Traditional Ojibwa lore has it that the vast depths of Lake Superior are haunted by a colossal underwater lynx – a powerful elemental spirit known as Mishipeshu, which held sway over the wind and waves. Natives sometimes made sacrifices to this demi-deity, throwing a live dog into the water as an offering, before setting out in their birch bark canoes into the perilous freshwater sea they called Kitchi-gami.
Mishipeshu is perhaps the most famous inmate of the menagerie of legendary cats that prowl the landscape of native Canadian tradition, the legend of which this author hopes to explore more thoroughly in the future. In this piece, we will explore other more obscure folkloric felines endemic to the Great White North, from a titanic predator said to haunt the subarctic forests to a mysterious black panther spotted in the eastern provinces. Enjoy!
The Lion of Subarctic Canada
Filed away in the scattered archives of the Society for the Investigation of the Unexplained – the papers of the late Ivan T. Sanderson, styled the ‘Godfather of Cryptozoology’ – is a letter written to Sanderson on July 12th, 1971, by a man whose signature this author was unable to decipher. The man claimed that, in the fall of the previous year, while visiting the historic town of Moosonee, Ontario, on the Moose River delta near the southern tip of James Bay, he met an old Indian named Guh-goh-nah-neh-neish, who claimed to have come from “the Nahanni area.” This region, the valley of the South Nahanni River, is a sprawling vale in the Mackenzie Mountains which runs along the border of Canada’s Northwest and Yukon Territories. Since the early 1900s, this remote subarctic hideaway, popularly known as the ‘Headless Valley,’ has earned itself a reputation as a place where prospectors die mysteries deaths, where a wealth of gold ore lies hidden in the rocks, and where monsters from a forgotten age defy extinction.
The native astounded the letter writer by enumerating some of the gigantic predators that roamed the wilderness of his homeland, describing an enormous long-nosed creature eerily reminiscent of the woolly mammoth, and detailing the physical appearance of a monstrous dog of which all other animals lived in fear.
“Its habits are disgusting, if it exists,” the letter writer wrote of the colossal canine. “Part carrion eater, it can take a bear apart, but prefers to live on injured or young animals. Its delight is to snatch the young from the mother whilst she is in the process of giving birth. Also said to attack man on site. Almost invincible, he has but one enemy.
“Now hang on to your hat!
“That enemy is a LION!
“I thought he meant Puma, which I wouldn’t have believed anyway, but no meant a lion… The lion itself is a giant, at least as big as the bloody dog, and apparently afraid of nothing. Very hairy, with a large woolly [mane] extending nearly all over its body. The lions kill everything when in the mood, including the bears, moose, and what would appear to be mammoths…”
In addition to evoking the famous Smilodon, or sabre-toothed tiger, this enormous Nahanni lion elicits images of the North American cave lion, an extinct subspecies of lion believed to have roamed the western end of the continent from Canada to Mexico, before dying out in the last ice age. This fearsome feline is believed to have been 125% the size of the modern African lion, making it one of the largest cats to ever exist. It must be mentioned that the North American cave lion is believed to have lacked the shaggy mane that fringes the heads and necks of male African lions. This attribute, however, is not necessarily inconsistent with the creature described by Gugo, as the letter writer called his native informant, whose “large woolly [mane]” covered its entire body.
The Maned American Lion
Another lion-like animal said to prowl the Canadian wilderness is a creature dubbed the ‘Maned American Lion,’ which cryptozoologist George M. Eberhart included in Volume One of the 2013 edition of his Fortean classic Mysterious Creatures: A Guide to Cryptozoology. Eberhart described the creature as resembling a male African lion in appearance, with a shaggy coat of brown or tawny fur, a thick mane around the neck, a muscular frame with a length of 5-8 feet, and a shoulder height of 3 feet.
