (You can also buy it online.) I will be able to stick around afterwards to hear your big cat testimony too, in confidence. I will be staying the weekend in Bury, so I hope to hawk Mystery Animals around Bury’s bookshops and to meet some local witnesses to big cat sightings to go out to the locations of their encounters with them.