Per Wikipedia: “The Beast of Bladenboro refers to a creature responsible for a string of deaths amongst Bladenboro, North Carolina animals in the winter of 1953–54. According to witnesses and trackers, it was likely a wildcat, but its identity was ultimately not definitively confirmed. According to reports, the animal commonly crushed or decapitated its victims, which were mostly dogs.” A curious aspect of these incidents was the lack of blood reportedly remaining in the bodies of the victim pooches. This last has led to the creature sometimes being called the “Vampire of Bladenboro”.
Eyewitness descriptions, always notoriously unreliable, were all over the place where the Beast was concerned. (Or it’s possible people were describing different creatures altogether.) Based solely on the amount of damage inflicted on the dogs, the creature would have had to have been big and powerful. Certainly no bobcat, which is what local authorities tried to blame for the incidents, could do anything like that. I expect the Beast of Bladenboro was your classic ABC, an Alien Big Cat, a mysterious black panther the likes of which aren’t supposed to exist yet are frequently sighted all across the country. This case is of particular interest because such sightings of ABCs don’t usually involve physical evidence. The Beast left a lot of bodies in its wake.
I will be travelling through the area this summer, and you can be sure I will set off in search of the Beast while I’m at it. Expect reports from the field, and if I’m really lucky (or unlucky?) these will entail an eyewitness encounter!
