A mother who was looking for bats out of her window with her son was very surpised to see what seemed to be a big cat prowling in the fields close to her house. The huge feline was spotted in farmland located in Empingham, East Midlands, on Tuesday evening. Shell Lee and her son Bobby were watching out to see bats that normally hover around their surroundings when they stumbled upon a beast way bigger than usual.
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Lee told Rutland and Stamford Mercury:
We see a lot of bats at this time of year, and so Bobby and I were looking out of the window when we saw what looked like a cat, but was much too big.
The mother made light jokes about the encounter saying that her cats, named Fatcat and Litten, are well fed and taken care-of, but aren't close to the size of the cat she viewed from her window.
She said:
I’ve never seen anything like it before, although I grew up in Ketton and had often heard people talking about big cat sightings.
I’m convinced it’s not a domestic cat because of the way it moved and the way its long tail was curved downwards.
She said that the creature was discovered at the back of her home in Bayley's Close.
Big cat watching
Shell Lee and her son have added ‘big cat watching’ to their daily bat watch after encountering the rare feline right outside the home.
She was so excited that she took out her phone to snap some pictures of the mysterious creature. She said:
I wanted to be able to show my mum what we had seen
According to bigcats.org, there have been reports of big cats in the UK for decades,and majority of the sightings have been found around the moorlands of Exmoor, Bodmin and Dartmoor, as well as West Wales and Scotland,
Sightings in East Midlands pioneered in the 1990s around the County of Rutland, where Shell Lee and Bobby encountered the alleged big cat.
In recent months, sightings of ‘growling and snarling’ big cats have been reported in Chester, Ellesmere Port, Warrington and Frodsham.
Cheshire is known to be a notorious spot for big cat sightings, with a group set up specifically to track the reported sightings.
Puma Watch North Wales has been keeping a close eye out for the mysterious creatures and raises awareness of all suspected sightings of big cats.
