Hombre Gato

The first attack came on a cold August night in 1984, in a quiet rural town about an hour southeast of Buenos Aires. A young woman named Alicia, twenty-two years old, was getting ready for bed when she heard a sound that did not belong in her bedroom. She turned and saw a man dressed entirely in black, already inside her house. His mask had pointed cat’s ears. His gloves were tipped with sharpened metal spikes. He wore football boots with hard plastic cleats. Before he could lunge, he let out a long, guttural meow that no animal would ever have produced. Alicia hit him in the forehead with a stone she kept on her nightstand. He stumbled back, climbed out the window, paused on the roof to meow again, and disappeared into the dark.

His name, in the first police chronicle filed the next morning, was El Gato Montés, the wildcat. Within days the Diario Popular had renamed him forever. He was Hombre Gato. The Catman.

What followed was seven months of accelerating panic across the province of Buenos Aires. He climbed walls. He squatted on rooftops. He scratched at doors and shutters in the small hours with claws of metal, leaving deep parallel grooves in the wood that residents could still see at dawn. He attacked children, teenagers, women walking home from work, a schoolteacher locking up her classroom one evening. He meowed in a voice witnesses described as low and deliberately wrong. One twenty-three-year-old man who escaped him in mid-August told the papers that his attacker was about six feet tall, that he could not see the man’s face beneath the black mask, and that whatever was sewn into the gloves had cut his neck open before he could break free.

Then came the phone call. Someone rang the Brandsen police station and said, in a voice the officer remembered as unusually deep, “Hello. I’m the Cat. I’m calling you from 2283.” The line went dead. An officer dialed the number back. A voice answered. “Didn’t you believe me? It’s me. The Cat.” When the police asked the telephone company for the address of the line, the company stared at its own paperwork for a long moment and reported that the number had been disconnected for two months. It belonged to a literature professor.

The legend hardened around a handful of set pieces. A child managed during one attack to tear the mask off his face. The mask, a careful felt-and-fur reproduction of a cat’s head with stitched pointed ears, ended up at the police station as evidence. Identikits were drawn from her description and distributed across Greater Buenos Aires. Nothing came of them. The set of metal claws he had used on his victims ended up later in a glass case at the La Plata Police Museum, displayed alongside the relics of other unsolved cases.

By autumn the sightings were spreading geographically faster than anyone could follow. He was reported in Burzaco, Llavallol, Almirante Brown, Esteban Echeverría, Monte Grande, on the same nights, sometimes at the same hour. The press began to suggest there was no longer one Hombre Gato but many. One theory held that there were twenty of them, all blond, all Brazilian, all members of a religious sect linked to umbanda, all trained in capoeira. The story reached the diplomatic offices of both countries and sat there until it embarrassed itself. Another theory said the original was a single sexual sadist who had simply found a costume that frightened people effectively. Another said the press itself had begun inventing him, padding lurid weekly spreads with copycats and ghosts.

Brandsen was not interested in theories. Vigilante patrols formed. Men armed themselves with flashlights and rifles and walked the streets after dark. A karate instructor named Carlos Godoy had to publicly clarify that he was not the Catman. A jogger and an amateur boxer were both nearly beaten to death by mobs that mistook them. In late December a rumor swept the province that he had been killed in Ezeiza. It held for about a week. In early January a neighborhood patrol in Cabañas opened fire on what they took to be the Catman, hitting one of their own members instead; he escaped, according to the story, in a red Fiat 600 driven by another Catman.

No one ever caught him. By late February 1985, after a final unsuccessful manhunt in General Sarmiento, he simply stopped appearing. He surfaced briefly in Tolosa in 1993, then vanished for good.

His powers were the powers of a man who had understood the architecture of fear. He could climb the low pitched roofs of a province built mostly of single-story houses; the cleats held him there. He had the gloves to scratch terror into the wood of front doors. He had the voice to imitate something that should not be imitated, and he kept doing it. He moved fast. He vanished into ordinary streets. He kept the province on edge for over half a year without ever being seen in daylight. The phone call from a disconnected line, whatever its trick, made him feel impossible to find by the technology built to find him.

Stones worked on him. So did the elbow of a seventeen-year-old who got tired of being knocked down. So, in the end, did boredom. The mask came off, and after it came off he never returned to Brandsen. He could not survive the moment the country stopped being afraid of him. Argentina was crawling out of seven years of military dictatorship into a fragile new democracy, jumpy and exhausted and ready to fear something it could put a face to. The Catman fit. When the mood passed, he passed with it.

The rooftops of Brandsen are still mostly tile and corrugated metal, the same surfaces he scratched at forty years ago. The local newspaper still publishes anniversary pieces. The documentary made in Navarro still circulates online. The metal claws are still in the police museum case in La Plata. Somewhere out there, presumably, is an old man who used to wear a cat mask.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the Hombre Gato?

The Hombre Gato is a shape-shifting creature from Argentinian folklore that can transform between a man and a large, spectral black cat. In its feline form, the Hombre Gato has glowing eyes and supernatural agility, and it is feared throughout the pampas for its predatory behavior toward humans.

Where does the Hombre Gato come from?

The origins of the Hombre Gato are disputed in Argentinian folklore. Some stories describe the Hombre Gato as a man cursed by an old witch and condemned to wear the skin of a predatory cat forever. Others hold that it is a malevolent spirit that manifests in physical form to stalk the living.

How does the Hombre Gato attack people?

The Hombre Gato uses its shape-shifting ability to deceive victims before attacking. In the best-known tale, a lone gaucho riding through the pampas meets what appears to be a man in need of help, only to be led into a trap where the creature reveals its true feline form and attacks with glowing eyes and phantom-like speed.

What powers does the Hombre Gato have?

The Hombre Gato’s defining power is its ability to shift between human and feline forms, which it uses to mislead and trap victims. It also possesses agility that seems to defy physics, and its eyes are rumored to hold hypnotic powers over anyone who meets its gaze directly.

How can the Hombre Gato be killed or stopped?

Silver objects, especially silver weapons, are said to harm the Hombre Gato. Folklore also holds that the creature cannot transform back if it is caught in the act of shifting, locking it permanently into whichever form it happens to be in at the time.

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