While most sightings of this mystery feline took place across the United States, there are at least three set in Canada, namely two in the Maritime province of New Brunswick, and one in northern Ontario. Eberhart avowedly drew his information on these Canadian sightings from cryptozoologist Loren Coleman’s 2007 book Mysterious America. Coleman, in turn, derived his information from the fieldwork of the late Bruce Stanley Wright, a forest biologist who served as a Lieutenant Commander in a Royal Canadian Navy combat diving unit during WWII.
The first documented Canadian sighting of the maned American lion took place on March 1st, 1941, on a forestry road in western New Brunswick. While hauling a log down this remote byway, a man driving a team of horses came upon what he described as a large catlike animal sitting in the middle of the road. The teamster characterized the animal’s colour as a mixture of yellow-grey and reddish, with hair so long in the collar area that it made the feline’s neck appear thicker than its head. The big cat responded to the panicked whinnies of the horses by cooly rising and padding off into the woods.
The next Canadian sighting of a maned American lion took place in the Canadian Shield far to the northwest, in the town of Kapuskasing, Ontario, located on the remote Ontario Highway 11 roughly halfway between Lake Superior and James Bay. In June 1960, local farmer Leo Paul Dallaire reported seeing what he described as an African lion on his property. The creature had light tan fur with a mane around its head and neck, and a bushy tuft of fur ornamented the tip of its four-foot tail. It stood at least three feet tall, and had a length of about five feet from its nose to the base of its tail. In response to the sensational report, an Ontario wildlife officer named Orrie Lewis is said to have made the derisive remark, “Mr. Dallaire has been watching too much TV.”
Four years after Dallaire’s sighting, the maned American lion surfaced once again in the wilderness of western New Brunswick, this time in the wooded hills south of the Saint John River, roughly forty kilometres southwest of the provincial capital of Fredericton. While trapsing along Magundy Stream with a pair of bird hunters, hunting guide M. McDonald of the southwesterly village of McAdam spotted what he described as a large dark brown cat with a long tail, which he claimed looked “exactly like an African lion.”
What is the mysterious maned feline that stalks through the forests of Eastern Canada? In his book, George Eberhart put forth three theories as to its identity, proposing that it might be an African lion escaped from a zoo or circus; a misidentified domestic dog, the chow chow, Brittany spaniel, and Newfoundland being suspected candidates; or a relict North American cave lion.
Black Panthers in New Brunswick
Despite his contribution to the legend of the maned American lion, zoologist Bruce Stanley Wright, from whose fieldwork the above reports derive, is perhaps best known as an early champion of the notion that a breeding population of eastern cougars – a subspecies of mountain lion popularly believed to have been extirpated in Eastern Canada by the mid-20th Century – survives in Canada’s Maritime provinces and the states of northern New England. Wright outlined this controversial theory in his seminal 1959 book The Ghost of North America: The Story of the Eastern Panther, and his 1972 book The Eastern Panther: A Question of Survival, sparking a debate that endures to this day.
Scattered among the eyewitness accounts that Wright documented in his books are twenty sightings of black panthers in the province of New Brunswick, typically described as long-tailed cougar-like animals with black pigmentation. To the layman with a passing familiarity with wildcats, the term ‘black panther’ might evoke images of the character Bagheera from Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book, the mascot of the African-American communist organisation active in the 1960s and ’70s, or the bestial namesake of Marvel Comics’ most famous African superhero. These creatures are melanistic leopards and jaguars – ordinary wildcats from the jungles of Africa, Asia, and South America which owe their dark pigmentation to a relatively rare genetic mutation. Interestingly, although a mere couple of black bobcats have been snared in New Brunswick, and the first black lynx to be caught on camera was filmed in Whitehorse, Yukon, in the summer of 2022, melanism has never been observed in cougar populations, begetting the eerie notion that the black panthers spotted in Eastern Canada might be members of a species unknown to science.
