Beast of Bodmin Moor

Also Known As: also the Beast of Bodmin; one of the phantom big cats reported across Britain
Region/Culture: Northern Europe
Mythos: Cryptids, English Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Monsters and Beasts
Mythical Attributes: The Beast is said to kill sheep and calves on the open moor at night and to vanish before anyone can photograph it clearly.
Role in Mythos: It is the best known of Britain’s phantom big cats, the animal behind about sixty reported sightings on a Cornish moor and the subject of a government inquiry in 1995.
Relation to Humans: Farmers blamed it for dead livestock, and one woman said it knocked her down from behind in 1993. The government investigators who went looking for it found house cats, a dog and no leopard.

On the evening of the twenty-sixth of October 1993, a woman named Jane Fuller was walking her dog near Cardinham, on the western edge of Bodmin Moor, when something hit her from behind. She went down. When she looked up she saw a very large, dark, cat-like animal standing over the lane, with a tail three or four feet long that curled upward at the end. It grunted at her. Then it was gone, and she was a thirty-seven-year-old woman sitting in a Cornish lane with a story nobody was going to enjoy hearing.

The moor had been building up to it for years. Bodmin Moor is eighty square miles of granite, bog and rough grazing in the middle of Cornwall, treeless on top and cold in every season. Farmers there had been finding dead sheep since about 1983, and people had been reporting a big cat since the late seventies. By the middle of the nineties there were roughly sixty sightings on record.

The mornings were the evidence. A farmer would go up through wet grass at first light and find a ewe on her side with her throat opened and her fleece pulled out in handfuls, and no dog in the parish to blame. Rosemary Rhodes of Ninestones Farm, on East Moor, lost at least ten sheep that way and in the end sold her flock. John Goodenough of Goodaver Farm put his own losses at about a thousand pounds. Both of them said they had seen the animal themselves. Rhodes went further and recorded it: a tape of harsh screeching in the dark, which was identified for her as the mating call of a puma.

What the witnesses saw did not match from one to the next. The usual Beast is black, low and long, the size of a big dog, with a thick tail carried in a curve. A builder named Steve Parkyn saw something else altogether, about three feet in the body with eighteen inches of tail, and pinky brown. A black leopard and a puma are different animals. The moor seemed to have room for both.

Where it came from is a matter of rumour, and the rumour has a name attached. Plymouth Zoo closed in 1978, and its pumas had to go somewhere. The story is that five were loaded into a van and two arrived, with three empty tags left in the back, and that the circus trainer Mary Chipperfield had let the other three go on the moors rather than hand them over. In 2016 the owner of Dartmoor Zoo, Benjamin Mee, repeated a version of it. Chipperfield’s widower, Roger Cawley, denied the whole thing.

By 1995 the local Member of Parliament, Paul Tyler, was pressing the government to act, and the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food sent two men. Simon Baker and Charles Wilson were given six months, twenty-six working days and £8,200. They collected the videotapes, the photographs, the plaster casts of paw prints and the carcasses of the four animals killed while they were there. Then they did something nobody else had done. They went to the exact spots where the Beast had been filmed, stood a one-metre pole where it had stood, and measured.

The black animals in the pictures came out no taller than thirty centimetres at the shoulder. In the clearest image the creature’s pupils were vertical slits, which a house cat has and a leopard does not. Of three paw casts, two were made by cats and one by a dog. The carcasses showed nothing a fox, a badger or a crow could not have done to an animal already dead or dying. The report was published on the nineteenth of July 1995 and said there was no verifiable evidence of a big cat on Bodmin Moor. The junior minister Angela Browning announced it in London wearing a large brooch in the shape of a cat.

Five days later a boy walking beside the River Fowey, on the southern edge of the moor, pulled a skull out of the cold water. It had no lower jaw. It had long, sharp canines. It went to the Natural History Museum in London, and the museum agreed at once that it was real: the skull of a young male leopard.

It was a rug. The back of the skull had been sawn off cleanly, the way a taxidermist does it to mount a head flat. The bone carried knife marks where the flesh had been scraped away. Tucked inside was the egg case of a tropical cockroach, an insect that does not live in Britain, and the skull had only lately been put in the water. Somebody had taken a leopard-skin rug apart and thrown the head in a Cornish river within a week of the government saying there was no leopard.

Paul Tyler said the ministry was wrong and that the sightings would continue. He was right about the second part. In 1998 the minister Elliot Morley told Parliament that his officials received reports of this kind every year and that the vast majority were not genuine sightings of big cats.

The Beast’s strength is the ground it works on. A treeless moor with few roads lets a dark animal be seen at four hundred yards with nothing beside it to give its size, and a ewe that dies in the night has been opened by foxes and crows before anyone finds her. It kills, by repute, without being heard, and it has never left a body, a den or a clear photograph.

Its limits are just as plain. It has never been caught, shot, trapped or run over, in a county full of farmers with guns. It shrinks when measured. And the worst it is on record as doing to a person on the moor is a blow from behind on a dark lane near Cardinham, from an animal that grunted once and left.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the Beast of Bodmin Moor?

The Beast of Bodmin Moor is a phantom big cat said to live on Bodmin Moor in Cornwall, England. It has been reported since the late 1970s, with about sixty sightings on record, and farmers have blamed it for killing sheep. No big cat has ever been caught or found there.

What does the Beast of Bodmin Moor look like?

Most witnesses describe the Beast of Bodmin Moor as a large black or dark cat with a long tail that curls upward. Jane Fuller, who said it knocked her down in 1993, reported a tail three to four feet long. One witness, Steve Parkyn, described a pinky brown animal about three feet long instead.

Did the government investigate the Beast of Bodmin Moor?

Yes. In 1995 the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food sent Simon Baker and Charles Wilson to investigate for six months. Their report, published on 19 July 1995, found no verifiable evidence of a big cat, and showed that the animals in the photographs were the size of domestic cats.

Was the skull found on Bodmin Moor from a real leopard?

The skull found in the River Fowey on 24 July 1995 was a real leopard skull, but the animal did not die in Cornwall. The Natural History Museum found that the back had been cut off for mounting on a rug, that it carried knife marks, and that it held the egg case of a tropical cockroach. It came from a leopard-skin rug.

Where is the Beast of Bodmin Moor supposed to have come from?

The most common story is that three pumas were released on the moors when Plymouth Zoo closed in 1978, and that the trainer Mary Chipperfield let them go. Her widower, Roger Cawley, denied this. No release has ever been proven.