I have been a professional cryptozoologist and fortean investigator for the past fifteen years. During that time, if I have learned nothing else, I have learned that things are never as straightforward as they seem. I first mooted this trip with the Illinois representative of the CFZ because I thought that it would be a reasonably straightforward exercise.
The idea was that I would fly to America, spend a few days mooching around the Illinois countryside and come home again. I was also reasonably convinced that I was not going to find any concrete evidence for melanistic cougars existing in the forests here. After all no-one else has ever managed to find any.
However, as I told you in last week’s dispatch, no sooner had I arrived in Illinois I was to discover that the phenomenon of great black mystery cats is a very real one. The locals call them 'panthers', and as I explained last week they are almost certainly no such thing. However, I am now confident that something strange does indeed lurk in the woods here.
Despite the road running through it, the Shawnee National Forest is dense and mostly untouched by man.
© Jon Downes/CFZ
In the last few days I have travelled to Shawnee Town in Southern Illinois and also to the Shawnee National Forest from where there have been accounts of these ebony black carnivores for well over a century. I drove along the road where – some thirty years ago – someone reported seeing one of these animals walking on its hind legs like a feline werewolf, and wondered to my companions, could a large carnivore exist here undiscovered. Just then Jessica (who was driving), slammed her foot on the brake just in time for us to see a beautiful white tailed deer – several hundred pounds of prime portable protein – disappear into the dense woods on the side of the road.
On stopping to investigate, I was amazed that an animal of that size could move so freely, because the Shawnee National Forest is surely the most impenetrable deciduous woodland that I have ever visited. Large swathes of the forest are – by the admission of the State Government – virtually untouched, and during the course of one day we saw a lot of wildlife; groundhogs, rabbits, deer, and most excitingly vultures and a rather peevish looking coyote.
We met a lady in middle-age who told us how – when she was a girl – her father and uncle shot one of the big black cats. They had put it in a tree to skin it but (sadly), she didn’t remember what had happened next. She also had no idea what had happened to the skin. However, she was only one of several such people we talked to, and we came away convinced that if the CFZ is to make a return trip en masse to look for these elusive creatures, the Shawnee National Forest is where we must go.
We also met up with the Indiana representative of the CFZ, and her father told us of another slew of black 'panther' sightings – this time in Indiana. She and her father are chasing up more details for us as I write, and so it looks as if the forthcoming campaign – for campaign it will most definitely be – will be fought on two separate front.
Sitting by the Ohio River watching the sun slip into the hills of Kentucky, I was suddenly hit by a wave of melancholy. Not just because in two days time I shall be back in England, and back at work but also because for the first time in my life I have found somewhere – apart from the rolling Devonshire hills – where I could quite happily live. Southern Illinois has captured more than a little of my heart and I am determined that it will not be too long before I return.