One of the earliest black panther sighting which Wright documented in his 1972 book is both the most dramatic and the most unusual. On the evening of November 22nd, 1951, while returning home from work, a lumberjack named Herman Belyea was attacked by what appeared to be a rabid black panther near the village of Cambridge-Narrows near the southern end of New Brunswick. “I was returning home about 6 p.m.” the woodcutter said. “I came to a pole fence and before crossing it I hit it with my axe… Within seconds, I heard five loud yells off in the woods… I walked about 100 yards further… when I heard four or five more yells. I looked back and saw it coming, leaping. I ran a short way when it overtook me, so I had to stop and face it. When I stopped, it stopped and stood up on its rear legs with mouth open and ‘sizzling,’ and with front paws waving, it charged. I swung the axe at it, but it jumped back, and I missed, so I ran for it and whooped. It leaped off in the woods and I ran for the house, but didn’t run very far before I saw it coming again and had to stop and swing the axe at it. It jumped up to one side so I ran for it and it ran off into the woods again. It repeated the same thing over and over five or six times until I came to a field where I could see the lights of the houses, then it leaped off and never came back.”
When asked what the creature looked like, the woodsman replied, “The animal was black or dark grey. Its tail was at least two and a half feet long and it was at least six feet long.”
The most significant flurry of New Brunswick black panther sightings took place in the woods surrounding CFB Gagetown, a large Canadian Forces base constructed in the mid-1950s in southwestern New Brunswick, just southeast of the provincial capital of Fredericton. In September 1955, camp commandant Lieutenant-Colonel Waugh was walking his dog, Pal, a robust Chesapeake Bay Retriever, along a dirt road at the base of Blue Mountain, beyond the far southeastern end of the base, when he saw a large black feline watching his canine companion at the edge of the trees. “It was a cat,” he said, “larger than Pal, black in colour, and with a long catlike tail. My first thought was to get a hold of the dog as if it tackled him, he would have no chance. However, as soon as it saw me, it ran up the very steep slope at an amazing speed.”
Eight months later, two soldiers returning to the base at night caught two large reflective green eyes in the glare of their vehicle’s headlights. The eyes proved to belong to what one of the soldiers described as “a cat slightly larger than the Colonel’s dog, and black in colour. It had a long tail that swished from side to side as we passed.”
Following a succession of more prosaic cougar sightings, along with reports of a mountain lion described as “shaggy” and “roughed up,” which descriptions Wright interpreted as indications of mange, more black panther sightings were made near the base and in a cemetery outside Fredericton in the summer of 1962. The most noteworthy sighing was made by Corporal Blair Hare of the Royal Canadian Dragoons, who observed a pair of jet black panthers with his binoculars near the site of Lieutenant-Colonel Waugh’s 1955 sighting.
Similar reports of black panthers were made throughout the province. Back in July 1948, two veterinary professionals, Drs. D.B. Butterwick and Dr. J.M. Barette, drove past what they identified as a very dark brown panther with a “body as long as a full-grown bear” on the Richibucto Road east of Fredericton.
On September 17th, 1951, a logger came upon what he first took to be a young black bear standing in the pouring rain on a backroad near the city of Bathurst, New Brunswick, on the southern shores of Nepisiguit Bay. As the creature fled into the woods, the logger caught a glimpse its long tail, which disqualified it from the ursine family.
In March 1958, a man named J.D. MacDonald, while driving alone on a gravel road outside the settlement of Chamcook, New Brunswick, just west of Passamaquoddy Bay, spotted a large cat with a long tail standing in the ditch. “The animal was quite definitely black,” MacDonald said, “and my first thought was that it was a panther… [It] may have been three feet long, not counting the tail.”
Several black panther sightings were made in the province in the summer and autumn of 1959. The best documented of these took place on the night of October 21st, on a lonely country road in western New Brunswick. While driving, an anonymous witness watched a small dark panther slink across the road in front of him. “[It was] black as a bear…” he said, “the picture of ease and grace… and about forty pounds in weight.” A year later, on October 29th, 1960, a similar creature was spotted by two men driving on a wooded road in the same area. The witnesses described the cat, which they saw walking slowly across the road, as having a length of three feet, an eighteen-inch-long tail, and a coat of either black or very dark brown complexion.
