Mystery Animals of Suffolk

A book of strange and yet-to-be-identified animals, animal folklore and tradition from the region briefly known as the Curious County – including an account of over 150 mystery big cat sightings. The book features:

• Alien Big Cat sightings – over 150 reports from around the county, numerous witness interviews. Photos of a possible black leopard from Wortham, North Suffolk. Two waves of big cat sightings in Ipswich, numerous sightings of a slim, black, leopardlike Suffolk big cat known as “Paws”, the Haverhill Puma, a welldocumented escaped West Suffolk bobcat, a “tan puma” near Lakenheath, many big cat “kill signs” (evidence of predation on livestock) around the county, dumped soft toy tigers causing brief alarm in Trimley and Sudbury.
• Alien invaders – wild boar shot at Ixworth, at Bury St Edmunds a 1960s hamster infestation.
• Woodwoses – uniquely East Anglian wildmen, also evil freshwater mermaids, a shambling hairy apparition on
  the road to Peasenhall and the “body of a mighty giant dig’d up at Brockford near Ipswich”.
• Black Shuck – Suffolk’s phantasmal black dogs, from ancient folklore to encounters around 1970s Lowestoft and Martlesham Creek in the 1990s.
• Animal ghosts – spectral coaches and coach horses, equestrian ghosts, a phantom fish in Southwold, invisible horses of Newmarket, Ipswich, Holbrook and elsewhere.
• Stowmarket’s baby-snatching “frairies” (fairies) along with “certain little people” who granted a convicted sorceress from Little Bealings her magic powers.
• Kessingland sea serpents – were they just misidentified whales? The Orford Ness “sea dragon”, a Medieval Suffolk-Essex border “crocadrille” and a winged “serpent” in Mendham in 1662.
• Escapees:  five-feet tall flightless birds delaying the East Suffolk Line train at Campsey Ash, an emu on the run from Glemsford, also a Wickham Market wallaby and at Covehithe a swimming piglet in the North Sea.
• Imps described in dubious testimony from Suffolk witchcraft trials.  Familiars in the form of ducks, exploding mice or “lice of an extraordinary bigness”.

Mystery Animals of Suffolk is on Twitter, with updates at @MysteryAnimals and on the web at bigcatsofsuffolk.com which also serves as a reporting centre for big cat sightings in East Anglia and links to video footage of big cats filmed in Suffolk.