Kellas cats: Tomas Christie's black cat by the River Lossie (1983) and the Revack snared cat (1984)

Highland folklore has long had its black cat. The cait sìth, the fairy cat, was said to be large, black and bristly, with a white patch at the throat and "sparks" in its fur. In the 1980s, the hills of Moray produced real bodies.

January 1983. Near the River Lossie, close to the village of Kellas in West Moray, local laird Tomas Christie saw a pair of black cats. Christie shot one. The other escaped unharmed.

The dead cat was a male. A local taxidermist mounted it in a snarling pose on a pine branch. Head and body measured 26 inches. The tail added 12 more. Long white guard hairs ran through the black coat, and two small white spots marked the chest and the groin.

June 1984. Within the grounds of Revack Lodge, on a pheasant estate south of Grantown-on-Spey, gamekeeper Ronald Douglas found an adult male dead in a fox snare. Douglas carried it back to the lodge.

Highland Wildlife Park director Edward R. J. Orbell and local veterinary surgeon John Robertson were invited to view it. Orbell photographed it. The fur was dark, bristly and predominantly black, with long white guard hairs. The animal was slender and long-legged, with prominent canines, very large triangular ears and a fairly long, narrow snout. It measured 108 cm in total length.

19 September 1984. The Forres Gazette put the Revack cat on its front page, in an exclusive by editor David Morgan. Christie's mounted cat followed on 3 October. By October the national press had the story. Then the Revack cat disappeared. As Karl Shuker put it, "Within a fortnight of this second specimen's media debut, the Revack cat had somehow vanished." Later, Di Francis tracked down the taxidermist. The skin was still there. It lacked its tail.

Late spring 1985. Christie's mount was x-rayed at the Natural History Museum in London by small-mammal expert Daphne Hills. The conclusion: "most probably a melanistic Scottish wildcat", though a hybrid with a domestic cat, or a feral domestic cat, could not be fully ruled out. Dr Frank Turk independently suggested a wildcat.

Francis kept collecting. On 22 May 1986, BBC1 aired a Tomorrow's World team's capture of the first purported live Kellas cat, a female from the Kellas estate. A male followed from Inverness-shire in 1988. At the Highland Wildlife Park, Kincraig, Francis found them untameable but bred them, producing the first litter of captive-born Kellas kittens.

Later work at the Natural History Museum and the National Museum of Scotland found that the unmounted specimens were all hybrids between domestic cats and Scottish wildcats, most of them closer to the wildcat. Shuker, who had predicted a hybrid identity in Mystery Cats of the World in 1989, argued for generations of backcrossing. In a study of eight specimens, one juvenile male was identified as "the first documented melanistic wildcat in Scotland."

The Revack cat never settled so neatly. Darren Naish wrote that it "apparently differed substantially from the other individuals," and commenters argued over whether it was a Kellas cat at all or one of Francis's "rabbit-headed" cats. Francis told the story in My Highland Kellas Cats in 1993, the same year as The Beast of Exmoor and Other Mystery Predators of Britain. In Strathspey, people still report big black cats.