In July 1961, three boys biking to school on the outskirts of Fredericton spotted a large black cat the size of a German Shepherd lying in the ditch. Wildlife officers who later responded to the report found the tracks of a large cat at the place where the animal had been seen. About a year later, another black specimen was allegedly seen on the outskirts of the Devin district at the northeastern end of the city.
Black panthers were spotted in New Brunswick on three separate occasions in 1967. On August 16th of that year, tractor operator Victor Collett spotted a long-tailed, four-foot-long jet-black wildcat crossing Hanwell Road near Fredericton while heading to work at 7:50 a.m. “It glittered in the sun,” he remarked, “and its hide would make a beautiful pelt.” Two nights later, a man encamped nearby spotted a large black animal in his yard, with length of five feet and a height of 1.5 feet, which he drove off by rattling his stove lids. Two months later, a hunter spotted a similar animal in the woods about ten miles away, as did a pair of observers on the outskirts of Fredericton on August 12th, 1970.
Wright addressed these mysterious black cougars in an analysis near the end of his book. After disproving some of his early hypotheses that these sightings might be misidentifications of regular-coloured mountain lions rendered dark by the position or wet fur, he wrote, “I now believe there are a few black specimens of the panther in eastern North America… There is [one] long-shot explanation to which I give little credence: that the black individuals are escapees. We now know that lions can survive Canadian winters with a minimum of shelter. Why not leopards who live farther north in the Old World? Perhaps black leopards escaped, or were turned loose in this area, but none have been reported to the authorities.
“The extreme northeastern section of the panther population has been isolated for more than 100 years, and it is in this section where melanism is most frequently reported… If it has developed in this region as the records indicate, it is an extreme variation that has occurred in an isolated pereferal population…”
Black Panthers in Ontario
New Brunswick is not the only Canadian province in which black panthers have been spotted. In a 2011 article for the scientific journal Canadian Field-Naturalist, in which he made the compelling argument that the wilderness of Ontario supports a population of cougars, wildlife biologist Rick Rosatte claimed to have unearthed fifty-two credible ‘black panther’ sightings in Canada’s Heartland Province, but omitted them from his study “as there are no records of a black phase of Cougar occurring in North America… In my opinion,” he wrote of the subjects of these sightings, “they were in all likelihood escaped exotic animals, most likely melanistic leopards or melanistic jaguars… or another species such as a Fisher… or a small American Black Bear. I could not find any records or published literature documenting the capture, killing, or photographing of black Cougars in North America…”
Embedded within the article is a trail cam snapshot of a large black wildcat. In what Texan folklorist Michael Mayes aptly described as “an amazingly nonchalant manner,” Rosatte identified the animal as a “photograph of a melanistic jaguar… taken by a trail camera near Guelph, Ontario, in April 2010.”
Although Rosatte neglected to elaborate on any of the black cougar reports that he came across, cryptozoologist Michael Newton included an Ontario sighting in an article for the Winter 2007/08 issue of the magazine Mysteries. On July 12th, 2007, while driving on Trunk Road on the Champlain Trail near Bonfield, Ontario, not far from Lake Nosbonsing, a man named John Wilson spotted something unusual. “I saw this rabbit running straight for my truck, like something was chasing it,” he said. “All of a sudden, this black thing came out of the bush. At first, I thought it was just a dog, but when it turned sideways, I saw its long, curvy tail. As soon as it saw me, it headed right back into the bush.”
According to Newton, local legend has it that the black panthers of Ontario are descendants of exotic cats once kept by a farmer from the southwesterly municipality of Powassan. Although the government forced the farmer to destroy his menagerie as part of an effort to curb a tuberculosis outbreak, rumour had it that four black kittens survived the purge and fled into the Ontario wilderness, where they proliferated.
