Lake Placid’s Black Panther

Large eastern North American cryptid felids are generally referred to as “Black Panthers,” no matter what the description. The practice is commonplace. It has little bearing on what the animal’s classification alignments may be.

This breaking news out of the Lake Placid area of New York tries to jumble around the science and speculation to include black leopards and melanistic jaguars – and remarkably exclude the realities of folk use of the term “Black Panther.” The rather illogical statement in this media account that “black panthers,” in fact, “do not exist” is incorrect. After all, “black panther” is merely a name. Black leopards in Asia and Africa can be called “black panthers” and they do exist. “Black pumas” are unverified and can be called “black panthers”: they may exist.

“Panthers” is another name for pumas. The term “panther” itself has nothing to do with color without the adjective “black.”

Bottomline is that this is a report of a melanistic cat, which is cryptic, unknown, uncaught, and unexplained: a “Black Panther.”

A black leopard (or jaguar) was sighted Saturday morning off Schaefer Road in Keene.

“Honey, I think there is a bear in the compost,” said Tsermaa Plumley around 9:30 a.m. as she listened to the sounds coming in from the outside.

“It’s too early in the season for bears,” said Dan. “Maybe it’s a fisher.”

“I heard something in the compost,” said Tsermaa to me the next day. “For some reason I looked through the window and I said, ‘It’s a huge black cat!'”

That got Dan’s attention. He got up, looked out the window and saw a huge cat. Really huge. “Stay where you are,” he said, heading down the stairs to grab his camera and race outside.

“It was walking around very slowly,” said Tsermaa. “Just roaming around. It had this very large and long tail that would wave slowly from side to side. Swish, swish. I was watching him walk on our driveway. Dan came out. He was looking for the cat but he couldn’t see him.”

“He came so close,” said their daughter Evella. “The cat was behind him.”

“The cat was just sitting there and started washing his face,” said Tsermaa. “Evella and I started yelling. The animal heard the distant noise. His ears perked up. He got attentive. Then he spotted Dan.”

“It was freaky,” said Evella. “My dad was so close to it.”

“I got a perfect view of its shoulders. They rolled when it walked. Its tail was so long. I couldn’t believe what I was looking at,” said Tsermaa.

“Clearly someone must have let it go,” said Dan. “This must have been an exotic pet that had gotten too big for its owners. Either they let it go or it escaped. Had I known it was going to hang around I would have brought the camera upstairs and photographed it from there. It had to be four and a half to five feet long from its head to the tail. I judged its length in comparison to the driveway. I think it didn’t hear me because I was in my bare feet.”

“It had a long and heavy tail,” said Tsermaa. “When it turned its head and saw Dan it loped off. When Dan showed me a picture of a black leopard on the Internet, I said, “‘Oh my gosh. That’s it. That’s exactly what we saw.'”

Some might think, a black panther, but they do not exist. Panther is the generic name for a variety of large cats, which includes cougars and leopards. Black leopards are actually not black but a very dark brown, and they are spotted, but the color of the spots and the fur is so close they tend to be thought of as being solid black. Nor are they native to the Americas; however, the black jaguar is. It can be found along the border with Mexico and, like the leopard, is not truly black but spotted and very dark brown. According to Wikipedia there have been a few sightings in Arizona, New Mexico and Texas. And they tend to run about 50 inches long — about the size the Plumley family saw. Since the female’s home range is about 9 square miles and the males about 39 square miles, the Plumleys and others in Keene may have this visitor more than once.

Cougars used to live in the region. They are also known as pumas, mountain lions and panthers, amongst others. While they are still fairly well established in the west, and Canada, the Eastern cougar is rare, although sightings do occur as has happened this year a couple times near E-town. However, they are tan, not black. Western cougars get to be about 150 pounds for males and 100 for females.

Black jaguars can get bigger that that, but that’s the South American variety. They will eat most any protein ranging from beetles and rodents to fish and deer. Dusk and dawn are their favorite times to be out hunting, and they are not as nocturnal as once assumed. They tend to kill their prey by using their powerful jaws to bite through the heads. Once dead, they tend to haul prey into trees and dine on them there. So if you hear a crunching sound coming from above it could be our visitor.

“It was very powerful,” said Tsermaa. “It’s head moved from side to side as it walked.”

Source: Missing your leopard? by Naj Wikoff, Lake Placid News, Lake Placid, New York, April 24, 2008.

Loren Coleman About Loren Coleman
Loren Coleman is one of the world’s leading cryptozoologists, some say “the” leading living cryptozoologist. Certainly, he is acknowledged as the current living American researcher and writer who has most popularized cryptozoology in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Starting his fieldwork and investigations in 1960, after traveling and trekking extensively in pursuit of cryptozoological mysteries, Coleman began writing to share his experiences in 1969. An honorary member of Ivan T. Sanderson’s Society for the Investigation of the Unexplained in the 1970s, Coleman has been bestowed with similar honorary memberships of the North Idaho College Cryptozoology Club in 1983, and in subsequent years, that of the British Columbia Scientific Cryptozoology Club, CryptoSafari International, and other international organizations. He was also a Life Member and Benefactor of the International Society of Cryptozoology (now-defunct). Loren Coleman’s daily blog, as a member of the Cryptomundo Team, served as an ongoing avenue of communication for the ever-growing body of cryptozoo news from 2005 through 2013. He returned as an infrequent contributor beginning Halloween week of 2015. Coleman is the founder in 2003, and current director of the International Cryptozoology Museum in Portland, Maine.

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