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My good friends from Hillsborough, NC claimed to have a monster, that they called the Catamount (a name often used to for wild cats). It was a hairy man of the forest that lived in the extensive woods near their home. They could hear it yelping at certain times of the year and moving quickly through the forest, frightening their menagerie of cats and dogs. In fact, the grandfather of a mutual friend told a story from his youth - he was on Orange Grove Road by those very same woods, when he was jumped and thrashed with a tree branch to within an inch of his life by a short, hairy man-like creature. Decades later his grandson, my friend, and an airforce officer, claimed to have seen that same creature one night along the very same road - its large, luminous blue eyes shining in the moonlight. He turned back to confirm what he had seen, and while it had retreated into the shadows of the trees away from the road, it stopped and squatted, man-like, meeting my friend's gaze. Both grandsons of grandfathers who had met once, long ago? Who knows. But reports of manlike creatures are so many, and so vivid, and by so many credible witnesses that they are hard to explain away or discount. Something may yet live out there, somewhere. So what is it that we love so much about monsters?
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