Cryptozoologist Craig Woolheater, who also documented Wilson’s sighting on his website CryptoMundo.com, included the testimony of another Bonfield resident named Marlene Tilson, who owned property on Trunk Road. “A few weeks ago,” Tilson said, “my husband went out in the back field to feed the horses, and he said he saw something big and black… At first, he thought it was a bear, but it had a long tail and was about the size of our Labrador retriever. You can hear it at night. It has a loud, high pitch, like a screeching sound.”
Black Cougars in Other Eastern Provinces
Although less common than their New Brunswick and Ontario counterparts, black panther sightings have been reported in other provinces in the eastern half of the country. In his 1972 book, Wright included the report of a 7-foot-long black panther spotted on four occasions in Nova Scotia’s Cobequid Hills at the northern end of the province, namely in June 1951, September and December 1952, and February 1953.
In the spring 2009 issue of the magazine Mysteries, the editor alluded to a case in which multiple witnesses saw a large black cat prowling near the remote town of Springdale near the northern end of Newfoundland in November 2008. And in an article published in the Fall 2007 issue of Mysteries, journalist Amy Woolvett described her own sighting of a similar creature on April 9th, 2007, which she made while driving her car toward the Sable River at the southern end of Nova Scotia. Upon reporting her sighting to the Provincial Department of Natural Resources, she was told that, despite hundreds of similar reports that they receive every year, the government refuses to acknowledge the existence of such creatures in the province.
The Sliver Cat
Another unusual Canadian feline was alluded to by reporter Jim Bronskill in a 1998 article for the Ottawa Citizen. “The Sliver Cat,” Bronskill wrote, “prowls central Canadian forests, waiting in trees to impale humans passing below with its long, spiked tail.” Bronskill almost certainly obtained this bit of folklore from writer W. Haden Blackman’s 1998 book Field Guide to North American Monsters, which includes a section on a creature of American logging lore – a massive wildcat with a spiked tail said to haunt the “forests of the Great Lakes region and central Canada.”
“One of the most repugnant monsters discovered by lumberjacks,” Bronskill wrote, “is the devious and brutal Sliver Cat, a devoted man-eater. The beast is somewhat similar to a mountain lion, or puma, with a powerful body about five feet in length, retractable claws, and razor-sharp senses, including highly-developed night vision. The beast, which lives only in the branches of tall trees, can reach up to 300 pounds and can be recognized by its low, ominous calls.”
Blackman went on to describe the Sliver Cat’s unique prehensile tail – a supple, muscular, eleven-foot-long weapon tipped with a hefty knob of spiked bone. The creature used this natural morning star to impale any humans who dared to trespass on its haunts.
Another less sensational variation of the Sliver Cat legend appears in the December 1940 issue of the magazine Minnesota History, in an article entitled ‘Imaginary Animals of Northern Minnesota,’ written by Marjorie Edgar of Marine on the St. Croix, Minnesota.
“When I was working on the North Shore of Lake Superior in 1927 and 1928,” Edgar wrote, “there were fantastic animals in the backwoods, even stranger than the moose and porcupines which startle the tourists from the south nowadays. Wherever I went that winter, by bus or fish truck on the highway or on snowshoes in the woods, wherever I camped the following summer, I heard stories of these strange creatures, the folklore of our north woods. Sometimes the storyteller hoped that I might believe in the animal, as in the past the young rangers and green lumberjacks had occasionally believed. Probably the creatures were originally created to fool the listener, a stranger to the country. They were fine stories, too, to tell the children, and most children of that countryside knew them as they knew the Paul Bunyan tales, from their fathers who were woodsmen.”
