I was at a neighbor’s house yesterday playing video golf when suddenly a great cry came from the backyard from my neighbor’s wife and several family members. Omigod come look at this cat! It’s huge! It comes up past my knees! It’s probably four feet long! and so forth.

My neighbor and I came running, but we didn’t see anything — all the shouting had scared the animal back into the surrounding woods. We went looking for it, which may not have been the brightest thing to do, but hey, we’re men. Everyone there who saw it said it was far too big to be a regular cat, and my neighbor’s wife, who had been the closest to it, says it was jet black, with golden yellow eyes and no tail. They first saw it crouching at the edge of the woods, and when my neighbor’s wife went to have a closer look, it got up and retreated a bit into the woods, at which time they saw that it was no ordinary cat.

We were left to speculate as to what they did see. Indeed, someone even wondered if it was the legendary Wampus Cat. You may recall that the last mystery beast in this area to be called that turned out to be a Sampson fox. More information and pictures after the jump.

Now I know we have had wildcats in our woods before, but her description didn’t fit any wildcat I had heard of. It sounded like a bobcat, but I had never heard of a black bobcat before. Still, other wildcats have melanistic versions (the leopard and jaguar, for example), so I didn’t think it was impossible. In researching the matter last night, I found some web sites about them, several of which (such as this one, which provided the first photo below) were determined to prove that such animals do, in fact, exist. That question appears to have been settled last year when one was captured by the Busch Wildlife Sanctuary in Florida (see the second and third photos).

My neighbor and the others who saw the mystery cat have looked at these sites and agree that this is exactly what they saw:

(That photo they emphatically agreed resembled yesterday’s cat.)