Edgar went on to relate some of the strange animals she was told about, including the pale snowsnake which ambushes and constricts unwary winter travellers; the whirling wampus, which snatches its prey during blizzards; and the wild teakettle, whose high-pitched hisses could be heard in the woods. After describing the mischief wrought by the argopelter, a small creature which hid in hollow trees and hurled pieces of wood at passing pedestrians, Edgar wrote, “Living in the same deep woods, but far less dangerous, is the ‘sliver cat’ (also called the ‘splinter cat’), which breaks off pieces of wood with ‘slivvery’ ends and throws them across the trails. The sliver cat looks a little like a porcupine with its spines pointing the wrong way.”
Given the apparent absence of similar stories in classic Ontario literature, the legend of the Sliver Cat could easily be dismissed as a charming but ultimately fictitious product of American lumber lore, perfectly at home in a Paul Bunyan story from the logging camps of the Upper Midwest, were it not for a handful of unnerving coincidences. In Ontario’s Muskoka Country, in the heart of the Sliver Cat’s supposed hunting grounds, is a promontory known as ‘Sliver Cat Hill’ as early as 1907, indicating that the term ‘Sliver Cat’ was not unknown in the Ontario wilds in the heyday of lumberman folklore. It is certainly possible, however, that the landmark owes its name to an old logging term for “splinters on stumps standing up two to four feet which whistle in the winter wind,” defined by L.G. Gorden in his 1956 book Logger’s Words of Yesteryears.
Far more disturbing than this vague toponymic coincidence is a short passage from an old ethnology by American anthropologist Philip Drucker in 1951. Despite that Drucker’s work pertains to the Nootkan tribes of Vancouver Island, British Columbia, who lived more than half a continent west of Ontario’s Northwoods, one of the legendary monsters his informants described mirrors the Splinter Cat with chilling fidelity.
“There was really an infinity of dangerous beings lurking in the woods,” Drucker wrote. “There were headless ‘mallardlike’ birds of brilliant plumage, birds with human faces, a kind of mountain lion that walked backward and killed men with its long lancelike tail, and many other horrid and dangerous creatures.”
While skeptics might dismiss these tales as the products of misidentification or tall tales told for the benefit of credulous outsiders, the sheer volume of Canadian big cat reports hint at a more disturbing possibility. Perhaps somewhere in the silent wilderness, remnants of a forgotten age, or members of an undiscovered subspecies, prowl the remote backcountry, defying classification in the rugged solitudes of the Great White North.
Sources
S.I.T.U. Archive, courtesy of Dr. Michael Swords
Mysterious Creatures: A Guide to Cryptozoology: Volume One (2013), by George M. Eberhart
Mysterious America: The Ultimate Guide to the Nation’s Weirdest Wonders, Strangest Spots, and Creepiest Creatures (2007), by Loren Coleman
https://asfwb.ca/the-asfwb-wall-of-fame/bruce-stanley-wright/
“Evidence Confirms the Presence of Cougars (Puma concolor) in Ontario,” by Rick Rosatte, for Volume 125 of the Canadian Field-Naturalist (2011)
“Black Panthers Party,” by Michael Newton in the Winter 2007/08 issue of Mysteries
https://cryptomundo.com/bigfoot-report/ca-myst-cat2/
“Prowling Panthers,” in the Spring 2009 issue of Mysteries
Article by Amy Woolvett in the Fall 2007 issue of Mysteries Magazine
Shadow Cats: The Black Panters of North America (2018), by Michael Mayes
“Watch Out: ‘Monsters Are Everywhere,” by Jim Bronskill in the July 18th, 1998 issue of the Ottawa Citizen
Field Guide to North American Monsters (1998), by W. Haden Blackman
“A Deer Hunt in Muskoka,” by Amos Green in the July 6th, 1907 issue of the Toronto Saturday Night
“Imaginary Animals of Northern Minnesota,” by Marjorie Edgar in the December 1940 issue of Minnesota History
Logger’s Words of Yesteryears (1956), by L.G. Sorden
The Northern and Central Nootkan Tribes (1951), by Philip Drucker
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